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UCLAs class of 2020 celebrated their graduation today while scattered across the globe. For the first time, the universitys largest graduation celebration took place remotely, honoring the roughly 8,800 students of the UCLA College.

Today we gather virtually to celebrate the conferral of your degrees in a uniquely 21st century high-tech way but, rest assured, your hard-earned degrees will be real. You guys are so futuristic! the graduates were told by actor, activist, alumnus and social media icon George Takei. The man who helped others imagine a brighter future through his role on Star Trek called on graduates to build a better world. With the experience of the pandemic, challenge yourselves to imagine the unimagined. You have technology that dazzles the mind. Soar with it. Aspire as no others have.

Though the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus means most students havent set foot at UCLA since March 13, classes continued remotely. While in-person ceremonies are planned once group gatherings are safe again, graduating students more than earned a celebration on what would have been their commencement day. Among the Centennial class, graduating at the close of UCLAs first 100 years, nearly a third are first-generation college students, andmore than 35 percent come from low-income households.

The ceremony opened with a moment of silence to recognize and honor victims of COVID-19 and also racial oppression. This was followed by a pledge by the six College deans to continue to fight social injustice.

While we have all been affected by recent events, we have not all been affected equally, said Darnell Hunt, dean of the division of social sciences. We will continue to shine a light on inequality.

Speakers borrowed from an array of real and fictional inspirational figures, quoting the words of activist author James Baldwin, historian Rebecca Solnit, wizard Albus Dumbledore, and Vulcan Starfleet officer Mr. Spock. The virtual celebration featured views of familiar buildings, fountains and hilltop vistas to soothe homesick Bruins, and senior Margaret Miller sang the Star-Spangled Banner. Students viewed the livestream or the later recording from couches with their parents, in apartments with roommates, or on laptops in empty rooms. Some added homemade pomp and circumstance by crafting their own mortarboards or using free graduation profile frames and yard signs from the Alumni Association they would soon join.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block praised the graduates resilience at completing their studies and acknowledged those who also found ways to get involved, whether by treating COVID-19 patients, making face masks to slow the spread of the virus, or joining the nationwide wave of protests against the murder of Black men and women by police.

A global pandemic has upended our lives and prevented us from being together, Block said. Were all reeling, once again, from the pain of racial injustice The horrible killings of unarmed African Americans have reminded us of our societys inequities, but strengthened our resolve to address them.

History shows that catastrophic events can expose the failings of the status quo and lead to reforms, Block added, referencing Solnit before calling on the graduates to build a more resilient, compassionate and just society. Though in almost any year, graduates are asked to make the world a better place, current events added extra resonance to that plea.

The imagination to envision better times, especially in hard times, is vital, Block said. James Baldwin wrote that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Now is your time to envision the role youll play in changing our world and creating a new one.

UCLA Broadcast Studio

Filmed in an empty Royce Hall, student speaker Kristie-Valerie Phung Hoang grieved the loss of the students final months on campus, but reminded her fellow graduates that they have already begun to improve the world.

It is at UCLA where weve felt compassion for each other, and drove our support toward undocumented students, first-generation students and immigrants working to make a better life of their own, she said. We poured our minds towards driving research in hopes of finding life-saving cures We created paths towards a greener, healthier planet We lived and breathed the spirit of equality.

Though the campus graduation season shrank from the usual 60 or so ceremonies and celebrations to a little more than 30 virtual events because of the pandemic, UCLA awarded degrees to nearly 14,000 students from its undergraduate and graduate programs. Other speakers include guitarist Carlos Santana for the Herb Alpert School of Music, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for the UCLA School of Law, and Californias first surgeon general, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris for the David Geffen School of Medicine.

In introducing Takei, Block praised his activism in speaking up for Muslims, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community, and tied Takeis activism to his days as an actor playing Mr. Sulu beginning in 1966.

George made history on a multi-ethnic new TV show called Star Trek, Block said. The show premiered at the same time that the Vietnam War was fueling decades of anti-Asian bigotry. As a Japanese-American child during World War II, George had endured that bigotry first hand in Americas shameful internment camps. Georges presence as one of the heroes of the show was a rebuke to the prejudice of the time. Star Trek imagined a future in which all of Earths races lived together in peace.

Sixty years after his own graduation from UCLA, Takei observed the highs and lows of the pandemic, from tireless medical and frontline workers, to unemployment and economic havoc.

