The Copaganda-Induced Crime Wave Is Really About Rolling Back the Clock
If the blue curtain types and assorted politicians have their way in the near future, we’re headed back to the ‘good old days’ of the 1990s. Look for waves of fear mongering, followed by round ups of all the usual darker skinned suspects. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Just a couple of years ago, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many thousands of people took part in hundreds of protests throughout the country. The vast majority of those protests were peaceful; a handful weren't. There were a few moments in 2020 where honest discussions took place about the expectations and responsibilities of the people we pay to protect us and our property.
There was no property damage or injuries to police at 96.3% of protests in the summer of 2020, and in 97.7% of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police, according to a Harvard University study published in the Washington Post.
Now, the tide has turned. The exaggerated violence–supposedly whole cities burned-- at those protests are now the basis for “whataboutism” when it comes to discussing the events of January 6, 2021.
Reforms coming out of the realization that the penal system wasn’t functioning as much as a series of progressively more sadistic holding pens are now being blamed for a “crime wave.”
You don’t have to look very hard to figure out that the people who brought the world the Big Lie known as “defund the police coming soon” seriously overlap with the people spreading rumors about busloads of Antifa looking for trouble and those profiteering from throwing people into cages.
Any lie will do, as long as people buy the crap that says the guys with guns and a big chunk of the political and legal establishments behind them are somehow the victims. Let us not forget that all-too-many of these victims don’t give two cents about protecting the public they’re supposed to be serving when it comes to masks and vaccinations.
The LAPD, which saw a 12% increase in their budget last year, had the nerve to put signage up on a substation closed due COVID-related absenteeism blaming locked doors on “defunding the police.” Will anybody suffer consequences for misleading the public? Not a chance.
I've started off with this latest Big Whopper to get readers ready for some hard truths that may shatter your perception of what local gendarmes actually do with their time.
Police in the United States…
Spend 4% of their time on what they call "violent crime.
Acquire more property via “civil forfeiture” than all burglary crime in the U.S. combined
Get paid to focus on some “crimes” and not others. Billions in overtime get paid out for low-level arrests, record numbers of people are arrested for drugs, while tens of thousands of rape kits sit around untested.
Are evaluated primarily based on arrests and imprisonments.
Here’s the bottom line:
If police and prosecutors made us safe, the U.S. would be the safest country in world history. No one else has spent remotely close to the trillions that we have. We already imprison people more than any society in modern history. Almost everyone incarcerated in the U.S. is poor; and we imprison Black people at six times rate of South Africa at height of Apartheid.
From Pew Research:
The World Prison Brief’s data estimates the U.S. incarceration rate at 639 inmates per 100,000 people as of 2018, or 13% higher than the rate of the next-closest country, El Salvador (564 inmates per 100,000 people). The U.S. rate is also far higher than the rates of other heavily populated nations, including Brazil (357 per 100,000) and Turkey (335 inmates per 100,000 people). Incarceration rates in Western Europe are less than a quarter of the U.S. rate: In England and Wales, there are 131 inmates for every 100,000 people, while France and Germany incarcerate 93 and 69 people, respectively, for every 100,000 residents.
The relationship between crime rates and economic inequality is constant. Violence, that thing we’re supposed to all be afraid of, is higher in countries that are more unequal, and violence is higher in U.S. states that are more unequal. And nearly two-thirds of the jail population have mental-health problems, according to estimates by the Urban Institute.
We have a criminal justice system that is almost entirely based on punitive actions. Each year in custody reduces a person's life duration by two years. More importantly, there’s a mountain of evidence that says human caging does not reduce crime.
All this talk about crime waves and the need for more “enforcement” serves the purpose of distracting from questions about inequality. Increased enforcement as we currently understand it doesn’t make people safer and the “solutions” offered up serve to increase the power and control over the have nots by the haves.
Crime, as it turns out, is in the eyes of the beholder. A fight at Lincoln High will likely be recorded as a “crime,” but a fight at La Jolla Day not.
