In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation.
Question: why are people stealing? Isn’t it because they need money, because they are poor? Maybe the solution is to make people less poor, rather than to have a bunch more “racist, sexist, militant fascists” patrolling the streets.
Again, the obvious solution to this problem does not involve police.
I’m not sure we can.
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Yes. Literally. Look at city budgets in the United States. Police budgets are multiple times the amount spent on housing and social programs, which are things that actually reduce crime.
Move money out of police budgets and into housing in particular. Housing first. Because the increases in homelessness and crime are primarily being driven by the lack of affordable housing right now.
https://data.aclum.org/2023/04/05/fy2023-boston-police-department-budget/
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If people don’t have houses, it’s more difficult to get jobs. If people don’t have jobs, they need a different way to get food. It really is that simple. Unconditional housing makes people less likely to be poor and less likely to steal than if they didn’t have a safe place to live.
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“You think its easier to not have poor people than reform police? I dont think the first is feasible in a population this size. The latter is absolutely attainable with a dozen law changes to hold cops accountable, which will also mean less of them”
The person you asked that to didn’t claim that “it’s easier to not have poor people than reform police”. “Not having poor people” would require a complete restructuring of political and economic systems, while police reform would require fewer changes.
It is, however, easier to have fewer poor people, that are less poor, than it is to reform the police.
Step 1 is increase taxes on the rich.
Step 2 is use that money to buy and build houses.
Step 3 is give those houses to anyone that needs one.
So for your original question, no, I don’t think that.
If California has affordable housing that was accessible to everyone it wouldn’t have the ORT problem worse than the rest of the country.
Unironically yes