We live in a time of heroes and menaces, Takei said. And where we expect leadership, we find shocking dysfunction. It is a virtual dystopian state.

But amidst this dark moment, he added, the air has cleared from the decreased use of fossil fuels for vehicles and factories, giving the world a glimpse of a cleaner planet. He urged the graduates to learn from it and find ways to improve the human condition.

We look to you, the high-tech generation, to seize this moment, Takei said. Revitalize our civilization. Discover new challenges. Stretch as far as you can. Boldly go where no one has gone before. May the UCLA Centennial 2020 class live long and prosper.

The virtual celebration closed with a bittersweet view of the Inverted Fountain, where graduating seniors traditionally take a dip to celebrate their years of hard work.

Our 2020 graduates will be the class that persevered, said Patricia Turner, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education. Let this moment of adversity forge in you a strength to overcome, to persevere, to know that the world is inherently beautiful, and that your future has only just begun.

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Graduates encouraged to envision and build a better future - UCLA Newsroom

We live in a time where riots and violence are called free speech. And where peaceful anti-lockdown protestors are called violent.

Where the disastrous Minneapolis police handling of a criminal suspect has led to a death, the indictment of a police officer, and violent national demonstrations and riots.

Where the Minneapolis mayor sends facial masks and social distancing pleas to rioters while allowing the burning down of a police precinct station. Governor Waltz should be credited, however, with calling up the entire state National Guard after the initial retreat of security forces.

Where thousands of allegedly Minnesota Nice people engaged in violent, dangerous behavior and attacked police officers. All of this in a minority-conscious, Blue State woke city. The World Is Upside Down.

The Department of Justice and Attorney General William Barr is initiating action against Antifa and other Leftist agitators, as the Biden campaign team sends bail money to incarcerated activists.

Away from the riot scene and looting, William Barr recommended the case by the FBI against former Trump intelligence advisor and military hero Gen. Michael Flynn be dropped because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct and entrapment by the Dept. of Justice, Special Counsel Muellers team, and FBI.

General Flynn had been slated to be Trumps national security advisor. Flynns military experience in that field gave him knowledge of Obama administration foreign policy failures. Flynn knew, as one observer stated, where the bodies were buried. No wonder, after Trumps 2016 election, Obama warned the president not to hire Gen. Flynn.

Recent DOJ documents revealed the coverup of information and shielding of transcripts by Democrat House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff. Schiffs public misinformation campaign and tactics included telephone taps of officials, lawyers, and a journalist. Schiff was forced to release his documents in May. Sources contend Schiff is now worried about his culpability, as is Barack Obama probably is, hence his recent public criticism of Attorney General Barr.

Trump aides and the president were exonerated from Russia collusion accusations when the allegations proved unverifiable. But the FBI and Mueller teams kept the investigation going. Agents who interviewed Flynn concluded he was innocent of the charges and recommended closing the case. High ranking partisans kept it open.

In mid-May of 2020, Obama publicly criticized the DOJ dismissal request of charges against Flynn. Obama contended the dismissal put the rule of law at risk. Speculation ensued that the former president did not want his own role in encouraging and monitoring the Flynn investigation or his potential culpability revealed.

George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan was quoted by reporter Nick Arama on 9 May as stating the DOJ did not contradict the rule of law as Obama claimed. Turley cited court precedents for the DOJ action and recalled that a dismissal of charges in another case had been requested by President Obamas Attorney General Eric Holder. Arama cited Obamas alleged transgressions of the rule law in his executive orders and his administrations spying on reporters and Obamas CIA director John Brennan spying on members of Congress.

And now, Obamagate has revealed that then-President Obama and his team were involved in unmasking Flynn, the leaking of which is a federal crime. That is being investigated now, and Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenas may flow from that. Stay tuned.

Read more from the original source:
The Minnesota Riots and 'Obamagate' Investigated (OPINION) - News Talk 1340 KROC-AM

The warnings came from all sides in the months leading up to Georgia's disastrous primaries on Tuesday: local election officials, voting rights advocates and even the state's top election official.

The combination of limited training on new voting machines and reduced polling locations due to the novel coronavirus could produce crushingly long lines and severely hamper voting access, they cautioned.

Yet none of those in charge of Georgia's elections were able to head off what all agreed was a breakdown of the voting system. Residents waited for hours to cast ballots, some past midnight. Workers struggled to operate new touch-screen machines. Some polling places in suburban Atlanta opened with no equipment at all.

