Jophiel wrote:
I'm... sure that sounded like a real zinger in your head?
Not so much a zinger as a commentary on the sad and frankly intrinsically inconsistent and incomprehensible combination of policies put forth by said Democrat politicians and liberal journalists/pundits. There are *in fact* a number of such people have have *in fact* directly called for "defunding the police". Period. Full stop. There are *in fact* several Democrats who have actually dramatically reduced actual funding for their police departments as a result of this nonsensical position.
And the whole "replace them with social services to deal with mental health issues instead of using cops as social workers" sounds great in an academic conversation, but is not remotely what any of these same people are
actually doing. If anything, in the same areas that they are pushing the most for defunding police they are simultaneously just "giving up" on the mental health social-worker side as well. Their "solution" appears to be "just let them do whatever they want". Again, the focus is more on preventing cops from doing anything in response to these problems than to actually address the problems themselves. Hence why we find ourselves with massively growing homeless encampments in most major cities, with rampant open drug use, horrific living conditions, who are allowed to urinate and defecate wherever they want, and steal whatever they want (cause the cops shouldn't harass them, right?).
Where are all these social workers that are supposed to be fixing these problems? Nowhere I guess. Oh wait! There're in court filing briefs against police departments for daring to arrest someone for shoplifting a store, or assaulting someone walking by, or randomly smashing people's property. They seem to think that enabling this behavior is the correct solution and then wonder why their cities have become even more hell holes than they already were.
It's almost like they don't get that police have to deal with these people and the crimes they commit precisely because no one else is doing it. Maybe put something else in place *first* and then decide to remove the police budgets that were funding police doing this work. That's what you'd do if those claims were legitimate claims in the first place. But we all know that they aren't. They are just playing lip service to an angry mob so they can appear to "care" about the problems. But in the course of this, as is typical of liberal policies, they are just making things worse.
The liberal "cure" is 100 times worse than the disease they are claiming to fight. Again though, that's just SOP for the left. They want and need large numbers of people who are in pain, suffering, downtrodden, etc, so they can appear to "care" and promise to "help them". Well. Until they get elected, and then they go right back to being the selfish people they always were. Actually, it's worse, since they actively put policies in place that make people more poor, more in pain, more suffering, and more downtrodden, so they can just repeat the process. .I keep waiting for the masses to wake up and realize this, but apparently good PR can cover for a lot of faults and there are a heck of a lot of really dumb suckers out there.