In a conversation with Mike Solan, the head of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, Seattle Police Department officer and SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer minimized the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave and joked that she had “limited value” as a “regular person” who was only 26 years old.
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In fact, as we reported exclusively, Dave was driving 74 miles an hour in a 25 mile per hour zone and struck Kandula while she was attempting to cross the street in a marked and well-lighted crosswalk.
No.
You do need police officers and don’t be so dumb to say that you don’t. Unless you’re 13 and trying to be edgy, in which case I’ll just ask you to limit yourself to TikTok or something.
You need police against criminals, you need police to enforce the rules of our society. The problem is that US police officers are just a major shit show.
Maybe that is why so many people shout these dumb slogans because they don’t even know or remember what a real actual police officer is and does.
If the laws supported the people there would be no need for cops to kill the people because there would be no conflict between the people and the laws.
Nurses serve the same clientele as cops and we don’t murder our patients.
Nurses don’t stop criminals either. You have different jobs. If you’re a nurse then I applaud you for what you do, but if somebody threatens to kill you or a loved one, I think you want police officers to help. Are you going to stop drug trade? Kidnappings? Murders? Those are actual problems which, I think we can all agree on, must be stopped. Who ya gonna call? The Ghostbusters? Or a well trained and well regulated police force?
That last part is the issue in the US. The police there isn’t well regulated, is extremely poorly educated, if at all, and if at all, half the training they get is proven bullshit. Then they’re armed by the US army. It’s a miracle that it isn’t a bigger shit show.
Train your police. A police officer, any police officer, should have at least have higher education and on top of that 4 years specific training. Good luck finding a single police officer with that in the US right now. Teach them de-escalation. Monitor their activities with bodycams, if they very obviously cross the line, hammer down. Stop police unions standing in the way of trials for police officers. Have a national database with police officer certificates, that also tracks their history. This way, if one fucks up badly, he can’t just go work somewhere else.
All those things are actual solutions. Just saying “defund the police” is just a dumb slogans that doesn’t help your cause
Cops don’t stop criminals. The fact that you’re working from that ignorant assumption that they do shows that you’ve got no business talking on this subject.
You stop crime by making people less desperate, and you don’t make people less desperate by threatening them with violence. You make them less desperate by making them healthier, happier, and improving their communities.
Ohhh boy. You need a dose of reality.
Yeah, there is something to the point where a lot of crime comes from poverty and desperation. I fully agree that those problems need MUCH more attention in places like the USA. Same goes for mental health care by the way, that is just a sad mess there.
Having said that… With all due respect, get your head out of your ass. Even in a perfect society with perfect healthcare and no poverty, there will be those that do not wish to abide by the rules society has setup. Be it rules like “stop at a red light” or “do not walk in a bank with a gun to rob it”, or “do not rape my 9 year old daughter”.
And you think its a great idea to just get rid of the police and that police can’t stop those elements or temporarily remove them from society until they are rehabilitated? Duuuuhuuude. Get in the real world, PLEASE. Yeah, police in the US is horribly trained (if at all), overstuffed with military equipment (… for what?! fun?) corrupt as hell and just needs an overhaul in general.
But you still need police. Saying that you don’t is just naive on the level of a 5 year old or just generally disingenuous.
Cops show up afterwards to bust heads. They don’t diffuse situations. They don’t uplift the desperate. They just use state sanctioned violence to keep the suffering out of sight while they protect the property and interests of the rich. The laws punishing rapists and murderers don’t stop rape or murder. They enable it by addressing the problem on the symptom level so that it’s never addressed on the systemic level. As long as it’s quiet, people like you can pretend it’s not happening. The only one who needs a reality check here is you.
Cops arrest criminals. That’s their role. The rest of the justice system handles everything else. It prevents people from commiting additional crimes by locking them up/rehabilitating them. How in this magical society you’re envisioning do we stop rape? Do you think rapists are just desperate?
I envy their optimism on humanity.
Realism, perhaps?
Having said that, the US justice system could use quite some fixing / a complete overhaul. But yeah, you need police. Anyone saying you don’t is just living in a fantasy world.
Agreed. There’s a ton of room for improvement there and I’m not against helping poor people or anything I just don’t think doing so will stop crime. I know of a lot of well off people that have done criminal shit.
Cops show up after the crime. The law and the cops don’t prevent the rape. If you want less rapists, you have to address the problem at the systemic level, and that means changing the factors that lead up to rape. What would that entail? Dismantling toxic gender roles, increasing community, enabling access to therapy and mentor programs, giving people hope that they can determine their own futures, creating a safe space for sex workers in society, and other actions that stop the festering hatred and social rot that leads to rape.
That will never happen as long as people like you are satisfied with state sponsored violence to hide the problems in the private-prison-slavery-industrial complex.
You’re an idiot. Rich people rape and commit other crimes all the time and they have access to anything they could ever need. Epstein had a goddamn island he flew girls out on his private plane for it. People in countries with better social services and sex workers still experience crime as well.
Not all poverty is monetary. Their wealth is a symptom of a poverty of mind, soul, and conscience.
And you don’t blame them for that? Nothing is anyone’s own fault? Every moral failing is because of external factors? Or are you just making up bullshit meanings to the word poverty so you don’t have to address how wrong you are? Some people are just evil, it doesn’t matter what society they’re in, they will do evil shit. This is why we need a justice system to identify and dispose of them.
No matter what laws you make, someone somewhere sometime is going to decide to break them. In any given society, someone will eventually get mad and try to murder someone else, or steal something, or just be a general nuisance. These people need to be dealt with. Being black, or homeless, or poor should not be a crime and should definitely not be a death sentence, but those aren’t the only laws that police enforce. Try not to be loudly hyperbolic and people might actually take you seriously enough to consider your ideas.
You’re programmed with authoritarian ignorance. You don’t build a civilization by creating laws that oppress people into behaving. You build a civilization that works from the ground up so that people don’t feel the need to kill each other for food and shelter, or the drugs they numb themselves with.
Uhhh, speaking as someone who has physically put his body in the way of cops trying to rob people of their civil rights, many times, doing so while accepting that cops do fulfill a societal need (and thus being completely non violent towards said cops), the idea that there is a utopia where “the laws” will not be in conflict with “the people” is a very, very difficult thing to even start to imagine. Can you describe such a situation, even in one instance?
If we didn’t have the cops we’d have to fix the poverty that generated the crime, but since we have violent muscle to beat down on the impoverished we never will.
All violent crime isn’t caused by poverty. Plenty of people who aren’t impoverished do heinous things. We would need some sort of security enforcement no matter what.
The decay in our society that causes violent crime is always related to one kind of poverty or another. People raised in healthy communities with security and support don’t lash out violently. Affluent killers have a poverty of the spirit caused by having more at the expense of others.