jameswidman.bsky.social
People are supposed to help each other. It's the only job worth doing, and we could probably do it a lot more efficiently.
he/him or they/them.
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The violent crime that is hardest to fake statistics around, is murder.
Homicide usually produces a physical body, typically with bullet holes in it. This gets reported.
It's also difficult to hide how ineffective policing is. Because you can see clearance rates (how many homicides get solved).
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You can see the murder rate go up as cops mistreat a population more, and the murder rate go down as cops treat the population better.👍🏿
You can end a crime spree and murder wave, by having cops convince the community that they are not focused on these low level arrests, but on major violent crimes.
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Again, to put the numbers in perspective:
Of ~12 million undocumented people, 50,000 are in ICE detention. That's bad.
Of ~20 million Black men, 4 million will be imprisoned at some point in their life. Not a typo. 1 in 5.
Those are horrific numbers.
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You can prioritize deporting the 100 most dangerous undocumented people, who commit the vast majority of the violent crimes.
Or you can prioritize deporting the 12 million other undocumented people.
But you can't prioritize both.
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it also seems like an escalation...?
if a black man in the u.s. witnesses a violent crime, he has to think, "if i report this, they might put me in jail for nothing."
if an immigrant is a witness, they have to think, "if i report this, they might put my **entire family** in a dungeon."
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If you understood this thread, then you will understand why due to ICE's recent actions:
*Arrests of violent criminals who are undocumented will go down🤡
*Violent crime by undocumented people will go up
*Unlicensed gun ownership among undocumented people will go up
So ICE is *creating* crime.
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The irony:
As you ramp up "policing," it becomes impossible to catch and arrest any real, violent criminals... because you betrayed and violated all of the civilians in the communities that you were supposed to partner with.🤦🏿♂️
You created the pre-condition for ineffective and futile police work.
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Consider a kind, undocumented taco stand vendor in LA. In 20 years he has never even thought of carrying a gun before. He had always assumed that if he ran into trouble, he would just call 911.
Now he realises that he can't call 911. ICE.
And he just saw hypothetical Big Dragon threaten a man...
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oh wait... miller does have financial motive to increase the crime rate:
www.pogo.org/investigatio...
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(except, aaui this isn't technically correct in the case of ICE, where the current quotas came from stephen miller...?)
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i have reached the point of cynicism where it feels like the point of policing is to produce this depressive effect in order to increase the crime rate, which in turn makes it easier for the police to demand more funding.
they set the quota to increase the crime rate to get more money.
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This makes it unsafe for Black people to call the cops in any circumstances. A Black person that has recently had a violent and racist encounter with the cops, will not call the cops to save you if they see you being assaulted.
So the more "policing" happens, the greater this depressive effect.
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Once you understand a few things about US policing, this outcome becomes incredibly obvious and unavoidable.
First, understand that "Law and Order, SVU," is not how policing works, and not what police do.
What most police do, most of the time, is arrest and fine innocent Black people.
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Let me bring it home for y'all using a topical example: ICE.
ICE has always been bad, but recently it's ramped up. It doesn't matter if an *individual* ICE agent is a good person or a bad person. The *system* of ICE now requires them to hit a deportation quota, so they are all targeting civilians.
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said it before and i’ll say it again — rural hospital closures are town killers. when they shutter, the economic collapse spreads like a contagion
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thank you for this!
i just tried both of my senators' D.C. numbers and got he automated message about "high call volume", which is probably a good thing (since i'm in a blue state).
i will keep trying...
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We have a legal mechanism for peaceful removal, but it doesn't work very well.
Parliamentary systems in other countries have the legal mechanism of vote-of-no-confidence, and it's great. We should get us one of those.
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The problem with that, in the long run, is that you really don't want a military to be able to start arresting government officials outside the military. That's called a "coup", and the result is government by the military. That's why the military must strictly be a servant to some elected official.