Yeah, "vote blue no matter who" means fuck it, I have their votes, I'll just do whatever the fuck I want and no one is allowed to criticize me or ask me to do better or else they are begging for a Trump Dictatorship
As a person living in the densest urban environment in North America, please no. Our police force is a group of barely constrained violent thugs who enforce actual laws capriciously and prevent very little crime, while consistently violating citizen's civil rights.
Inb4 "Trump and the Republicans would be worse"
(They're equally the same, but the GOP is open about it. Whereas the Dems are more like to lie through their teeth)
So, $24 for equipment and training?
Every Law Enforcement agency has the horniest guys in procurement and run through their budget like Ippei at Bally's. Its all cumbersome gadgets and vaporware.
We would be made safer if we piled up the money and set on fire.
Every one of us can list 10 things off the top of our heads that would be better and safer than cops. Just using the money to feed school kids would be easy, fun, and legitimately useful. Kick that money to replacing lead water pipes is an instant benefit! Neither of those things is fascism adjacent
“Let’s keep feeding billions of dollars into this thing to reduce crime that has never ever reduced crime while starving programs that do reduce crime.”
Meanwhile, Republicans will keep going on Fox and saying Biden is weak on crime and viewers will 100 percent believe them.
We're not going to be safe until we can put a trillion cops on the beat--we need at least three if not four cops for every non-cop, otherwise, we cannot be safe
A competent politician would have done this to win the votes of the hippie bashers by showing hes Tough on Crime...
...but then attached conditions requiring massive policing reforms for any force that wants to actually receive the money.
They could easily have still got the headlines they want.
That's literally how every single federal rule is enforced, and how every US department gets what it wants from State and local governments.
Show evidence of compliance, receive money. Fall out of compliance, lose money.
But they definitely wont change if theyre given unconditional money.
The US feds are heavily constrained by Supreme Court rulings around states rights, from coercing the lower levels of government across the board, or heavily regulating state and local agencies.
But the one thing they ARE allowed to do, is make funds conditional on reforms in the same domain area.
Then if you don’t give them the money they yell that you’re not supporting law and order and you look like you’re anti-police. You lose what you wanted to gain in the first place. The police are not like other cases, they have more political power than most departments.
I mean I'm sure that's true, but
'you lost funding because the Justice Department found you non-compliant with regulation..'
is an easier sell than either intentionally cutting their funding or refusing them in the first place, and to the extent they have power, that will be true for any option.
It’s simply my feeling that tactics which don’t take into account the specific features of the situation won’t be effective. What works on other entities can’t be trusted to work on police departments.
