Tagential, but does the Baltimore Banner pay by the word?

>The area around McGrath’s Raffia Preserve home in Naples is quiet, a gated community off a main road that features new-build strip malls with restaurants such as Five Guys and Dunkin’ Donuts. Inside the community, the exterior of McGrath’s house was quiet, with no police presence.

>A large, wood-paneled courtroom was set for the trial. Clipboards with jury questionnaire answer sheets were set out at dozens of auditorium-style seats.

Not an attorney, but your landlord is a shitbag.

>Baltimore city students already get more funding in the state per student, by far. I'm fine with even more but if it's going to waste what's the point?

First of all it's not "by far." It's about the same as Montgomery Co. Second, the system was underfunded for several decades. Maryland had to be sued into properly funding Baltimore Schools in the 90s; and it's fallen short of the mandated terms quite a bit in the interim. You can't glean anything from state rankings alone.

>The school system in Baltimore City has been disgustingly mismanaged fiscally and administratively.

How much of it is fiscal mismanagement and how much of it is pushing a deteriorated system uphill?

As for the rest, I agree. Making it rain on cops is useless and destructive.

Irony detected

This line of thinking is actually pretty lazy. It's straight out of the 90s. We've been "reforming" since Rodney King got the shit beat out of him on TV.

We don't have anything resembling the sort of constabulary we need. We have impulsive children running around with broad authority and no oversight, slaughtering and brutalizing people in the streets (and with dubious impact on public safety at that). That's urgent. That's grounds for pulling the plug. If a broken pipe is flooding your basement, you don't give the waters the "proverbial pat on the head." You don't go "well I need water, I can't just turn it off!" You stop the fucking flooding, and then you figure out how you're going to take a shower.

"Let's tweak this shit for another century until we get it right" is just lazy as hell. It really diminishes the severity of what we're facing: the state is routinely killing, brutalizing and violating citizens' rights. That's fucked.

What happened, essentially, is that influential society doesn't give a shit about Black people getting slaughtered by the state. We're not going to hold cops accountable until white kids on the right of the tracks start getting beaten and killed en masse. It's a tale as old as America.

Lol this is the most Baltimore shit ever. I'm surprised it doesn't come up more often.

Both of the things she wouldn't support have been a detriment to society so

Pain felt. It's pretty bad down here in DC too

> A retired cop with shitty takes still in the city is kind of rare.

Shitty takes plastered on their car you mean? Because if you get to chat with them, they got shitty takes for days

Edit: Nevermind. You meant that they move once they retire. I overlooked the word "retired" somehow.

Seemingly safer for some, at the expense of others*

Your ✌️point✌️ is that one part of an opinion poll reflects the unmovable sentiment of a group of people you never interact with. I told you why this point was flawed:

-The conflicting sentiment in the poll itself

-Polling around new ideas move. A lot. Again, if this were 1960, you'd be using a poll to explain that Black people really want everyone to stop demonstrating. And that would have been an idiotic thing to propose.

The idea that American policing is a failure took seed and germinated in Black communities..places where those failures are most plainly manifest. So to be all "sEe ThEy wAnT cOpS bEcAuSe tHiS pOlL sEz So" is oblivious white guy shit. You're like a caricature of a privileged gentrifier lol. If this were 1990 you'd be the "some of my friends are Black" guy.

Anyway, there's no quick policing solution to elevated crime rates. There's only ineffective, reactionary bullshit that further victimizes marginalized people. Relying on cops to address society's structural deficiencies is dead. I feel like more privileged white people need to get slaughtered by cops before yall fucking get it. I mean, it took an opioid epidemic tearing through the burbs for you all to rethink our punitive approach to drug addiction.

Doesn't look that bad to me. But to be fair, I don't have a Blue Brothers chase fetish. I can't imagine how hard it must be for you to not see one.

>The sum total of your rebuttal to my claims is: "nuh-uh."

Well yea, Professor...my entire point is that you you don't have evidence to prove these weak ass arguments lmao. I'm essentially poking holes in your unfounded assertions. Duh.

>You provide no data to support your positions, you flippantly disregard any actual evidence I point to, and you twist my words every chance you get. "

All I'm doing is pointing out how your sources don't support what you're saying. That's my "data" lol.

>I'm careening towards that cliché definition of insanity by trying again with some actual evidence and data, but here we go:

Lmao it's always funny watching disconnected white folk use polls to explain Black people's feelings. Lol this shit is basically sketch comedy. Why do so many of yall do this without appreciating the absurdity?

>I don't know if 81% of black Americans saying they want police to spend the same amount or more time in their neighborhoods can be considered "near-universal", but this is America, so 81% agreement on anything is pretty damn conclusive.

Your little poll also says

>Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect.
>
>However, 59% of the relatively small group of Black Americans who are "not at all confident" that the police would treat them with courtesy and respect want the police to spend less time in their neighborhood.
>
>When factoring in those who are at least somewhat confident that the police would treat them well, a majority of Black Americans (61%) are generally confident, but this is still below the 85% seen nationally, including 91% of White Americans.

I get that you don't actually talk to any Black people, but the conflicting sentiments in your own source should give you pause. Somewhere between "80% of Black people don't want fewer cops in their neighborhoods" and "75% of Black people don't have confidence in being treated fairly by cops" is a group of people who are probably sympathetic to the idea that maybe that entire institution is ineffective. I've had those conversations. Even the people who ultimately disagree aren't as intransigent as some coddled Federal Hill brat who's never been been mistreated or brutalized by cops.

>https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html

And prior to Civil Rights passing, 60% to 70% of Black people polled thought mass demonstrations hurt efforts for racial equality.

