Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Pressure to reduce police budgets from both the left and the right. From the left for ideology. From the right from tax cuts and loss of local revenue.

On the right, the law of unintended consequences related to tight budgets. From the left, the idealism of transfering resources from police services to a utopia of softer social services.

Seattle City Council is proceeding with a 4 million dollar cut in police budget due to pressure from BLM protesters. Less noticed is an even larger 20 million dollars in cuts that are probably inevitable due to reduced local tax revenue. The second, bigger figure is strongly influenced by reduced local revenue due to the virus situation.

The police are being chopped at from both directions; no pun intended, since there was the "Chop Zone" in Seattle a few weeks back. This is pretty much a worrisome situation for public safety.

Some people on the left want to transfer money from police to other softer and more preventative things such as affordable housing and mental health resources.

Like the phrase an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; cure being calling the police.

As there are problems in society, the police are the one's who get called when things like domestic violence happen. The last resort, versus, for instance, a therapist.

Problem is that just about all services of local government, from police to mental health services, are facing the potential for larger cuts due to the loss in tax revenues.

Tho conservatives tend to oppose this, there still needs to be a financial bailout, or backstop, for local government from the federal government. Yes, it does seem like we just need to keep printing the money.

In an ideal society, there would be more affordable housing and a better social safety net. As funds to provide these things professionally are dwindling, it looks like more services will need to be provided by volunteers. Many of the softer services, such as mental health and housing, could be provided by informal and more volunteer means. Tiny home villages, for instance.

As for volunteer police services, there is the worry about citizen vigilantism.

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