Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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 …

So it seems like y'all are paying a huge portion of the city budget for tens of thousands of traffic stops, while violent crime goes almost entirely unsolved.