In the aftermath, as the nation reckoned with the possibility of a similar debacle in November, state and local officials blamed each other, but they could not explain why Tuesday's problems were so predictable - and yet not preventable.

"The cause of the problems is grave mismanagement of elections here in Georgia," said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a civil rights watchdog. "The state failed to heed the warnings of what could happen in this election."

As local and state officials vowed to investigate what went wrong, interviews with voters and election officials around the state pointed to a combination of factors, including the collision of a new voting system with the pandemic, which led to the cancellation of training sessions and diminished the corps of polling workers.

On top of that, overwhelmed county election offices struggled to handle a crush of absentee ballot requests, leading to thousands of voters never receiving theirs in the mail.

The widespread problems in Georgia were quickly seized upon by both political parties. President Donald Trump's campaign said it showed the risks of mail voting, a practice he has attacked without evidence as prone to fraud. Democrats and voting rights advocates seized on Georgia's chaotic primary as an intentional act of voter suppression, accusing Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, of failing to prepare adequately.

"What happened in Georgia yesterday was by design," former secretary of state Hillary Clinton tweeted Wednesday.

Such charges are especially fraught in Georgia, which has a long history of racist election practices and saw a heated 2018 governor's race between Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is black, and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

Raffensperger disputed the idea that his office failed to prepare, saying that most of the problems stemmed from poor planning at the local level, pointing in particular to Fulton County, home of Atlanta, and DeKalb, to the city's east.

He promised Wednesday to work with the state legislature to give the state greater authority to "directly intervene and require management changes" at the local level.

"What is clear from yesterday is that while almost every county delivered successful elections, a couple did not," he said in a statement, adding: "We are here to protect every voter. Republicans, Democrats and Independents deserve well-run elections."

For their part, Fulton election officials acknowledged their difficulties keeping up with demand for mail-ballot requests, polling place staffing and worker training.

Adding to the challenge: The county's top two mail ballot officials came down with coronavirus at the height of election preparations. One of them, Beverly Walker, 62, died on April 15.

"We are going to look at everything that happened in this election and will make sure in November we serve the residents of this county with distinction," said Rick Barron, Fulton's elections chief. While Barron acknowledged that the county fell short, he also called on Raffensperger to take responsibility and contribute to the fix.

"He's the head election official in the state, and he can't wash his hands of all responsibility," Barron said.

Many said that what happened Tuesday reflects the need for structural change in the way elections are run in Georgia, with more funding and more uniform administration needed - something only the Republican-controlled state legislature, or Congress, can make happen.

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has proposed $3.6 billion in additional election funding nationwide to help local governments contend with the effect of the pandemic on elections. She said Georgia's primaries dramatically demonstrated the need.

"When there are any kinds of attacks on our country, we do not expect some local city to defend themselves," Klobuchar said. "When Pearl Harbor was attacked, we didn't say, 'Pearl Harbor, you're on your own.' And when we have issues with the pandemic, that is not the fault of the counties that are having these elections right now. Basically that's what you're saying if you don't step in. You've got to at least give people a fighting chance to be able to vote."

Georgia was not the only state that struggled with long voting lines Tuesday. In Nevada's Clark County, which had just three in-person polling locations, the wait stretched as long as seven hours. In South Carolina, where some polling locations failed to open on time, voters were also forced to stand in line for hours.

Voters in Georgia confronted the first widespread use of new ballot-marking devices, which replaced a paperless electronic voting system that a federal judge had declared insecure. Even before the pandemic struck, election security experts had questioned whether officials had enough time to provide adequate training for their use in the primaries.

When Brittany Westveer, a 26-year-old public relations specialist in Atlanta, arrived at her polling place at 7:40 a.m., she was roughly 0.2 miles away from the entrance, she said. She ended up waiting five hours.

Once her turn came, she said poll workers failed to guide voters who were confused about using the machines or answer their questions.

"I would love to see some sort of change happen soon, especially with the November election coming up," Westveer said. "The governor's election left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and this one especially did now. We're hoping to see change soon."

A spokeswoman for Dominion Voting Systems, the contractor that provided new voting machines, said the company received a relatively high number of calls from poll workers in DeKalb, Cobb and Fulton counties seeking help setting up equipment, checking in voters and activating voter cards.

"It points to the fact that the counties needed more training support going into Election Day," said Kay Stimson.

The company received relatively few calls to replace faulty components, she said, indicating that machine malfunction was not a widespread issue.

