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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
This is a pretty shitty thing to be able to do, and this would absolutely be a cause worth fighting for...
...the problem is that the whole concept of police reform is now inextricably linked in the minds of at least half the populace with total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology. The whole subject is fucking radioactive now. I wouldn't lend my name to any such cause, for fear that it would, like nearly all causes, massively expand its mandate beyond the very specific issue I want to correct. I don't want to empower any of the other garbage.
In the UK, we have different problems, in that our police don't spend any time investigating actual crimes like burglaries, but will happily waste days and weeks chasing down speech crimes on twitter or illegal football stream watchers, but there's the same obstacle to overcoming them. To even breach the subject would require, at least to me, some kind of cast-iron guarantee that whoever was overseeing the reform was 120% free of any sort of wokery whatsoever, and that's something I can say about almost nobody in our political class. Myself and a lot of other right-wing people I talk to sense the formalisation of the two-tier quasi-racialised justice system that we already suspect exists is pretty imminent.
The trust is completely gone, and there's very little I can think of that would bring it back.
Good news: Most of these positions have effectively zero public support, with the possible exception of bail reform.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/
This poll was done at the height of the Floyd riots.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/reuters-ipsos-civil-unrest-george-floyd-2020-06-02
A similar number of Americans (79%) say that the property damage caused by some demonstrators undermines the original intent of the protest’s call for justice in George Floyd’s death.
Republicans (83%) and Democrats (77%) agree that property damage ultimately undermines the cause of the demonstrators.
What does polling matter when the policy we got are the things you say poll poorly.
Part of it is we did have a George Soros coup of DA offices. Where relatively modest money could win those offices when no one was paying attention.
And places like San Fran have legalized hard drugs.
I mean it’s cool people say they don’t like the stuff but it’s become the policy of the land.
This conflates national and federal polities. And at the Federal level, you have the Koch and Federalist cartels to undermine the public for conservatives, balancing things out. The US is a divided nation, but its between 60/40 and 50/50. Nevertheless, what flies in California won't pass muster in Alabama.
These things don’t poll well anywhere but yet they happened. Black communities wanted more policing but less and more murder.
Also everyone is going to say they don’t want anti-white ideology. But many support affirmative action or picking a Supreme Court justice because she’s black and female. Promoting blacks ahead of whites is just anti white ideology yet no one is going to come out and say they are anti-white.
The goalposts were
The data indicate that, for most of these things, public support falls a far south 50%. ~85% of Americans want police funding to remain the same or increase. More people want it to increase substantially than to decrease substantially.
Ok so what’s your point? I agree public support is lower. But we got those policies anyway.
~15% tracks pretty well to the places that got such policies. The ones where people would rather not, largely didn't.
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