We saw it in Ferguson and again in Dallas.
Every citizen has the right to an effective police department, but law enforcement is stuck in the mindset of the 20th Century, with more and more money being poured into government police agencies with results continuing to deteriorate.
And those who are hurt the most are the people who are living in pockets of poverty throughout the nation. Their crime rates continue to increase no matter how much money we spend.
With that in mind, I propose a complete rethinking of policing to give all Americans access to the protection they deserve.
One way to improve police departments would be to hold them accountable for their results. If a department is determined to be failing based on statistics, provide it with options- either shut down the department or replace all of its officers.
Now that would improve law enforcement.
Why shouldn't people have a choice in what kind of police department they have. Instead of shoveling tax money into one police department for each city, why not provide taxpayers with options?
Instead of just calling 911 and having the same police department responding to emergencies for everyone, how much better would it be if we provided each family with vouchers and allowed them to provide for their own protection?
You would still have the option of putting your money into the traditional government police department, but you could also use your money to pay for a private for-profit security business, a virtual police run entirely online, or maybe even put all of your money into home policing and buy your own weapons, alarm systems and whatever else you need.
Consider the possibilities if we were to take away the restraints and the bureaucratic shackles that have kept police departments from trying innovative methods of protecting the public. What if we could put our tax money into operating a series of charter police departments that would not have to abide by the rules that currently hamstring government police agencies?
How much better would it be if police departments didn't have to follow all of those laws and it they could operate without any public scrutiny?
The biggest problem we have is the number of unqualified police officers in this country. We have too many burned out officers who are just out there to collect a paycheck. Why not offer energetic, capable college students an opportunity to train for six weeks, strap guns on them, and head them out into the streets? We could call it Police for America.
And perhaps it is time to put all decisions on policing in the hands of a few billionaires who know more about it than any of the rest of us.
Let's get real.
No politician would ever propose anything like that. My "proposals" would be a recipe for disaster.
Yet the same proposals are presented quite seriously as cures to the problems facing education in this country.
We will soon have a Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whose family has spent millions pushing educational vouchers and charter schools. The DeVos family also created the strategy of labeling public schools as "government schools." You will be hard pressed to find any record anywhere of anything Betsy DeVos has done to help a public school.
With our president-elect already boosting charter schools and decrying the state of education, we should expect to see all of the solutions I proposed above being applied to education.
Under the Trump-DeVos program, parents will be able to put tax money into private schools, religious schools, home schools, or virtual schools with little or no regulation of the product they are receiving since Trump has told us over and over that government regulations are holding us back.
The groundwork for this has been laid by decades of blaming all of the problems facing education on "bad teachers." If we could just fire all of the bad teachers and take away their tenure protection, education would magically improve and teachers from the Teach for America program can enter classrooms with just six week of training and be able to perform as well as veteran teachers.
Come next month, we will have a president who has never had any connection to public schools and who has selected a secretary of education who has made destroying public schools her life's mission.
Those who support public education have every reason to fear what is about to be unleashed on this nation.
And who's to say that somewhere down the line, someone is going to realize the money that could be made by privatizing police departments.
Surely Trump can find some dilettante billionaire who could run the Department of Homeland Security.
21 comments:
"And who's to say that somewhere down the line, someone is going to realize the money that could be made by privatizing police departments."
And who better to do just that than Betsy DeVos's brother Erik Prince who took our taxpayer money for his bloody mercenary ventures-privatizing and profiteering just like his sister, only with hired killers. It would make sense given the current grotesque militarization of US police.
Come on Randy, Trump has a lot of experience in education. In fact he founded his own University.
How much better would it be if police departments didn't have to follow all of those laws and it they could operate without any public scrutiny?
BZZZT!
Here's where you shift into a clear lie, for all private institutions in the country have to operate under the law (and in that respect private police operating without sovereign immunity, as private prisons do, are actually held to higher standards, especially by envious public police). And certainly it would be no more difficult to arrange for a sufficient degree of public scrutiny for wherever people spend education vouchers than we were able to get of Huff's Joplin Schools. State standardized tests for a starter.
Come next month, we will have a president who has never had any connection to public schools and who has selected a secretary of education who has made destroying public schools her life's mission.
We're now approaching the century mark of shear malpractice in teaching reading to those who can't just pick it up with little or no help, and it's been 61 years since Why Johnny Can't Read was published pointing this out (although we didn't directly see this since "Why Johnny Can Read in Joplin" published in e.g. The Reader's Digest (I read my grandmother's saved copies of it) noted that we hadn't followed our betters in abandoning phonics for Dick and Jane and their running dog Spot). And that battle is still being fought.
