Since we know the police are bad, Seattle hired private guards to remind people that camping in Cal Anderson Park (the CHAZ/CHOP epicenter) wasn't OK. The hostile crowd chased them out and they say they won't return.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...ter-one-night/
(Not blaming the security guys, BTW, that's a no-win for them ... just commenting that the 'alternatives to the police' notion might not work as well as some people seem to think)
More private security will replace the police. Then the contractors can take the heat like Blackwater did in Iraq. Mayor and chief of police will be out of the loop. That happens a lot when the stakes get too high.Originally Posted by whomever
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
Unfortunately, they aren't replacing the police. The mission assigned to the private security was to keep people from camping in the park. They did not accomplish that mission.
One of the values of the traditional policing model was that they had a great deal of economy of force. If a 5 ft 2, 100 pound officer told you you couldn't camp in the park or told 100 people they couldn't camp in the park, anyone who was at least partly sane knew that meant you weren't going to be camping in the park.
You could grumble and leave (and go to court if you thought the officer was out of line), or you could refuse, or you could fight, but you weren't going to win the fight, or succeed in the refusal. You were, with 99.9% certainty, not going to camp in the park tonight. The only choices on your menu were how badly you wanted to get hurt, and how long you were going to spend in jail instead of camping.
Changing that model to 'you can ignore the law if you have enough manpower handy' is not an improvement.
Let me rephrase that. Private security will replace some of the things that police traditionally do. Your example of how effective the police are falls apart with CHOP. Private security is already being used by many businesses. If the police aren't going to protect your business or property, which they didn't in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis, I don't see any alternative, especially when they defund the police and make them stand on the sidelines.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
A couple of days ago, Amazon let a Seattle lease for space that housed 1k workers lapse and said that it will relocate workers “to other offices in our Puget Sound campus.” Facebook just bought REI's new building, so they're not sticking around, either.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/..._news_headline
Sounds like a series of resounding GFYs to the Seattle City Council. I'm beginning to wonder whether Kshama Sawant has the logos of companies that she's forced out of town on her office door like a fighter pilot...
Okie John
“The reliability of the 30-06 on most of the world’s non-dangerous game is so well established as to be beyond intelligent dispute.” Finn Aagaard
"Don't fuck with it" seems to prevent the vast majority of reported issues." BehindBlueI's
From a slightly different perspective: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...eway-closures/
WSP was worried that they didn't have the people and budget to protect protestors who want to take people and budget away from LE.Recently released emails obtained by The Seattle Times show WSP leaders also did not believe they had the resources to make mass arrests of protesters and worried about escalating tensions. Some did not believe there would be any point in arresting protesters if they were unlikely to be charged or jailed, either because of pandemic-related limits at the jail or because the King County prosecutor has been reluctant to charge peaceful protesters.
When people want to defund law enforcement, we have truly fallen through the looking glass.
Okie John
“The reliability of the 30-06 on most of the world’s non-dangerous game is so well established as to be beyond intelligent dispute.” Finn Aagaard
"Don't fuck with it" seems to prevent the vast majority of reported issues." BehindBlueI's
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