Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I think it can be disappointing to people who live/have lived in those neighborhoods to see the national conversation constantly cater to whichever event is trending on twitter rather than their neighborhoods' unreported chronic problems, esp if they get attacked for complaining

The same communities are both under- and over-policed. Baltimore averaged 300 murders a year for the last 5 years. Only 418 murder arrests total (over 1,000 murders were unsolved). But there were 456 arrests for gambling and 1,781 for prostitution. https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Public-Safety/BPD-Arrests/3i3v-ibrt …

They are overpolicing a bunch of minor, easy-to-solve offenses while underpolicing actual crime.

It's hard to paint with a broad brush bc police departments are so heterogenous, but hard or soft quotas & fines/confiscations that can fund the depts seem like corrupting factors. LEO shouldn't be funding themselves with police activity, but nobody else wants to fund them

fwiw, civil forfeiture & exploitative bail procedures (e.g. charging the accused for the use of their own GPS bracelets) absolutely destroys community goodwill toward the justice system. Unfortunately, I don't see how defunding police depts can possibly improve this situation

Of all the functions local government has, protecting the lives and property of residents seems like a pretty decent #1 priority to have. I'm an Oakland resident. We have a serious crime problem here. Ask my neighbors whether they think we should reduce the police budget.

Leave aside budget reductions for the moment. In the most recent stats I could find, Oakland police are making over 30,000 discretionary stops a year (mostly traffic). https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/beta.oaklandca.gov/2016-2017-SD-Report-Final.pdf …