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Cambridge city councilors, police commissioner don't hold back the anger in five-hour meeting on proposal to shift some police funds to public health

Cambridge Day reports that after five hours, nothing was resolved and the council will meet on the issue again on Monday.

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Anybody know of any public health workers invading a man's home and arresting him for breaking into his own house?

Arresting a professor's kid looking for the spare key after locking himself out?

How about mowing down a cyclist and driving off?

Arresting a pedestrian for not having ID on him?

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Did those officers have a history of abuse and mistakes? How where they dealt with? How many people has the department fired? (Actually fired, not encouraged to resign with benefits.)

If police don't have face serious consequences for their actions, reducing the funding solves nothing.

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How is that an overfunding issue? It sounds like a problem with discipline, managing, and screening during hiring of cops.

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...sounds like the very same argument for giving police departments that has been used over and over and over again, lather rinse repeat.

"More training! Yeah that'll fix it!"

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In the past few weeks there's been dozens of articles by and about police chiefs who lament the legal and contractual inability to reprimand officers. Many want to to be able to hold their officers accountable and can't. So bad cops stay on the job.

Read the article on the Rhode Island survey of police chiefs today in the Globe. According to RI state law, they can only suspend officers for two days (!) and some doubt they'd be able to even fire Floyd's killer cop if it happened in RI. The police review board is staffed by current and former officers. Gee, you think they're going to hold their buddies accountable?

Police reform starts at the statehouse. Until laws protecting cops are changed and union contracts voided, nothing of significance will happen.

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The knee to the neck for a medical transport is excessive force in any and every use of force policy I've ever seen. If the RI Chiefs can't rule that excessive force (which is a crime in itself) that's on them.

Unions are also being over blamed in this. Teachers, teamsters, ASCME, etc all have the same disciplinary language in their contracts, Police are going to have the same. A lot of this is simple labor law stuff that your never going to avoid (managers retaliate against worker for x/y/z, worker sues company for discrimination and gets awarded a million bucks). You really don't get around the problem by voiding contracts in my opinion. You have rules and laws, and union workers have to abide by those rules and laws. It doesn't get more simple than that.

Reform needs to start with Civil Service. That organization protects bad cops more than any union could ever dream. The Boston Police (and Cambridge) are forced to hire workers that they wouldn't hire in the first place, and now the City has to defend them for what reason? The concept of Civil Service is noble, but reform needs to start there.

Civilian Review Boards are never going to matter, because unless they are labor attorneys, they really can't legally have a say as long as police officers are considered employees subject to labor laws in the US, which they always will be. There are also studies which show police IA investigations find officers at fault more than civilian review boards do (because they are on the outside).

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must be they need a training experience they have not had before. maybe just maybe

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Will they be the first Unions both sides agree must either go or have less power?
Probably not..

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I kinda like the lowest crime rates in modern history. Keep increasing police funding. Violent crime fell 51% between 1993 and 2018 according to the FBI.

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Correlation does not equal causation.

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I find it entertaining how some groups (police and politician in particular) like to take so much credit when their community's crime rate drops, but you'll never hear them taking responsibility when it goes back up.

Not that policing and policy don't matter, but there are so many hard to quantify other factors at play when it comes to crime rates. Here is a partial random list: Economy, employment rate, pandemics, demographics, housing, racism, education, lead poisoning, health care availability (mental health in particular), social services, birth control etc.

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You are either engaging in it, or perpetrating it.

Most of the drop in crime came BEFORE the insane increase in police force size and firepower. The sharpest decline was before 2000 - before all the WAR ON EVERYONE NOT A COP era.

IMAGE(https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990.jpg)

It is widely believed that crime dropping was the result of the baby boom aging out of crime wave prime time. It absolutely had nothing to do with the police forces militarizing and expanding because that came after 2000 (even if expansion bills were passed under Clinton) - unless you count the perpetuation of residual paranoia about crime being exploited for job security.

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Means increasing social and mental health workers who work with the police department you know that. No one even mentioned military equipment.

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As Mark Twain (noted racist) said, “there’s lies, damn lies and statistics.”

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Lead levels in blood vs. violent crime rates

It's unfortunate that the media first linked the nationwide decrease in violent crime starting in the early 90's to NYC, because it made everyone focus on perennial-piece-of-shit Rudy Guiliani and broken-window policing. Turns out there was nothing he couldn't have done to drive down the crime rate, as it was happening everywhere in the country at the same time, concurrent with young adults coming of age with much lower blood-lead levels.

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Don’t forget about those factors....

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Would you happen to know in which year the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” was passed? It’s a law that gets discussed a lot in terms of criminal justice reform today.

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Anyone who can score 100% or 99% on the exam surely has other job opportunities with more favorable working conditions and eventually better pay. The highest patrol officer salaries that are published are usually those who are working 16 hour days, five days a week. When apples to apples are compared, a cop with a degree and ten years experience usually makes around $90,000 base for a 40 hour week. Why would anyone take that when competent people are making far more in other, less risky fields?

Very few newcomers are taking the police exam, in part because of the Ferguson, now Minneapolis effect. Who would want it? Career police officers who almost religiously waited until they "maxed out" at 32 years service and 55 years of age are now aggressively pursuing early retirement. There is hope that the legislature will offer another buyout which would allow officers to add 5 years to age or service time. It only takes about five minutes to file for retirement but roughly 18 months for recruitment, exam, exam results, appeals, selection process, interviews, backgrounds, medicals etc. At some point there will be no need for a police budget because there will be no police left. On a brighter note, at least there will be no stores to loot or cruisers to burn, so maybe people won't notice.

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Anyone who can score 100% or 99% on the exam surely has other job opportunities with more favorable working conditions and eventually better pay.

Sadly, those other opportunities usually don't allow them to be racist bullies without repercussions...

If we're going to continue to have cops, we need a different kind of cops.

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And probably why police brutality is at an all time low (well I can’t speak for the rest of the country and how their scores/salaries are)

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