elliseamos wrote:I would think the mere existence of your account (and others) would inspire a better conversation, but like many things I'm clearly wrong.
So let's just rewind things to the glory days of nonviolence: 2014.
I think it's just that it's frustratingly disingenuous to pretend that surging violent crime in many places can be mapped back to the pandemic
without taking into account the dramatic changes in the perception of police and how policing is done on the streets. We did not see property crime surging in 2020 into early 2021, we saw violent crime surging. This is an important distinction if you believe the answer is driven largely by economics and not the ongoing attempt at shredding the social contract.
It's not ironic at all that in the discussion of Buckhead and Atlanta, that
this happened:
One year ago this month, protests filled the city’s streets daily after the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and, less than three weeks later, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. Pushing for changes to Atlanta’s police budget, over a thousand residents sent comments into the City Council — so many that the recordings had to be played over two days.
Facing a June 30 deadline to pass the budget, the City Council discussed temporarily withholding $73 million of the Atlanta Police Department’s budget while the city considered changes to the way it polices. The effort failed on an 8-7 vote.
This year, the day the council voted on the budget, there were less than two hours of comments from the public. The council passed the budget unanimously, and rather than withholding funding from police, the city increased the department’s budget by 7% to over $230 million, a $15 million increase that represented the biggest boost awarded to any department.
The discussions at City Hall over this year’s budget, which followed a citywide rise in violent crime, highlight how the discourse over policing has shifted in the last year, among elected officials and some members of the public.
Also, and I am a touch hesitent to post this, but the "it's not that big an increase" line of thought sounds an awful lot like you're suggesting that there is some acceptable level of victimization that one demographic group should be forced to put of with because feelings.
"The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."