Search This Blog

Thursday, June 4, 2020

The problem with "the police"

The problem with "the police" is not "structural racism" or "systematic racism" or "the legacy of slavery" any other Democratic Party lie; the problem with "the police" is that the policing power is being used by *all* levels of government as a revenue-generating scheme. The problem with "the police" is that they are responding, as all humans do, to incentives ... but, the incentives are perverse.


Remove the perverse incentives, that is, take away the ability of government bureaucracies to profit by the fines and penalties they impose, and most of the problems with "the police" will solve themselves.

Here is one way that can be done --

When a citizen is fined by a government entity, the monies -- including "court costs" -- are forwarded to the local government where the citizen lives (*), where the total of those monies is used to reduce the tax burden of *all* citizens subject to that government entity. That is, the monies are not *added* into the budget of the government entity, but rather reduce the amount of the existing budget to be extracted directly from the citizens.

For example, property taxation is almost universal. If a county is scheduled to raise $10 million in property taxes, and the total fines and penalties imposed on the citizens of that county for that year somehow also amounted to $10 million, then no one would have to pay property tax that year, and the county would still have the amount for which it had budgeted.


(*) this is to remove the temptation to live off the backs of out-of-towners.

10 comments:

Ilíon said...

Seen on the internet --

=="The loudest and most strident accusers of racism are cynical, unprincipled activists. Second to that, I think, is confirmation bias rather than apophenia [i.e. seeing apparent patterns which are not actually there]. People see what they want or expect to see. They are looking for racism (or sexism, or whateverism), and they find it everywhere."==

My response --

Yep, [quoting my earlier comment] "Most accusations of racism are baseless. Most of these baseless accusations of racism are made in bad faith."

Of the people who *need* to find racism everywhere:
1) some (generally white) need to find racism everywhere so that they can demonstrate their moral superiority by denouncing the always-being-discovered racism -- while excepting that in their own hearts;
2) some (frequently black) need to find racism everywhere because they have long-since learned that accusing a white person of racism will almost always get that person to do whatever is demanded, no matter how absurd.

====
Many years ago, I was on a jury trying a young black man on a gun charge.

The prosecutor had *one* witness -- the dude's on-again off-again white-trash girlfriend. At some point in the trial, he asked her a question, she answered ... and then, just a few sentences later, he "summarized" what she had said by turning it into the direct opposite of she had said. And she agreed that that is was the truth.

When they *finally* turned the case over to the jury, all other eleven jurors were ready to vote "Guilty" as soon as we walked into the jury-room. On this jury was a Matronly Black Lady, a Hip Black Dude, a Redneck Southern Hickstraight form Central Casting (even to the point of always referring to the defendant as "boy"), me, and 8 other non-discrepant whites of both sexes.

Myself, I *also* believed that the defendant was guilty -- of the narrow charge of gun possession -- for I didn't even begin to believe the defendant's "I didn't know the gun was in the car" defense. But I was *morally offended* by the prosecutor's actions *and* by the alacrity with which *all* the other jurors were going to convict him, without giving a moment's thought to what they had heard. Moreover, while the charge he was being tried on was "illegal gun possession", it was so obvious that the *real* reason he was on trial was to get him out of the white-trash girlfriend's life before one of them killed the other.

So, I got the other jurors to agree to request that the portion of the trial where the prosecutor had contradicted his own/only witness be read back to us.

So, after that, they other jurors did give real thought to the evidence (as presented): the two black people switched to "not guilty" and would not be budged, the Central Casting Redneck was always a "guilty", the 8 other non-discrepant whites were split (the women tending toward "not guilty", the men toward "guilty"), and I finally voted as I believed. So, it was a hung jury.

Now, the point of all that is this --

Once the jury was actually deliberating, the Hip Black Dude kept trying to get me to switch to "not guilty" by accusing me of being a racist. Meanwhile, he never said a word to the Central Casting Redneck, who *certainly appeared*3 to be voting on the basis of race ... hmmm, just as Hip Black Dude himself was. Hip Black Dude mistakenly thought that I was a white "liberal" who lived in terror of being thought RAYCISSSSSS! and could therefore be manipulated by the accusation.

