Shot in the Dark

Sheer Brilliance

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking along University Avenue, looking unsuccessfully for “white supremacist” graffiti. Distracted, he misses Avery LIBRELLE, who is roaming the streets with a cell phone, reporting people who aren’t socially-distanced enough to the governor’s snitch line. They nearly run into each other.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Uh, hey, Avery…

LIBRELLE: It’s time for cities to de-fund the police!

BERG: Huh. Seems…illl-advised.

LIBRELLE: It’s high time we did it! It’s the only way to cure systemic racism.

BERG: Right. And deaths from house fires will stop when cities abolish fire departments.

LIBRELLE: We’ll come back to that.

BERG: Huh. Hey, what could go wrong?

LIBRELLE: Camden, New Jersey did it! In 2012! And guess what, Merg? Crime fell!

BERG: Yep. It “fell” because in 2012, it was literally the most dangerous city in the US, of any size. A city of about 77,000 people in 2010 – about the size of Fargo or Duluth – it had 69 homicides. You do the math…

LIBRELLE: Hey…

BERG: Sorry, my bad. I’ll do the math. That’s a homicide rate well over 100 per 100,000 – triple that of Detroit.

LIBRELLE: And guess what, Merg? Crime has fallen!

BERG: Along with the entire rest of the US. And it’s “fallen” to 31 per 100,000. Which is, if it were a city over 200,000, would make it the fifth most dangerous city in the US, after Saint Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It’d be tied with Kansas City.

And they do all that magic with a “re-organized” police force double the size of the old one .

LIBRELLE: (Has become distracted) Hey – is that a white supremacist I see over there? With an assault rifle?

BERG: It’s a city road crew worker with a jackhammer.

LIBRELLE: I”d better see what Vox.com says about it…

BERG: Er…about crime?

(But LiIBRELLE has wandered away already)

And SCENE

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19 responses to “Sheer Brilliance”

  1. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    City Council President Lisa Bender said Thursday they will “dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.”
    . . .
    Several members of the Minneapolis City Council this week have expressed support for drastic overhauls to the way the city handles law enforcement, ranging from calls to defund the department, to suggestions that social workers, medics or mental health professionals should be sent to some calls currently handled by police.

    That ought to accelerate white flight to the suburbs.

  2. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Mitch BERG is […] looking unsuccessfully for “white supremacist” graffiti

    For cryin’ out loud, Mitch, it’s obvious. The white supremacists were running around painting BLM/Antifa graffiti to direct attention away from themselves while they, cleverly disguised with blackface, were looting Target.

  3. myyellowbike Avatar
    myyellowbike

    You defang the police, the wealthy can get security, guess who gets the short end of the stick?

  4. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Totally illegal race discrimination by “woke” company:
    “Uber Technologies (UBER) – Get Report has launched a feature of its Uber Eats food delivery app to enable U.S. and Canadian customers for the rest of the year to order from black-owned restaurants with free delivery.”

    Isn’t it praiseworthy to punch racists?

  5. This chopper for official use only Avatar
    This chopper for official use only

    The MNGOP has not had any clout in the TC for decades, and never will again. Most of the membership doesn’t live in the cities, or have any particular reason to go there.

    They have absolutely nothing to lose by endorsing the reprobate calls to eliminate the MPD, and SPPD. Besides, can you imagine the entertainment value of watching the vibrant community in action, and being chased by social workers yelling “Now sir, put that flat screen down and come talk to me!!”.

  6. This chopper for official use only Avatar
    This chopper for official use only

    Get Report has launched a feature of its Uber Eats food delivery app to enable U.S. and Canadian customers for the rest of the year to order from black-owned restaurants with free delivery.

    And how is that different from hanging a “Whites only” sign on the door? I swear, if I was independently wealthy, I’d start suing every one of these corporate muck rakers.

  7. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    We are supposed to have an EEOC to watch over that, but it has been captured by racists. Every help wanted ad you see for the EEOC has these words at the bottom that endorse race/sex discrimination: “Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.” Those words are the “No Irish need apply” of the 21st century.

  8. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    This is insanity:
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nypd-officer-appears-make-white-power-sign-protest-prompting-probe-n1224141

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  10. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    This is insanity

    Just like harassing shop owners who called 911 for help and not arresting and/or prosecuting the actual looters, rioters and arsonists. Finally you are catching on.

  11. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Actually, I think it would be a great thing if Minneapolis did what Camden did. They had a sky-high murder rate and could not hire more police because their union contract locked them into sky-high wage rates. They didn’t end police altogether, but outsourced it to the county with a lower wage basis, and got twice the officers, and with it, each officer got less frustration because he had to handle fewer cases.

    I will not be holding my breath for the DFL here to endorse union-busting, but the whole thing holds promise. I also applaud Camden for getting rid, for the most part, of choke holds.

  12. myyellowbike Avatar
    myyellowbike

    I was reading about Camden. It worked there

    How’s this going to work with traffic tickets??

  13. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    One other thought I have is that if you’re dealing with allegations of police brutality, then the stress level for the police is very important–you want to minimize it–and then it is also super important for them to be seen doing benign things like helping kids fix their bikes, eating donuts, and such.

    That is, if every time people see an officer, he’s writing a ticket or cuffing someone, there’s an entirely different dynamic going on than if they see him from time to time sitting in the park eating a hamburger.

    The move among many seems to be to reduce the # of police—and if what I wrote above is at all true, it would be exactly the wrong thing to do. Just thinking aloud here…

  14. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    Bike – I couldn’t agree more. The problem with police is police cars. Get out of the damned car, get back on your feet, get to know the neighborhood – the Moms, the merchants, the homeless – not necessarily to be Officer Friendly but to be Constable Jones, the cop on the beat, the one uniform everybody knows they can trust to keep an eye on things. Won’t stop all the violence but it’ll put a serious dent in quality of life crimes and that’s a huge start.

    I know – it’d take a million more cops to police the entire city that way. Maybe so. Maybe we only do it in certain areas. Or maybe we bit the bullet and shave a few bucks from the Diversity and Inclusiveness budget.

    Only way to integrate cops into the community is to be there, in person, all the time.

  15. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    There you go with solutions, JD. Nobody cares for solutions in the libturd world, only feeeeelings and slogans du jour.

  16. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Joe, if you work the numbers, Minneapolis probably has about 500 miles of city streets beat cops would need to walk citywide to give the whole city a daily glimpse of officers doing things that were not confrontational. You take 100 officers and given them half a square mile apiece, and tell them to take their time about it. Shoot, if they saw a beat cop just once a week….

    Plus, it’s an officer health program, whereby young punks might find it’s not so easy to outrun Officer Friendly when said officer isn’t carrying 20 years of donuts around his beltline, and Officer Friendly just might be able to see/smell/hear what’s going on a whole lot better on foot or on a bicycle than from his cruiser. We might also find out that when Officer Friendly needed to cuff someone who didn’t want to be apprehended, he might have a bit more strength so he could do the job without beating the snot out of the person apprehended.

    You’d still need black & whites for fast deployment where you needed more than one officer and the like, but it could really help.

  17. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    And stress level…exercise does a GREAT job of reducing that, too.

  18. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Salaries and bennies go up, there is only so much you can tax, so you cut back on the assets and make them “more productive”. All the while enjoying police union endorsements. Another unintended consequence of union mentality. How does police feel about now for helping get reprobates they endorsed elected?

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