Under a state contract, Dominion provided training to county election officials who were then responsible for training poll workers. Stimson said the company's training was partially disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, leading to the cancellation of a second trial run.

Raffensperger's deputy, Jordan Fuchs, said the office has launched an investigation into what went wrong but emphasized that the issues were most pronounced in a small handful of counties. She said her office had sought to help counties hire substitute poll workers, worked with Dominion to produce training programs and encouraged all voters in Georgia to vote early or by mail to avoid a potential crush on Election Day.

"We spent the last three months telling people: 'Please, please, vote early. Please vote absentee,' " Fuchs said. "There are going to be long lines. There are going to be shortages."

They weren't the only ones.

DeKalb County officials were concerned ahead of the election about the "significant challenges" that the coronavirus outbreak would pose, according to county chief executive Michael Thurmond, a Democrat.

And in the two months leading up to Tuesday's election, officials on the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections expressed concerns about a range of issues that voters could face, including equipment failures, long lines and an increase in absentee ballot applications, according to meeting records.

Last month, officials raised alarms that voters were not receiving their absentee ballots despite submitting applications - and anticipated that those voters would show up in person. They warned of the potential for jammed scanners, an issue that surfaced during early voting and again on Tuesday.

In the end, the most severe of Tuesday's problems were in Fulton, where a mass exodus of poll workers fearing coronavirus exposure forced the closure of 34 polling places. One polling place in Atlanta served more than 16,000 voters - more than triple the usual amount.

Officials also struggled with overloaded circuits that caused voting machine power to flicker, a severe shortage of provisional ballots and astronomical demand for mailed ballots.

On top of that, county officials said at least 8,000 mail-ballot applications were lost, likely adding to the crush of voters waiting in line on Election Day.

Barron acknowledged that many poll workers never received in-person training for the new voting system launched statewide on Tuesday. Poll workers were so unused to the new touch-screen machines that they inserted magnetic voting cards upside down, delaying voting for hours trying to figure it out rather than moving quickly to allow voters to submit emergency paper ballots, Barron said.

"We would have lost more poll workers had we done in-person training, because people weren't comfortable with it," he said.

In Gwinnett County, a northeast suburb of Atlanta, officials took responsibility for the late delivery of voting machines to 16 out of 144 polling places, which they attributed to a miscalculation of the capacity of trucks.

In DeKalb, east of downtown, where long lines and training issues also surfaced, both the state and county were at fault, and any investigation into what went wrong needs to look at the role of both levels of government, Thurmond said.

Thurmond expressed frustration at Raffensperger's statement blaming DeKalb and Fulton officials, noting that the problems were not limited to those two counties.

"To somehow conclude that the problems were the result of an action taken or not taken by two counties, without any investigation, any review, without talking to anyone, without reviewing the technology and how it operated - to draw that conclusion, is stunning," Thurmond said Wednesday. "How do you know that that's true?"

The state knew, he added, that dozens of experienced poll workers decided not to work because of fear of the coronavirus, and those recruited to replace them were not properly trained. No training support was offered in response, he added.

Judges ordered at least 20 counties to stay open past 7 p.m. Tuesday due to various voting snarls. Long lines were reported in a scattering of communities outside of the Atlanta area, including Savannah and Columbus.

Eric Holder, who served as Barack Obama's attorney general and now leads a political committee focused on ending partisan gerrymandering, said voters are starting to recognize the need for widespread electoral reform, much as they have awakened in recent weeks to the need for reform of police agencies.

"We have to make sure people understand what's at stake. We can't have another Wisconsin. We can't have another Ohio. We can't have another Georgia," he said, referring to a string of states experiencing coronavirus-related election difficulties this year. "People are going to lose their faith in their ability to cast their vote."

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Voting debacle in Georgia came after months of warnings went unaddressed - The Advocate

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has galvanized the nation and the world. His murder was only one in a long, long list of murders and lynchings over decades. But this was a perfect storm that made its heinousness obvious to all: This was not the instant firing of a gun in a moment of fear, but a torturously long, drawn-out 8 minutes, 46 seconds, during which three other police officers stood around, onlookers pleaded for mercy, and the whole thing captured on video that was shared over social media.

So while there were other unprovoked killings Breonna Taylor, shot in her own Louisville apartment in the dead of night after police invaded with a no-knock warrant this one was undeniable in demonstrating the ingrained culture that dehumanizes in order for such violence to occur, and the smug security of police, given the unparalleled power of a gun and a badge, that they would not be held accountable.

