- 15 Posts
- 62 Comments
0·7 days agoI have read the letter before before, and debunked it to my satisfaction. The numbers in it about “bullet ballots,” as far as I can tell, are simply made up. You can think whatever you like. If you want to see my reasons and citations and links, search back through my history, or if you can’t find it but really want to see, let me know and I’ll see if I can find it.
1·7 days agoIt is absolutely not our system. In my case, the municipal government is the local branch of the state government, which is itself subordinate to the federal government. And at all levels, the people with the money are the ones that pull the strings. If push comes to shove and it’s the will of the people vs the will of the higher levels of government, the will of the government usually wins, and the will of the most powerful local capitalist will win every time (because states amplify the political power of those who are wealthy enough to prop them up).
This simply is not how it works. If you run for city council, and you have the city council on the mayor on board, and you disband the city police, nobody in the state government is going to give a shit. They may be unhappy when a ton of calls for service come in for the state police, there actually was an issue like that in Texas where something weird was going on with the city and they were just letting almost all their calls get handled by some other jurisdiction.
But regardless: If enough people run for office, and win, it doesn’t matter how much money some local business has. With very rare corrupt exceptions (I can literally think of two, post-reconstruction), they’re now in charge. Money is tied in with who will win, that’s completely true. I didn’t mean “indirectly” in the sense of, it’s a small or trivial factor. It’s a huge factor. But, if you can overcome it, you can be in charge. Full stop.
What are you alleging will be the mechanism by which the state government “doesn’t let” the city not have police? There are a lot of places in the US that don’t have any police below the county level. You’re sort of on your own, out in the country, although someone from the sheriff’s department may come out after a while if you call. It’s just that every single city, and most towns, have opted to have a separate local police force. But there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from incorporating in a new place and not having police.
Here’s actually an example of it happening: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
The libertarians took over the town, and among other changes, functionally disabled the police. No one came to stop them. They have the votes, so they’re in charge now.
(Edit: Actually, another good example along the same lines is from “Wild Wild Country” on Netflix. Those guys built their own community, with no police, and nobody cared for quite a while. And then, even when they started creating issues enough with the town that the ordinary people reached the point of “something must be done,” it took quite a bit of doing for the forces of law and order to do anything about it. The issue was, at all times, that they were committing crimes which impacted the town. Simply being out in their little place with no police was completely fine, before, during, and after.)
(Edit: And, there’s a whole separate case study when the Freak Party was going to take over Aspen. That one’s significantly more complex, among other reasons because it does include some sense in which the establishment “didn’t let” them do it, but still interesting to talk about as an example of how things play out in the real world, instead of in someone’s particular ideology.)
You keep lecturing me at quite a lot of length about how it actually works, but what you’re saying is not how it works. I’m happy to show you evidence and reasons, and sources. Are you open to that?
I would argue that this basically is the reality of the situation, and that the voting is just to make the smallest of changes. (“If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.” I would like to offer a corollary: if a possibility is so impactful that it would actually disrupt the capitalist order, it will never be put up for a vote, because the government gets to decide what gets voted on, and the politicians are indirectly controlled by the capitalists.) Like with police interrogations, voting is not an equal interaction between the government and its subjects. The government has all the power, and that power is controlled by the capitalist class.
That’s not how it works. Reference the article above, as a counterexample. I will not at all tell you that capitalism is not deeply and corruptly entrenched within our system, both indirectly in how much money it costs to even muster the votes to win the election, and at how the system gets set up at a bigger-government level for bigger jurisdictions. But, removing the police force at the municipality level actually is something that’s perfectly realistic to do, has been done before, and you can look at the experiment and see how it played out. You can also, if you think an anarchist community would make it work better, just make it happen and make your community, just like the libertarians did.
Fixed the title for you, my apologies.
See all the first part and Trump wanting to rig the election sound completely real. Stephen Spoonamore and his “Duty to Warn” letter are totally made up. It’s somewhere in my comments history, I actually looked up the numbers from the State of Arizona web site, and what he’s saying is impossible just from how many ballots marked how got turned in and tabulated. It’s made up. If you couldn’t tell from the fact that there’s all kinds of totally insane stuff in it that isn’t at all how things work, similar to “The voting locations use StarLink and that’s Elon Musk hacked the totals.”
You joke, but there are sovereign citizen groups in Australia who try to quote US laws and documents to the cops as their argument for why the laws don’t apply to them.
Why not post to a cop forum “how to deal with the people you have to deal with.” ?
I think the George Floyd protests accomplished a pretty large amount of this. Prior to about 2014, the state of policing in the US had some absolutely fatal flaws. No pun intended. Now, training on use of force is totally different, bodycams are pretty much universal, a lot of stuff has changed.
