Defund the police? Defend the police?
“Calls to defund police grow,” June 10 news story
City Councilwoman Robin Kniech stated: “I’m 100% committed to imagining a future without police and working toward that future.”
Before you go down that road, you’d better be 100% sure that human nature is going to make a total turn around and the residents are going to feel safe in their homes and walking the streets.
Re: Therese Roth,
I think the Democrats need someone from a public relations firm to create more positive titles for their proposals. “Defund the police” has to be the stupidest catch-phrase they’ve created for a long time. Of course, they don’t mean that they want to eliminate police departments, although in some cases they are proposing to move funding from the police departments to other departments in order to be more effective.
A good example of this is eliminating police presence in schools.
In that context, then, you would be moving funds away from the police department and redeploying the officers away to more traditional roles — dealing with criminals, enforcing the law.
So how about a new term for what needs to be done with police departments: e.g., reimagining police departments, reorganizing police departments. Not as catchy, but at least it doesn’t provide cannon fodder for Trump’s inevitable attempts to mislead the public about the ideas.
James W. Craft,
All those that want to defund the police, please just leave your name with the police department and they won’t bother your neighborhood, which is good, as that will leave more resources to protect my neighborhood.
The police in Denver are great.
Gerald Anderson,
When I was a cop the administration was always pushing for more police and a bigger department. Each year at the end, they would push to spend more than the budget, so they would be able to ask for more money. There were two cops per thousand citizens. That seemed to be the magical number they were after.
Most of the time our shift was able to handle everything that happened. Five days out of the week we were just looking for something to do. The other two days were loaded up, but if we were overwhelmed, we could call the county in to help.
How many times have you seen four police cars on a scene with one car pulled over? The government is over sized and could be cut by half of their jobs and still be able to function. When you see street workers out, how many are working and how many are standing around. Same as government offices. Then they treat you like you are an inconvenience to them. We could do the same thing with half the police and government workers. Half.
Let those departments stop hiring and let the natural process of people leaving, retiring and being weeded out for criminal activities happen until they get down to half. Also give them training that shows them how to treat people as customers or citizens instead of a lower class. That goes for all races .
James Day,
How to address police brutality? Hit them in the pocketbook!
Police officers should police themselves. Every individual in a precinct knows who the troublemakers are and no one reports them because they don’t want to be the bad guy turning in a fellow officer. But if every single member of that precinct had their pay reduced, similar to a fine or temporary cut in pay because of one officer’s bad behavior, perhaps they would begin to speak out, not to the public but to the offender and their superiors.
In-house, everyone knows who the officers are, the ones who step over the line. They see the reports and hear the rumors. If the pay of everyone is affected by the behavior of one or two “bad apples,” they soon will have an incentive to say something.
Additionally, police union heads and officeholders should be fined as well, perhaps more substantially, because if everyone involved is not accountable and doesn’t buy into the changes necessary, there will never be any change.
John Kuepper,