Will, funding police and police alternatives are not mutually exclusive. They both play a critical role in public safety. In your example regarding misdemeanors, you once again completely leave out the perspective of whoever was victimized by that crime (I'm assuming they are likely to be petty theft or something along those lines). Just because you are not arresting the perpetrator does not mean they are not guilty of the crime and if there is not consequence for their behavior why would they not continue to victimize more people over and over again. This notion that any semblance of criminal justice is bad is really childish and completely undermines your credibility when discussing these topics.

"The answer is not to defund the police; it's fund the police." He adds, "We expect them to do everything...to protect us, to be psychologists, to be sociologists."

Who expects the police to protect them? The Supreme Court ruled long ago they don't actually have to do that.

Fund them all you want, it's not going to solve their nationwide problem of toxicity, cronyism, white nationalism, corruption, and a lack of accountability for horrible behavior.

From the embedded tweet:
"The research indicates Biden’s plan to hire another 100,000 police officers WILL increase arrests, incarceration and police violence ESPECIALLY for petty non-violent issues."

Such petty non-violent issues include anything from catalytic converter thefts to swiping a sweater from a boutique to taking candy from a baby.

@1 And that is the problem these folks and ones like NTK don't get and apparently never will. The vast majority of society just wants to be left alone. They may also vote for Social Housing initiatives, etc...but they don't want a tweaker stealing their crap. They distinguish between "poor people" and "people who brought it on themselves and won't stop". Down on luck and steal to survive, okay, get 'em help. Stealing to feed that sweet, sweet meth habit...screw 'em. That's how the majority thinks. Sorry.

It's also a failure of alignment. This is a national problem, which requires national solutions, or at a minimum statewide. Otherwise, extra special local services just result in bus therapy and more people who need extra special solutions. You start where you began, only with an ever-growing expense on extra special solutions. You can't fix a national issue locally.

Unless policy aligns with the above constraints imposed by reality, you'll just see more of the NTK contingent lose in election cycles until it's just Sawant raving at sessions with no allies.

What are the odds Biden hasn't read a white paper? ...or that his staff and various task forces and study groups under him haven't written more of them?
Certainly, the previous administration may have adjusted our expectations, but why employ the rhetoric assuming our government is ill-informed or poorly reasoning, when they promote or do the more broadly popular thing, rather than a more narrowly preferred one? For all it's faults, one hopes we live in a democratic republic, no?

Corporate Theft from we
the Peeps Dwarfs
petty crime

but if ya cannot
See it it didn't
Happen.

The Kent teachers strike is legit. The homegrown worker action is legit. The SEA threats and requests are bullshit. I have read about what SEA wants and much of it has nothing to do with the people they represent. SEA is demanding a bunch of costly changes that allow them to control things they have never controlled before to try and take power away from the board. They are using the cities Kid’s and the anxiety parents have about the other ways the kids education have suffered through the pandemic. SEA is slimy and off base. Their tactics remind me of the police guilds tactics. I hope their membership does the right thing and allows working mothers the ability to rely on the school schedule and get back to work.

Our more compassionate approach to mental health over the last three-four decades has been a complete failure.

Ken Kesey did irreparable damage with his overwrought fictionalized cuckoo's nest.

Bedlams might have been unpleasant but they did manage to protect society form these madmen for centuries.

It's time to bring them back

Hiring more police reduces crime. However, there are far more cost effective ways to reduce crime. There are numerous studies that show this. My guess is Biden (or his staff) knows this, but from a political standpoint, this is easy. This shows a lack of leadership on the issue. Rather than explain how a stronger social safety net would prevent crime, he takes the politically easy way out, and pushes for more police. All the while, folks ignore the fundamental flaws within our police system. These vary in severity by city, but are much more prominent in the U. S. than in other countries. Basically, our police departments are inferior to other cops around the world. Not only are they often abusive -- committing crimes and making the jobs of good cops that much more difficult -- but they simply aren't that good. Other police forces are better trained, and far more effective at their jobs (https://theweek.com/articles/918143/what-america-learn-from-nordic-police).

This approach puts us in a never-ending cycle. Either we add more police and accept their flaws and high costs, or we cutback, and see crime increase. Neither is acceptable. Both are a primitive way of looking at the problem. We are like a football team that runs the ball up the middle every play -- three yards and a cloud of dust. Other teams have a mobile quarterback in a shotgun formation, trained to recognize dozens of defensive formations, and exploit any one. We are getting our ass kicked because we ignore the experts, and successful systems around the world. If we were a company we would be bankrupt. But instead we are merely a country that wonders why things are so fucking hard, given that we have the best higher education system in the world, and extremely talented individuals.

@6: So any crime that you don't associate with "corporate" is petty and okay to steal or vandalize because it balances things out?

"I have no idea how this guy still has a job. "

Writer with a legal background has no idea public sector employee's have first amendment rights. Or at least feints ignorance as if that will help his cause.

@9

You are correct that our police officers are woefully under trained. It takes mores hours of training in Washington to become a licensed cosmetologist than to become a law enforcement officer.

What’s often unstated is that our populous in the US is likely harder to police than the populace of other countries.

Our population is much more heavily armed than in other countries.

Our population has a bullshit notion of personal freedom that hasn’t evolved much past a middl schoolers’ “I don’t wanna and you can’t make me!” tantrum.

Combine a selfish heavily armed population with an undertrained and understaffed police force and the results are predictable.

@8 to be fair, Kesey was on a LOT of acid.