The idea of defunding cops is relatively new in mainstream discourse, and in the little time it's been here, it's been oversimplified, misinterpreted or demonized without nuance. So it's entirely unremarkable that 90% of people polled aren't on board after sitting with it for a couple years. If this were 1963, you'd be holding a newspaper and shrieking at protestors too lol.

>Also, if policing can do absolutely nothing to reduce homicides, how do you explain the fact that BPD pulled back in 2015 and murders skyrocketed?

Where the fuck are you getting this from, the FOP website? The whole "cops pulled back and things got worse" bullshit is dumb ass police union propaganda. Fucking do better.

>Also, how do explain the fact that homicides plummeted in NYC in the 90s and inequality arguably just got worse? The evidence is clear that solving poverty is not as clean of a solution to crime as you think it is.

Right...you mean the decade the poverty rate fell precipitously? When unemployment fell to under 5% for the first time in decades? Yea, I'm sure that refutes the correlation between poverty and crime somehow.

You can lead a fool to data but you can't make him understand it.

>The overall trend still holds.

No. The "overall trend" does not hold lol. That's exactly what those words I quoted from your source detected. That it doesn't.

>Obviously, there are other problems in Baltimore that would prevent just throwing a bunch of extra cops into the streets from being an effective solution.

Mhm. That's very observant of you. It would invalidate this paragraph-breakless epistle of yours, and yet you forged ahead anyway.

>You can try all you want to make it seem like I'm advocating for blind reliance on policing to solve all of our problems with crime, but I don't believe that and I never said that.

You're making unfounded assertions about the efficacy of a destructive institution. If that's not advocating for blind reliance, I don't know what is.

>In my initial comment, I said that creating the perception of swift and certain punishment was ONE WAY to reduce crime, and it can work here too. BPD needs to restore trust with our communities in order to be effective, and they clearly have a long way to go. But it's not as if Baltimore is so unlike any other city that policing could never be a viable option for crime deterrence.

It's an unproven way to reduce crime you mean. Anyhow, in your initial comment, you painted this as a near term solution to homicides in Baltimore. Now you're saying BPD has "a long way to go" to restore trust in order to be effective. So it's not a near-term solution at all. Not only is your reasoning faulty, you're also inconsistent.

>But it's not as if Baltimore is so unlike any other city that policing could never be a viable option for crime deterrence. European countries have much larger police forces per capita than we do here, and their crime rates are significantly lower.

"European countries?" Putting aside that you're comparing a non-uniform assortment of nations, you're just presuming that their lower crime rates are due to the size of their police forces. Typical causation/correlation fuckup. And I'm being generous by taking your word on the correlation.

>There's a reason there aren't any large cities without police: Policing works, no matter how politically inconvenient that may be for you.

Policing works because large cities have police? This is such puerile reasoning lol.

Endowing cops results in people of color being brutalized at the hands of the government. That's not "politically inconvenient" for me, privileged white guy, its a threat to my existence.

>And, to reiterate what I said before, all of this should be in addition to materially improving peoples lives and outcomes.

Yea, let's empower a violently racist institution to pursue a course of action of unproven benefit. Experimental state violence is OK as long as we run it alongside materially improving lives 🙄. That's such an easy call to make from one's perch in Federal Hill.

How about this - just improve material circumstances. That has a closer correlation to crime rates than turning cops loose in the streets with nebulous mandates. Your crime and punishment fetish can wait.

>But, to cast policing aside as a way to deter crime is to spit in the face of the people who actually live in the communities torn apart by violent crime who are asking for more police

Lmao white guy engages in selective hearing of Black people, uses cherrypicked points of view to support his sophistry. This scam is as old as racism in America itself.

I'm sure you don't actually know anyone in a disadvantaged community of color, but the feeling that cops are a net negative is fairly common one. The idea that there's a universal desire for more boots on the ground is fucking laughable. But tell me more about spitting in faces...

Lmao bruh that's one of the very attempts I'm referring to. Holy shit, I didn't expect you to go finding sources that support my point.

>The economists also find troubling evidence that suggests cities with the largest populations of Black people — like many of those in the South and Midwest — don't see the same policing benefits as the average cities in their study. Adding additional police officers in these cities doesn't seem to lower the homicide rate.

4.1 bil? Nice. That would do wonders for me, that's for sure...but what's the mean for a city? I mean, it's more than twice that here in DC and we don't have gold-paved streets.

And assuming that's viable for a city the size of Baltimore, what's that mean in a historical context? Like, if I've been living in poverty for 20 years, and I make a living wage next year, my situation is still going to be fucked on Dec 31 2023.

It's not that theory either lmao. We're talking about murders here bruh, not purse snatching or fights. A study on general crime deterrence doesn't prove that more police activity is going to have an impact on murder rates specifically.

People have already tried to find a correlation between adding cops and crime reduction. The best they could come up with is mixed results; and in the case of murder rates, a number of cities that increased police presence, arrests, etc saw increases or no impact in murders committed.

Look, you're not the first person to grasp at straws in an attempt to prove that there's some viable short term criminal justice solution to murder rates. People have been failing to make this argument for decades just like you have.

>An actual perceivable threat of jail time is one way to do that.

Yea bruh I'm sure most criminals are making detailed decision flowcharts about which crimes to commit and how much punishment they can expect from committing those crimes 🙄

Lmao where the hell are you getting the idea that there's no "perceivable threat of jail time?" People committing crimes associated with poverty generally consider death or jail to be inevitable. So that kinda pokes a huge hole in your little theory.

Just tell us the stats bro