Ilíon said...

The link is to a :41 second video ... and you know from the first second how it is going to end.

You will know how it ends

Well, what can one expect of people who congregate 'f[ornicate]' several times in a single sentence?

Ilíon said...

That didn't take long.

You see, destroying Christianity has *ultimately* been what it is all about. Sure, the leftists hate Western cultures (i.e. the "white/European" peoples) and Western Civilization (i.e. which used to be called "Christendom"), and they especially hate America (i.e. the originally "white" culture which so thoroughly incorporated Christianity that it could *transcend* race). But, what the leftists hate most of all is Christ and his Church.


Talcum X needed to get some of that lime-light --

“Tear Them Down”: Race Activist Shaun King Calls for Removal of All Statues, Murals and Stained Glass Windows of “White Jesus and his European Mother”

==“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down.”==

I once saw a photo of a delightful depiction of the Flight to Egypt (*) by a Chinese artist. I know Gentle Reader will find this hard to believe, but that Chinese artist depicted the Holy Family as *Chinese* and placed them in a Chinese-style landscape.

Similarly, the historically Christian Ethiopians have historically depicted Biblical characters as looking Ethiopian.

Weird, huh?

Why, it's almost as though "... red or yellow, black or white, they are precious in his sight: Jesus loves the little children of the world."

Now, concerning "white" depictions of Christ or Biblical characters -- due to the 1400-year-long war of Islam against Christianity, for over 1000 years, until quite recently, the majority of the world's Christians were Europeans -- who, just as the Ethiopians and Chinese do, use their own native art styles to depict the Christ. So, *naturally* the majority of existing Christian art will have been produced by Europeans, in European styles.



(*) Which, by the by, has always been inhabited by a people who are within the Caucasian racial grouping.

Ilíon said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnD5lS-rHJY

Ilíon said...

Here are three simple law/policy changes that would eliminate the vast majority of police misconduct --

1) Eliminate the ability of government jurisdictions, at all levels, to profit from the fines and levies their bureaucrats impose upon the citizenry --
1a) The most widespread and lucrative example of the bureaucrats treating the citizenry as cash-cows is the dishonest levying of extra-and-false charges pursuant to enforcement of traffic laws;
1b) The highly unConstitutional, yet widely practiced, practice of "civil forfeiture" is merely the most blatant example of the bureaucrats treating the citizenry as cash-cows.

2) Rigorously enforce and uphold the Constitutional doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" --
2a) The current practice of "my word (as a cop) against his (as a mere citizen)" turns the Constitution of its head -- and this incentivizes cops to *blatantly* lie in court (which I have personally experienced) in pursuit of milking the citizenry for cash, in line with 1a) above;
2b) In current practice, the mere act of denying the charges levied against one and defending oneself in court is treated by the prosecutors as *evidence* of one's guilt; and the judges allow this, both in examination and in final statements to the jury.

3) Require all LEO to wear active body-cams at all times while on duty, with turning it off to be a felony. This can both protect the cops against false accusations of police misconduct and provide extra and objective evidence over-and-above a cop's mere say-so, in line with 2a) above.

Drew said...

All gun laws are unconstitutional and unbiblical.

Ilíon said...

Drew! Long time, no see.

Nate Winchester said...

Thank you. Glad to see someone else saying it.

(Though not sure about the solution - I think many revenue efforts are to cover shortfalls in budgets.)

The proliferation of laws doesn't help either. It amuses me that the groups demanding defunding or changes in police also want to make so many things illegal when the simple observation is that the more laws you create, the more officers you'll need to enforce them.

Ilíon said...

Nate: "I think many revenue efforts are to cover shortfalls in budgets."

But that doesn't alter the fact that they are fomenting injustice -- and widespread societal contempt for "the law" -- to raise these extra-budgetary revenues.

Nate Winchester said...

Oh yes, quite true.