Things have gotten so bad in so many of our Zero Intelligence Massive Intolerance public schools that putting your children in those is white line child abuse, so why not give these people a chance to make that part of America Great Again, the educational establishment has been abjectly failing more and more, for, as I note again, nearly a century. And with any luck they'll stick a shiv or three in the public teachers unions while they're at it, that's good politics as well as good policy.
The only two large cities which have private police operating within their jurisdictions are San Francisco and New Orleans. In those two cities I guarantee you the private police do not operate under the same restrictions as the police departments.
There has always been a misconception that public education would be equally beneficial for all children. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is the problem of which level of native intelligence you set your teaching standards to. If you set it to the smart kids, the dumb ones get left behind and it is a crap shoot as to whether the kids in between learn anything. If you set it on the intermediate range, the smart kids get bored and you lose them and the dumb ones will still not grasp the concepts. Be that as it may, we have chosen the intermediate path as the one with the most impact on the majority of children. In some places we have softened the impact with specialized programs for the gifted students and remedial classes for the not so bright. Either way, the problem is not our educational system, it is just that our population is becoming less self reliant and losing the ability to cope with an expanding technical society. It is not that the schools are causing the problem, the schools are simply reflective of the problem. That problem is that our society is actually becoming dumber with time.
There is the problem of which level of native intelligence you set your teaching standards to.
That's one of the reasons public education is such bad shape nowadays, it's dogma that all children are capable of learning at levels that some simply aren't, and tracking, honors classes (which had been abolished when I went through Parkwood, because they were "racist") are elitist and not to be tolerated. One of the best real names for NCLB is No Child Gets Ahead, since it focuses so much on the lower scoring students, smart ones are left to wither on the vine.
Except, nowadays, haven't been turned off from learning, if they can survive the torment of public schools and have any energy left over, "our expanding technical society" allows them vast opportunities to learn, to informally connect to other like minded people, etc.
Less self-reliant? Maybe, and there are a lot of messed up paradigms now, like it being criminal to not watch your kids like hawks, but I'm not sure that makes a dumber society, more like makes it more fragile.
And let's take an example of that locally tricking down: mercury in light bulbs is just dandy, but minute amounts in admittedly dirty coal is unthinkable. This is one of the things that forced Empire to go all gas, which is also just dandy until there's a supply problem with it, and we don't have those coal boilers to fall back on.
So you've spent the better part of the last 5 years blaming Huff and the previous board for ruining our children's education. So with no choice I guess kids just have to suffer huh? So school choice is bad, but leaving them in failing schools is good.
One of the problems with a public education is the wealth of misinformation these kids are subjected to at home and in their parent's religious circles. This goes back to the Scopes Trial and has progressed to the point of banning books and bringing law suits if the kids are taught anything contrary to the parent's religious beliefs. It is an ongoing problem and does not seem to be going away.
I find it interesting that the New Orleans paper today carries an article about a dispute over the method of educating children in 1816.
5:55 AM: And how many public school districts have trimmed their sails because of such threats from the religious? And how many of these issues really matter to the average person? Evolution certainly doesn't, although it's a useful model for non-biologists.
Latest we've heard of banning books is Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird by the ever more censorious Left, which is openly talking about banning "Fake News" or "Russian agent" sources like ... Drudge.... I.e. this election loss has made them even more stark raving mad.
So, tell us with real, citeble (sp?) examples, how this "ongoing problem", which I have no doubt is one, is a serious one, compared to the Left's war on truth, science, and it's incessant virtual signalling (well, I suppose the propagandist in To Kill a Mockingbird is a rape denier, but that's not what they're banning it).
For those wondering about 7:14 AM's comment, I was able to find the article and here's a link to it. Does sound like a legitimate beef if his evidence was correct, the system attacked could produce bad results, then again, it sounds a bit like what I've vaguely heard of how some "one room schools houses" would work, with older and/or more responsible students helping the teacher.
" And how many public school districts have trimmed their sails because of such threats from the religious? And how many of these issues really matter to the average person? Evolution certainly doesn't, although it's a useful model for non-biologists."
It is difficult for many evolution deniers to understand why they should be worried about drug resistant bacteria.
It is difficult to understand how bacteria evolve drug resistance to antibiotics without understanding evolution and how usage patterns of these drugs in human medicine and factory farming exacerbate the resistance problem.
But hey, just pray the MRSA or XDR TB away.