On a higher level, crimes executed for the benefit of more upper class people tend to be handled by guys in suits. Illegal bank foreclosures are linked to more deaths than all homicides combined. Banks make about as much in fraudulent “overdraft” fees as all of what police call “property crime” combined in the country.
Wage theft by employers isn't in crime stats but it costs low-wage workers an estimated $50 billion/year, dwarfing the cost of all cop-reported robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts combined. (As of this year, California is toughening up what has historically been lax enforcement of wage theft.)
Tax evasion by wealthy people costs 20 times more than all wage theft, estimated to be about $1 trillion dollars per year. The IRS enforcement arm now barely touches higher end tax returns; it’s too complicated for the ever-shrinking staff congress gives them.
The money involved in these crimes could eradicate whole classes of social suffering, but these laws are widely unenforced against the rich.
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Another bad aspect of contemporary law enforcement is that they are largely unprepared for the technological, climate, and social changes in the not too far off future. I don’t know what crime in the metaverse will look like and neither do they.
Technology as it applies to law enforcement has everything to do with massive (and mostly indiscriminate) data collection subject to haphazard analysis and occasional oversight.
Them thar tasers ain’t gonna do much once some sick genius figures out how to take control of a group of AI driven cars. I’ll leave what could happen to your imagination. (Or you can read Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface)
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So, am I saying “eff the police?” Nope, although I’m sure some snowflake sergeant will spin it that way.
I am saying this contemporary copaganda about a crime wave in progress is dangerous and unproductive. We don’t need more people in jail for the crime of living on the streets. We don’t need more people in jail, period.
But when all you have is a hammer, every solution looks like a nail.
Police reform needs to go further and faster than even reformers have imagined. I don’t know if that’s even possible in an era where the social safety net is in tatters and the very concept of law enforcement is subsumed by a legacy of racism and widespread toxic masculinity.
I think we can all agree that a couple of decades worth of tokenism in hiring a few cops who look more like the community has yet to make an impact on the day-to-day mentality of people driving around with guns and badges.
Another huge obstacle in changing the direction of how we approach law and order has to do with a lack of will by politicians. This is about more than campaign donations or police union endorsements.
Sometimes that lack of will takes the form of shuffling or suppressing the agendas for meetings where elected officials are supposed to discuss or enact reforms.
San Diego voters overwhelmingly approved a measure establishing a new oversight mechanism for the police department. The nuts and bolts of that entity’s operations needed to be established by the city council. Here we are 14 months later and magically the Democratic politicians who run this city haven’t managed to get this project underway.
This stalling also happened during the process of putting the measure on the ballot, whereby a required consultation with the police union just.didn’t.happen, thanks to the efforts of a no-longer-sitting council person. This time around, the problem lies with the glacial workings of the City Attorney’s office.
All of a sudden—surprise!— there’s a meeting of the Public Safety & Livable Neighborhoods Committee set for this Friday. Reform advocates are scrambling to get the public’s attention so a legislative sleight of hand doesn’t end up neutering police oversight.
As things stand right now, the price to be paid for rocking the boat is just too high, even for elected officials with their hearts in the right place. One mayor, one district attorney, or a couple of council members don’t stand a chance.
With their all-too-often accomplices in the (if it bleeds, it leads) news media would be agents of change are wide open to gotcha traps. One complicated prosecutorial decision can easily be spun as something that generates fear in the community.
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, who’s tried to take the old culture head on, is facing his second recall in just over one year of being in office. The Los Angeles Times and other media outlets have (likely) been played by the LAPD into portraying a theft problem in local rail yards as the result of lax enforcement, along with shocking photos of trashed packages surrounding trains.
In about three months a non-front page story on the thefts will appear with another explanation. But that’s okay, because the image of the LADA as soft on crime will have been established in the public consciousness.
I’m not through ranting… just signing off for today.
I’d like to express my appreciation to Alec Karakatsanis, Founder and Executive Director of the Civil Rights Corps for the inspiration, data and a few borrowed phrases involved in writing this story. Make sure you follow him on Twitter @equalityAlec.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com