Enough is enough, protesters by the tens of thousands in hundreds of cities throughout the country and the world, chant, even putting their own lives at risk, not just from the baton-wielding, tear-gas throwing, flashbang-grenade hurling, rubber-bullet firing police dressed as an invading army, but from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The protests have come to suburbia and our hometown as well most affectingly, one this weekend organized by Great Neck High School students which drew well over 500 people to Firefighters Park in Great Neck Plaza. (They withstood accusations on Facebook they were terrorists.)

They decried the structural racism at the heart of a police culture that has its origins in catching slaves, then morphed into an enforcement mechanism for white supremacy, along with so many other structural inequities that, by design, have kept African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities unequal in society.

While the elements of police brutality and criminal injustice are well-known, they are kept in force year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation by supremely politically powerful police unions.

Indeed, the most dramatic reform is to completely rebuild police departments there are 16,000 of them. Some police departments have actually done this Camden, NJ, for example and it may be the only way to really root out the structural inequities as well as bias. Now Minneapolis city council has voted to disband its $193 million police department. What that actually means is that, like Camden, it intends to rebuild it in order to make it functional and appropriate in a country that supposedly is based on principles of equal justice for all.

They will likely scrutinize how police officers are recruited, hired and tracked for a record of police brutality (like Timothy Loehmann, who murdered 12-year old Tamir Rice). How are officers trained and what do they understand their mission to be? One trendy training program (as John Oliver disclosed on Last Week Tonight) is in the art of Killology where officers are instructed that if they are not predators prepared to kill, they have no business being police.

Not only are the problems well-known, but the solutions have been methodically investigated, analyzed, quantified and put in the form of recommendations by the Obama administration after the Ferguson, Mo., riots that followed Michael Browns unprovoked murder by police. The task force developed a template for 21st Century Policing, including ending militarizing police. Obamas Department of Justice under Eric Holder obtained consent decrees from the most vile police forces. But like the template to address a global pandemic handed to the Trump administration, it was immediately discarded and the consent decrees withdrawn.

George Floyd has created the rarest opportunity for reform, however. With breathtaking speed for New York or any state government, major measures for a Say Their Name police reform agenda have already passed the Legislature allowing for transparency of prior disciplinary records by reforming 50-a, banning chokeholds, prosecuting callers for making a false race-based 911 report and designating the attorney general as an independent prosecutor in cases involving the death of unarmed civilian by law enforcement.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to go further to seize the momentum, correctly seeing this time as transformational to reinvent policing.

This is a long time coming, Cuomo said. It is time to reimagine and reinvent policing for 2020Police are public servants for that community if the community doesnt trust, doesnt respect police, police cant do their job.

Democrats in Congress have also seized on this transformational moment as well, introducing the Justice in Policing Act, which at the federal level would ban chokeholds; challenge qualified immunity; prohibit no-knock warrants; counter the trend toward militarization of police; require body and dashboard cameras; require independent prosecutors in cases of police brutality; establish a national database to track police misconduct; and (finally) make lynching a federal hate crime.

Others want more. There are calls to defund police which like Theyre coming for your guns and Open Borders! is a catchy slogan that fits on a sign that has been deliberately distorted by Trump and the Republicans and used to incite fear among (white suburban) voters, who are being told their neighborhoods will be overrun by criminals, gangs and rapists.

What defund police means is reassessing what functions the police do. Do we want protectors or warriors? Are police the best ones to address situations involving mental health, drug overdoses, domestic violence or school discipline? More accurately, people are calling for divest-reinvest: Take that money and invest in social workers, mental health professionals and guidance counselors, roles that the police have said they are not equipped to handle.

And it means investing in community programs that in themselves reduce crime. Thats what Cuomo is proposing in a Justice Agenda to root out the causes of criminal injustice, all on view in conjunction with the coronavirus epidemic and its disproportionate impact on communities of color. It goes to addressing the disparities in education, housing, health care, poverty.

But none of this will happen as long as Trump and the Republicans are in power.

Link:
Viewpoint: Seize the moment for police reform - Blog - The Island Now

For years, Camden, New Jersey, was known as the murder capital of the United States. The city of 74,000 people would record murder rates six times the national average and was plagued by open-air drug markets, robberies, looting and violence.