There’s actually still more that is needed, and a lot in our criminal justice system that still needs improvement, but the cops’ part of the equation has actually had some of the most attention to it recently, so it’s in the best shape, relatively speaking. The court system and the prisons are where a lot of attention needs to go, now.
most US cops have
This is absolutely false. Tell me which classes, and what their enrollment numbers are. There are a little over a million cops in the US.
Yeah. They’re dangerous to interact with, because a part of their job is to fuck up people’s lives in certain circumstances. If you’re in the role of “the guy we’re trying to put in prison,” then they are absolutely your adversary, and you need to recognize that even if they’re pretending to be nice to you or seemingly being reasonable. But not every interaction involves them being the adversary, and except for individual ones who are pieces of shit (which does happen, just like with every other class of human being), they don’t need to be the enemy.
I definitely feel like “It’s not your job to make sure they have the right person” deserves some followup questions lol.
So I was driving, late at night, and I saw a heated argument between a man and a woman.
I slowed down, sort of checking if everything was okay. Just then, he punched her in the face, pretty hard.
She fell and crumpled up on the sidewalk in a ball, I jerked my car over to the side of the road, popped out and ran over yelling. The guy turned around to me, and for some reason charged at me while I was still running at him. We collided, fell over on the asphalt together, shit was on, we fought for a little bit. Finally he turned around and just ran away. I called 911, and went over to the girl, who was still crumpled up. Her purse had fallen down and open, with her shit all scattered everywhere, and as I was going over she sort of started gathering up her stuff. I sort of knelt down, still talking to the dispatcher, and tried to tell her to relax, and she started yelling at me to hang up, I didn’t know what I was doing, she didn’t need the cops.
Fuck that, man. For one thing, they’re already on the way at this point, all me hanging up is going to do is get them here faster if anything. She finished gathering up her stuff, and also fled the area.
When the cops arrived, they were sort of darting around trying to find the guy, it took a little while before someone had time to come over and talk to me. They basically just told me to stay put. When someone had time to talk with me, they took my whole statement and sent me on my way. In the morning, a detective called me and filled me in: They’d caught up with him, but they couldn’t find her, and without a victim they couldn’t really charge him with anything. However, he did assault the police officers, just as he had both the girl and me, and so they had him on plenty of stuff. The detective asked if I wanted to press charges, I said no, and then I hesitated and asked if it was useful for me to press charges, if they wanted more stuff to get him on. The guy laughed and said, “Oh, no. We got him.” Okay, sure, if it’s purely up to me and my convenience, then I don’t care. Anyway, presumably, he got in some trouble. I am 100% on Team Cop as far as that interaction. To be honest, I also simply don’t give a shit if the girl feels her life would be impacted by this douchebag getting convicted of the crimes he committed. He also attacked me when all I was doing was running over.
Another time, my roommate was having a mental health crisis and called the cops to take her to the hospital. We saw them out in the yard with flashlights, interacted with them, they came in, she was really badly embarrassed because she was wanting them to come to the back door so we wouldn’t need to know about it. Honestly, it’s whatever. Anyway, they took her to the hospital. Nobody shot the dog, or her.
Another time, my family member died, and we called the cops to go to her place to check because we hadn’t heard from her. They found her there, let us know what was going on, handled the body and all.
Another time was another boy and girl fight. He was grabbing her arm and not letting her go, she was asking me for help, I had a pretty heated conversation with the guy and called the cops after, and they set her up with a women’s shelter until she could figure out what she wanted to do.
Another time, a homeless guy was yelling on the sidewalk at the top of his lungs and the cops got him to calm down and leave, somehow without slamming him on the concrete or taking him away for anything.
I’ve seen cops abuse their power. I’ve had friends who’ve been roughed up by the cops. I’m not saying policing is perfect, and definitely not in the United States. But, that being said:
DIFFERENT SITUATIONS ARE DIFFERENT AND NEED DIFFERENT RESPONSES
NOT EVERY COP IS THE FUCKING ENEMY
I literally posted a link to a video which recommends your 25-word script, down below.
Not every interaction with the police is a traffic stop. Honestly, most traffic stops involve citations that are so trivial that it barely matters what you do, as long as you can manage not to get yanked out of the car for refusing to ID or something. This is talking about a lot more serious situations that don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer to them.
Edit: Added “most.” Sometimes, depending on what you’ve got in the car, the 25-word script is absolutely pretty fucking critical to stick to.
What in the world?
Once the government has been taken over, they can force their memecoin as the national currency and then rug pull
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?
Stealing the election, in the way you’re talking about, is extremely difficult in the modern day. There are a lot of safeguards, paper ballot backups, random recounts and spot-checks. A lot of it is run very locally by people who care quite a lot about the fairness of it. Twenty years ago, you used to have to trust the software and it would just spit out a number, which was horribly unsafe and caused a lot of people to become very upset. It’s actually fairly likely that the Republicans stole some elections in places like North Carolina while that was the system. Modern elections in the US are not bulletproof, but they’re now better than that. It’s not nearly as simple as “the uplink is Starlink so they can change the numbers en route.” It just doesn’t work that way.