Biden announcing hiring of new cops is nothing more than the Democratic Party doing everything it can to distance itself from "Defund the Police" and "ACAB" before the midterms, in order to reassure their base and nervous swing voters that they are not indifferent to rising crime. If the "Defund" slogans hadn't been so effectively disseminated by activists, Dem politicians wouldn't be working so hard to disavow them.

Biden is delusional and if he believes this strategy will get him re-elected he is dead wrong. The endless murders of Black people by cops and what was it 50? cops standing around doing nothing but picking their underwear out of their asses and listening to children in Texas be slaughtered (and not one of them held accountable) and he believes funding more cops is the answer? Black Lives Matter and Until Freedom and other organizations have been petitioning Biden and Congress for major police reform since Biden was elected (and members of congress, specifically the senate, were put into power by Black people voting in record numbers) and he is betraying them to appease the same people who always need to be appeased - white people. Only racist white people driven by fear believe cops are the answer to crime in this country. This country needs to house people, feed people, educate people, keep people healthy (mentally and physically) and make sure that employment in this country means being able to live on wages earned working ONE full time job. More cops and more funding for cops is what Trump and the MAGAts want. More violence. More authoritarianism. It's so tone deaf and a total slap in the face to all of the people who voted to get Trump OUT OF OFFICE. This is why we need a YOUNG president - preferably female and non-white - because the white men in power are all one trick ponies - and it's literally destroying the country.

Meanwhile the capitol Mississippi has no water. The Republican governor has a water tanker parked in front of his mansion. Throwing more money at cops (who already eat up TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars annually in salary, overtime, and civil suit payouts every time they murder someone) IS NOT GOING TO HELP THIS COUNTRY IN ANY WAY.

@8: You need not toss out "compassionate" when describing better policies. What works best can be compassionate.

@16: "Only racist white people driven by fear believe cops are the answer to crime in this country."

You, my dear, are the Marjorie Taylor Greene of the far left.

There are reams of evidence as to why the violent, white supremacist system of "law enforcement" is deeply racist and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting anything other than property and (secondary) wealthy white people's lives.

Police brutality and racism in America

The truth that almost none of us who are White get is that 57 years after Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, 56 years after the Civil Rights act of 1964, and 55 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, if you are Black or Brown, and particularly if you are a young Black man, for you America is like living in an occupied country where any interaction with the police is to be avoided. It can send you to prison for a trivial offense at the least, and may, and often does, result in your murder at the hands of those whose supposed but not actual job is to “serve and protect.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7331505/

Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement
The government’s response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law

What the police really believe
Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/7/21293259/police-racism-violence-ideology-george-floyd

But if we can't fill our local jails (like King County Jail), how will employers find slave-labor workers to keep the cotton mills working?

@16 & @19 xina for the WIN!! Here's to Biden stepping aside in 2024 and making the way for the centuries overdue first female President of the United States, along with the Orange Turd's conviction and death sentence (to prevent its taxpayer-funded life imprisonment), RepubliKKKan neofascists and their MAGAt rubes cancelling each other out by "rioting in the streets" (as paranoid Senatorial fatass and GOP fearmonger, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. predicted), the mass extinction of the batshit crazy GOP, and ensuing world peace.

@18: And you, Elmer, are the Ron De Santis of dumbfuck MAGAt neofascists.
Try not to fall in when you flush.

I enjoy the heat warnings especially because after each one going back to July a local meteorological pundit at UW said 'it will cool down for good after this one' even though the 10 day forecast on my phone already says another is coming (it doesn't right now though, sigh)

@9
What @15 said.
I don’t blame Biden for political laziness. If you or I had a 40% approval rating 2 months before midterm elections, we would give the same message, to counteract ‘defund the police’.
Yes, policing in the USA has myriads of problems. Lots and lots of them.
I’m particularly interested in how Val Demings will do. She (and other Black law-and-order candidates like Eric Adams) are the Democrats’ hope to counteract the ‘defund the police’ disaster.

@9
What @15 said.
I don’t blame Biden for political laziness. If you or I had a 40% approval rating 2 months before midterm elections, we would give the same message, to counteract ‘defund the police’.
Yes, policing in the USA has myriads of problems. Lots and lots of them.
I’m particularly interested in how Val Demings will do. She (and other Black law-and-order candidates like Eric Adams) are the Democrats’ hope to counteract the ‘defund the police’ disaster.

@17 "What works best can be compassionate."

Perhaps but we haven't found that particular unicorn yet.

Until we do I'm okay saying the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

@19: Discussion of police brutality and racism in America is healthy. Fanning the flames of division with insulting racist generalizations is not.

The postal service has just issued a Pete Seeger stamp, for those who still have a use for (or interest in) such things. Nice design too.

@8:

Sure, why not? And while we're at it, we should probably get rid of those ridiculous child labor laws - if a kid is old enough to consume resources, they're old enough to extract resources, amiright?

@29 Not sure why you think a child and a raving lunatic are equivalent.

But next time I see some 10 year old screaming at their inner demons while wailing on a street sign with a piece of rebar I’ll be sure to think about child labor laws.

And why has attacking street signs and light posts with rods, sticks, or poles become such a common activity for our “in crisis” community?

@21 and @19 i'm not sure where youre data on the public's opions on 'defind popo' comes from...the NY Times and fascists at Pew said this just recently :
"...According to Pew:
Four-in-ten each of Black Democrats and Black Republicans say funding for police departments in their communities should remain the same, while around a third of each partisan coalition (36 percent and 37 percent, respectively) says funding should increase. Only about one-in-four Black Democrats (24 percent) and one-in-five Black Republicans (21 percent) say funding for police departments in their communities should decrease."

The source was Blow's editorial today...and he's hardly a GOP hack.