Well, considering federal funds already help police departments all over the country, and big city SWAT teams are often already super militarized, perhaps this OP and discussion should be a little more specific about what help city governments want, need, get, and are rejecting.
I heard the Chicago Mayor recently say on national TV that federal help and financial assistance for police crime fighting efforts would always be appreciated, but no thanks to separate squads on the streets under federal control to make a political statement.
In NYC there are already some 36,000 cops and 19,000 civilian employees in the police department. Maybe some of them can go down to D.C. to help our President next time he decides to cross Lafayette Park for a photo op?
There already stands downtown right by the famous “Tombs” and “One Police Plaza,” well-manned FBI and CIA buildings, and many more thousands of federal and private security personnel operate nearby at courthouses, federal buildings, Wall Street offices, etc. What could Trump send NYC that would even be noticed? Jet fighters? Does NYC need tanks on the streets? To fight whom?
By the way the number of NYC murders from 2000 to 2019 was cut in half, and all crime is down significantly, despite a recent spike ... itself likely due to this terrible Covid “summer of discontent.” (Giuliani left office in 2001.) NY Governor Cuomo, who criticized the present NYC Mayor’s lack of quick police response during a night of sudden looting a while back, has spoken with the President and made it clear ... no extra “help” of the kind he is offering is needed.
So how about being a little clearer about what “aid” is being offered where, and what its real purpose is.
But, but, but you don't want to fund or support the police, and the governor's and mayor's have lost control, so what's left after that ???? The feds are what's left, and a strong response is needed to make it clear that to kill INNOCENT civilians is unexceptable, and will always be unexceptable. Playing politic's ???? Rotflmbo.. The cratzi's have been playing the worst kind of politic's, so much so that it has successfully divided a nation, and has plunged it into chaos. No amount of excuses will help, because the facts are right there for even a 5 year old to understand.
Makes me wonder though, how on Earth do you get this messed up in your mind or ways of thinking Tom ?
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But, but, but ....”
But nothing, Beagle. I am telling it like I see it. You have every right to disagree. In my life I’ve seen plenty of
real riots and ghetto uprisings in the 1960s that make these integrated demonstrations, and even the infrequent opportunist criminal looting (and tearing down of monuments) look like child’s play. There is no criminal insurgency. No Democratic Party coup. Just political theater and the expression of long pent-up and largely legitimate complaints. Most demonstrations remain peaceful, and the right populists in our country are reacting hysterically.
A lifetime spent working all over NYC, driving a taxi and then working in the subways, taught me a thing or two about policing. I have a carry license myself. Back in the day in NYC I had only a weapon at home. Those days were really dangerous for me and for my fellow workers, black and white. Police are essential, but they are never “enough,” not when society itself is sick. Even in NYC, the
center of much-praised U.S. and world capitalism in the 70s and 80s, poverty, drugs and crime festered, while “crime in the suites” grew. Street crime and ghetto hopelessness is less severe today than it was then after the Vietnam War and the murder of MLK and the Kennedys, but political hysteria and hyperbole is at even higher levels than it was then.
I was not then and am not now against police funding, and it seems to me absolutely clear that neither are our Democrats —who have for decades supported and funded the expansion and militarization of city police departments everywhere. On the other hand, where there have been community policing reforms and significant racial integration of policing, there has been a great change for the better which you may not be aware of. But there must be limits to funding police, just as there must be limits to our spending on the military.
Unlike both Republicans AND Democrats, I am for huge cutbacks in foreign military bases, because we can neither afford nor are justified in maintaining so many overseas military adventures and wrongheaded international policies, for example in the Middle East.
A big problem in the next period, whether or not Trump is re-elected, will almost certainly be that many big city and state governments will go bankrupt. Our Federal government is
already bankrupt, except that only it can print money and live with ever-increasing debt thanks to monetarizing debts via the Federal Reserve. This is Federal
state capitalism.
Bankruptcies of corporations, states and cities means not just bankrupt pensions, cutbacks in crucial infrastructure and welfare, and layoffs, but also future reductions in policing. Private cops for the very rich is already the norm everywhere, as society consists more and more of “gated“ suburban communities. If Trump wins big (I doubt this but it is possible) federal cutbacks would be instituted on a heavily partisan basis, against Democratic cities and liberal governors. Thankfully we have no regular federal police force in our country, but authoritarian pressures are building to create one, to politicize and expand the FBI, or to allow de facto federal takeovers of local policing.
Of course the coastal states and many Democratic cities are the home of great U.S. corporations and money-making banks, most of which are taxed lightly, but that is another problem. Local governments must balance budgets, which in the next period may prove impossible, especially in cities hit by Covid-19 fears, economic turmoil, and real estate collapse (where much tax funding originates). The “private economy” in the age of big corporations and state capitalism (and international Cold War) will not take up the slack. Our society is adrift, drifting to a state where rich and poor, stock owners and workers, are ever more divided. Trump’s “show of force” and “drain the swamp” pretenses notwithstanding.