It’s hard for me to argue for the negative that it didn’t happen, but this combines stuff that sounds unlikely, stuff that is extremely specific weird speculation like the Starlink thing, and wild stuff that to me is clearly untrue, in a way that leads me to question why the heck it has 50 upvotes.
Yeah… I mean, we can talk about it. The clearance rate for drugs is near 100%, because of course it is, because it’s going to be very rare for drug “report” to go into the system for any reason other than that a cop found drugs on the person, and then promptly arrested them. The clearance rate for car theft is basically 0% (okay, you got me, that is perfectly fair I admit, you’re probably not getting your car back until the person’s done with it). There are crimes where it’s naturally a lot more difficult to find the person, but you do know that it happened, and those are going to be the ones with lower clearance rates.
Like I say, we can talk about it and whether that’s the specific explanation for any particular crime’s clearance rate, but you’re changing the subject away from the idea that you said “real” crime was this tiny minority of all the arrests, but it’s not. If you want to switch to talking now about how they should be arresting “real” crime as an even bigger majority percentage than it is, then sure, you might have a point, but that’s different from what you said before.
I am also entertained that there’s a category for “Treason,” with 0 reports and 0 clearances in it.
No I wouldn’t have, no I don’t think that everything you think is stupid, and I most certainly do not think that everything I think is right and can’t be questioned. In fact, I rewrote my reply several times because I wanted to critique my own beliefs before I posted it. And I indicated in my reply that I desperately want my response to be torn apart to improve my understanding of the world. The guide I posted is not the answer, but I do believe it is a good one.
Okay, sure. I’m happy to have this conversation with you, but you have to realize that you wrote me an initial message with “All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions” “a worthless piece of shit.” “No they aren’t” “No you fucking don’t” “it’s terrible advice” and so on. I read your initial paragraph and didn’t see anything even remotely resembling “this is why” or where logically your argument came from. It was just “research” from your “comrades,” which makes it sound like only comrades can come up with truth, and anyone else needs to learn from them before “spouting off.” You literally said at one point “don’t use your judgement.”
The cops in most cities are organized by the city council and the mayor. “Capitalism” has nothing to do with it, except indirectly, because it takes money and connections to get on city council. There are a lot of places where people through the exercise of their democracy, reduced the funding for the police, instituted other programs like social workers going to some calls, got the police force out of doing traffic enforcement, basically, doing reforms. If the whole city council tried to disband the police completely, and just have an anarchist city, they would probably lose their election because the people of the city wouldn’t like that idea. But there is not some other entity that’s coming from outside and “enforcing” the police on the people of the city. It’s just the city government, which is our system, is changeable by a majority of the people every few years, if enough people can get on board for it.
I’m not trying to say it is easy to fight against the network of people who operate city government, or that it doesn’t take money or anything like that. But plenty of places, some reformer has run a campaign and then won and then done reform. We still use voting. It’s not like some Amazon warehouse where the “owners” run the city and make there be police, and there’s nothing the people in the city can do about it.
Doesn’t that make sense? Does it seem accurate as far as a critique of what you said about how inescapable the police that are enacted on our cities, apparently, are, and how there is no consent by the people of the city? You tell me. I’m picking out just that one part to respond to, because you said you were open to critique and conversation. So sure, we can talk about it, I usually like talking.
I have had exactly this type of experience, of being calm and straight with the cops, and they clearly really appreciate it in exactly the way you described because so much of their day consists of people who are acting like maniacs or lying through their teeth.
The one part I would take some exception to is “don’t be untruthful.” If you’re guilty, then, I mean, definitely don’t lie to make yourself innocent, but there’s a big myth that cops like to promulgate that when you’re guilty then you just need to be honest and they’ll be able to help you out. This is wrong, wrong, wronger than wrong. Just ask for a lawyer.
But yes, being cordial with them while still protecting your rights will mean they’ll generally do what they can to help you out in turn, and make your interaction a lot more better, absolutely.
This is incredibly solid advice. Whether you’re dealing with a perfectly reasonable police officer, or Shooty McSettlementByTheCity, it will be to your benefit to be cool with them and respect their desire to get through the interaction smoothly, and not have to be nervous about what you’re doing.
I can summarize three of my last four encounters with law enforcement thusly:
1: “Hey stay where you are” “Sure” (talks to me briefly, gets on his radio, verifies I’m not the guy, okay cool you’re free to go)
2 and 3: I actually was guilty of something minor, and the cop knew it, but because I was aboveboard with him and didn’t make bullshit when I could have, he went pretty much to the limit of his ability to not get me in trouble for it. THIS IS NOT TO SAY YOU SHOULD BE HONEST WITH THE COPS. Just don’t be a dick and make everyone’s day more difficult, is what I’m saying.
