Category: Policing

In my last entry, I noted that the routine, caustic phrase pasted on the United States by “criminal justice reformers”  —  “incarceration nation”  —  is hogwash.  Ninety-nine and a-half percent of the population is not incarcerated, and the fraction of one percent who are generally did quite a bit to earn it.

I now want to address another whooper told by the reformers:  That the police can “build trust” in the community by taking a more relaxed attitude toward crime, and generally by “de-escalating” enforcement.  This argument is all the rage in faculty lounges in Palo Alto, New Haven, Cambridge, etc.  But, as the Baltimore Sun tells us, it’s anything but the rage with the actual communities that have been the unwilling experimental rats of dumbed-down policing.

Continue reading . . .

Now for a balancing bit of good news. Shane Kavanaugh has this article with the above title in the Oregonion.

Nearly a year after “defund the police” became a racial justice rallying cry in Portland and across the U.S., a vast majority of Portlanders and those living in the metro area reject the call to diminish police presence in the city. Continue reading . . .

The Atlantic has an article with the above caption as the HTML web page title. The article headline and subhead are “The Numbers Tell a Different Story About Police Killings of Minors: Exaggerated narratives could yield misguided policy responses—which would endanger many more kids.”

Sensational but rare events have always assumed outsize proportion in popular reaction. That reaction can often lead to wrong policy choices and sometimes disastrous ones. Author Conor Friedersdorf compares the perception to the reality and notes,

false or hyperbolic characterizations of police killings of minors carry a cost: They traumatize members of the public more than the facts justify, unfairly vilify cops, and mislead people about the best way forward.

Continue reading . . .