In November 2012, Scott Thomson, Camdens then-chief of police, decided to conduct a radical overhaul of policing disbanding the citys 141-year-old local force and handing law enforcement of the city over to the county police department.

Many of the laid-off officers were rehired by the county at lower salaries and fewer benefits, which ultimately doubled the size of the county police department. More officers were assigned to patrol the streets a trust-building tactic, Thomson told Bloomberg last week, to increase non-crisis interactions between officers and residents. Police were also required to undergo de-escalation training, wear body cameras and adhere to stricter rules on the use of force in the line of duty.

Seven years later, the homicide rate in Camden has more than halved, from 69 in 2012 to 25 in 2019.

Forward to 2020, and Camden is hailed as one of the few U.S cities that saw a completely peaceful Black Lives Matter protest on May 30, a march led by organizer Yolanda Deaver and Police Chief Joseph Wysocki.

Deaver told CBC that she had asked Wysocki to hold the banner with her during the protest. The chief said I set the tone, Deaver recounted, but he set the tone because he didnt come in with riot gear.

Camden isnt the only city to operate without local police. Compton, Calif., also took the same step in 2000, handing over policing to Los Angeles County.

In 2015, the U.S. attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, stated that the Justice Department was considering a similar solution for the police in Ferguson, Mo., after the murder of Michael Brown. Ultimately the city and its lawmakers struck a less-drastic agreement, but one that still included many reforms.

This idea of police reform isnt new, says Dexter Voisin, dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. However, he said its gaining more traction now as authorities across the U.S. and Canada re-examine public safety amid weeks of global protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism. For example, on Monday, two Toronto councillors said they will put forward a motion to defund the citys police force by 10 per cent and use that money for additional community resources.

In the U.S., the mayors of Los Angeles and New York City have both pledged to divert funding from their local police forces toward social services and communities in need.

Nine Minneapolis council members a veto-proof majority have opted for the more radical measure of dismantling the local force and replacing it with a new model of public security. Mayor Jacob Frey, however, said he does not support the full abolition of the police department.

Its unclear which option Minneapolis will choose. However, Council President Lisa Bender told CNN that the council is against the idea of having no police department in the short term. Rather, she said it is looking to shift police funding toward community-based strategies.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a University of Toronto expert on policing and racialized law enforcement, says its important to distinguish between the different terms used when it comes to police reform.

I think theres some confusion between defunding the police, disbanding police and police abolition, he said.

The concept of police reform exists on a continuum, according to Voisin, and depends on each communitys notion of public safety. For some, it could mean redirecting funds away from the police to community organizations that can better respond to the needs. For others, it could mean redirecting funds with the aim of dismantling over time and replacing (the force) with other types of community policing, he said.

WHAT IS POLICE DEFUNDING

Defunding the police recognizes that were giving funding to the police to perform functions that theyre not necessarily well-positioned or well-equipped to perform, Owusu-Bempah said.

Weve been asking them to do more and more over time and there are organizations and agencies that are better equipped to do some of the tasks that police are doing, he said, referring to issues arising from mental illness, poverty and substance abuse.

Voisin thinks that defunding police helps to keep the force accountable.

When their budget continues to grow and becomes unchecked, it leads to the development of what we call the super cop, the militarization of police, which is arming the police to deal with social issues, he said. You cant really deal with these social problems through increased policing.

Redirecting funds toward what Voisin calls some of the structural drivers of crime and mental health poverty, unemployment, homelessness, race-related racism can create a much better outcome, he said. Its part of a larger conversation that the public-policy approaches around public safety have not been equally serving all communities.

DISBANDING AND ABOLISHING

The idea of disbanding or abolishing police forces falls on the more radical end of the spectrum when it comes to police defunding.

The words are synonymous in some way, said Owusu-Bempah, in that they both advocate for the closure of certain police departments. The difference lies with what comes after.

Camden, for example, chose to close its local police force due to serious institutional problems within the existing police agency at the time, he said. However, they did not eliminate policing altogether. Rather, with the help of the county police force, the city changed the way policing was conducted, via retraining and a raft of new policies.

It was acknowledged that, essentially, they just need to disband police and start again, he said, whereas the term abolish would mean the permanent removal of police altogether.

Closing down a police station is feasible in different contexts, Owusu-Bempah said.

In Toronto, he said, smaller communities could replace policing with a more civilianized and non-weapon-carrying force that might try and maintain order in a more informal way.

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Calls to defund and dismantle police forces are growing, but what exactly does that mean? - National Post