Also, be white. It helps a lot.
I am so happy to see this. I posted one of the videos below.
Yes, there likely are “actual” crimes out there that need to be solved. But they are in the tiny minority of what the police pursue and prosecute overall compared to petty drug bullshit, harassing people for existing while black, writing speeding tickets, busting homeless people, and jailing people who need to steal to eat on behalf of megacorporations – crimes for which the police will show up for near instantly when called, whereas if someone victimizes you, Mr. private citizen, they generally can’t be bothered.
This absolutely isn’t my experience.
The FBI actually keeps statistics about this compiled from a lot of state and local agencies:
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/arrest
I’m having a little trouble making sense of it. I was able to find a better-formatted report somewhere else for a few years back, but this is what I could find easily that’s current. If we take what’s in “Offense Category,” though, it shows 26 million arrests, of which 8 million are “other,” 4 million are drugs, and the rest look like pretty legit crime to me, until you get down to the 100,000 category, stuff like “drunkenness.” If you consider how much more drug “crime” there is than murder, or robbery, or what have you, it sounds to me like they are working, generally, on some real problems. Definitely the 14 million non-drug non-“other” arrests are not a tiny minority, even if we’re assuming that everything in the “other” category is bullshit.
That’s how the cops operate here. I know how the cops work here because I live here. I don’t know what to tell you about where you might happen to live, but I’ll bet you if you look at it hard it isn’t that much different.
I’m not going to tell you that your experience where you live isn’t your experience. But I do not think it is representative of the US as a whole, or even close to it. You’re saying some stuff that is simply objectively not true, about what percentage of arrests they make for different things and so on. I have a decent amount of personal experience with it, also, in my area.
And even if you are not the perpetrator, that doesn’t matter. The police are pressured to arrest somebody.
This part, I definitely know is wrong. Some cops do have a particular stick up their ass about liking to arrest people for marginal reasons. The majority of cops, in any given interaction, dislike arresting people, because it’s paperwork, and they get paid the same either way. They’re not looking to arrest some random person if they can’t find the actual perpetrator. With very rare and corrupt exceptions, it’ll wind up being a massive waste of resources when they have to be released, or go to trial and get off because there is literally 0 evidence, and if someone shows a consistent pattern of that, it’ll be a problem.
Is your name similar to someone else they want for something else?
I used to think that you lived in a part of the US where the cops are bad, and we mostly just have a difference of experience. That still might be true, but I more strongly suspect now that you’re basing this on not much more than your particular set of prejudice.
If the charges were dumb shit, why did you decide to help the cops with your security camera footage?
It sounds, looking over these comments, like a lot of Lemmy lives in some kind of locality where there is never an actual crime to be addressed, and the only reason someone might ever call 911 and the cops come out is… well, I don’t know, I guess the cops just ride around just fucking with innocent people full time for no actual reason. I’m sure there are places like that, but I definitely do not live in one.
Hm… so I spent some time looking over it. It’s not immediately crazy, on the face of it, like the “Duty to Warn” letter. And the allegations in the second link are specific, and concerning enough that if they are true, that it sounds like something looking into in more detail.
I did dig through it, just kind of poking to see if anything seemed off, and some of it is pretty suspect. I compared numbers from these two links, just to see if it was internally consistent:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ytDyPprQVqiQG4r0G5BZTpEwvDdKBvH4/edit?gid=1449319225#gid=1449319225
https://smartelections.substack.com/p/so-clean
The first link says that the Connecticut Democratic drop-off was -8,612 (roughly -1%), and the Republican drop-off was 59,065 (a little under 10%). But on the second link, the numbers are clearly not that.(Edit: Hm… actually, now looking again with the population of each county taken into account, maybe it is right. Let me look at a few more. I was just overall really skeptical because the first link broke it out by swing states having a much bigger difference, and then the first one listed a bunch of non-swing states and said all the states showed the exact same pattern… but maybe in terms of numbers, they actually do line up. I’ll look more.)
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding something. I don’t completely know what I’m looking at here. I’d like to be able to ask one of these people what’s up with that discrepancy, and see what the answer is. I’m still pretty skeptical, though, unless there is some specific answer for why the two sources seem to show different results for what I think is supposed to be the same thing.
This makes me more skeptical. How many votes came in, in each category, was available immediately. If your argument depends on looking at the number of votes for each candidate, and you didn’t present it until two months went by because of saying stuff wasn’t available, that sounds wrong to me.
That means absolutely nothing. Putting out a press release is about like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. I’ve done it. It means nothing in terms of validation.
Do you have a link to the case? Where did you get this information? Voter fraud, I can easily believe. What you’re talking about is election fraud, which is very different and would be the concerning thing.
Overall, I’m still pretty skeptical, to be honest.