“When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided driving through Golden Valley.”
Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting — in droves.
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Mr. Harris is quick to point out that Golden Valley may not be the perfect model for the rest of the country. “This is a wealthy community with very little crime,” he said. “We can afford to go through this change. I realize that may not be the case in other places.”
tl;dr: Rich town with low crime rate does wacky changes, doesn’t really mean much, but still interesting
TIL black police chiefs are the answer to removing bad apples.
Sometimes at least.
As a liberal, this doesn’t pass the smell test. Correlation is not causation. Did the crime rate drop, or did people stop reporting because they thought that the cops wouldn’t respond? Or did the crime rate drop because cops were stressing the criminals out? Maybe the crimes done by people who got a thrill out of getting away with it got bored?
Without a theory/hypothesis for the drop, this piece is pure conjecture.
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Basically: bad cops create crime. They do this by convincing people that the risks associated with calling the cops are greater than the benefits, and by diverting attention away from actual crime and towards minorities who haven’t actually committed any crime. This makes it easier to get away with actual crime, so it criminal behavior thrives.
I wish that were true in Portland. Cops quit, the city stopped doing enforcement of most crimes, car/retail theft exploded.
Car theft (and catalytic converter theft) exploded during the pandemic irrespective of local police staffing. Only thing which helped there was going after the fences, but the cops mostly don’t care about that
lol to the comment above you. “cops quit, but deaths from respiratory disease just went way up!” hmmmm maybe the causality is not quite as stated.
Quick research to support your point Here’s Where Car Thefts Are Spiking Because Of The Pandemic:
there were 108 catalytic reported converter thefts per month on average in 2018, 282 average monthly thefts reported in 2019, and 1,203 average thefts reported per month in 2020.
going after the fences
typo? what was the intended text?
Fence is a term for buyer of stolen goods, acting as a middle man of sorts to recirculatethem goods.
A fence is someone who knowingly purchases stolen goods, typically for less than retail price.
I love it, racist cops demonstrate that they’re worse than useless. Though it could also be one of those weird statistical things, like less police = less patrolling = less crimes detected rather than committed aka surveillance/selection bias.
On the other hand that weird statistical thing can and often does include “less crimes made up” aka “detected” because the cops are evaluated by quotas.