Self-imposed ignorance rules these days. It's so easy to live in a fantasy land where you don't need evidence or facts. Just beliefs. Most comments are evidence enough of the failure of education to replace perceived knowledge with true information and a global perspective. For that matter, the teaching of the Gospels doesn't seem to have taken hold, either, from the level of vitriol that is spewed.
It is difficult for many evolution deniers to understand why they should be worried about drug resistant bacteria.
That's only if you go beyond the rejection of the "Origin of the Species" level of evolution, to the sort that happens in real time that's obvious to anyone with eyes. I've never met such a person, but I'm sure they exist. But how many of them are even close to making policy? Aren't they by definition shut out from membership in our ruling class? The latter, after all, are the ones who have been running things and have allowed the current situation to arise.
But, again, the general public is pretty far removed from the grander scope of the antibiotic issue, the biggest thing there, especially for MDR and XDR TB genesis, is compliance, and that's more a matter of a) listening to your doctor and b) having the will power to follow the onerous regimens. TB requires taking your nasty meds for a minimum of six months. MRSA similarly came out of lax hospital practices, compared to when my mother was a nurse at the dawn of civilian available antibiotics, they got much more lax about infection control, expecting antibiotics to make up for that, which of course turned out to be a catastrophic mistake.
You also left out the political dimension, and that no matter how well we handle this stuff, super lax practices in other countries where e.g. antibiotics of often iffy quality are sold over the counter, and there are no Christians, let alone anti-evolution ones to speak of, will in the long term make efforts in that direction futile, only a permanent resumption of the "arms race" between man and bug will work.
Although I can't see how prayer can hurt, or how your disdain for Christians can help.
The evolution deniers don't have to be in a position to make policy in order to cause harm.
All they need to do is cling to their swadosciece myths, things like the anti vaccine nonsense and evolution denial. Then, these people vote for the politicians that either share their happy ignorance, or just cater to it to win election.
A more simple example- politicians who don't see the value in tornado drills and emergency notification systems BEFORE the disaster. https://www.flickr.com/photos/58205222@N08/5751945369/
The evolution deniers don't have to be in a position to make policy in order to cause harm.
All they need to do is cling to their swadosciece myths, things like the anti vaccine nonsense....
OK, here's you're just spouting nonsense, for the anti-vaxxers are overwhelming from a class that does officially believe in evolution, they are an entirely different group of people, although there is of course some overlap. Chicken pox parties famously happen in places like metro NY, not SW MO.
And bringing Billy Long into this, in a unknown source photo (that's not Twitter, for one thing), on something that's entirely irrelevant to our discussion, such as it is?
I normally avoid making such judgements, but it sure sounds like you just dislike the bulk of the people in this part of Missouri. Any reason you're still here, or if not, still involving yourself in our affairs?
in a unknown source photo (that's not Twitter, for one thing),
Here it is on Billy Long's twitter:
https://twitter.com/auctnr1/status/10337201666
Gotta understand Turner and Turner's other ilk. The sole reason that they are still here and trying to involve themselves in our affairs isn't as they pretend to help us, but rather because they can't stand living with others like themselves or the consequences of their professed stupidity.
Some of them are refugees from places back East or California where they got what they wanted -- and didn't like it but must destroy the social order they find in their new refuge. Or like Turner, wants to turn this area into a cesspool and are angry that he was detected and kicked out from reporting and teaching.
I have no doubt that if Turner tried police work that he would be kicked out of that too and probably put in prison to boot. So why should anyone listen to Truner's over-clever off-point analogies comparing police work -- which is also corrupt and unworkable -- to Turner's previous failed career in other fields?
Turner was a failure in everything Turner has tried. There is no reason to accept advice as to how to be a failure in a field in which Turner hasn't failed yet in order to justify Turner's failure in fields in which Turner has provably failed.
A more honest title should be: "How I would screw up police work like I screwed up reporting and teaching if I hadn't been detected and kicked out."
Hey Buddy, this place is, and always has been, a cesspool. You talk about a social order when you don't have a clue who actually has the money and controls this armpit of America. This place is crawling with gangs, skinheads, religious fanatics and con artists. You shouldn't worry too much about education because the smart people get the hell out as soon as they get their degrees. So sit back, drink your beer and watch Nascar. You might consider not bashing Randy because he actually does care about the people here. Be thankful because the rest of us do not.
Good lord, get yourself some help. That kind of cynicism and hatred is eating you up. We will pray for you. You need help. I hope you find it soon.
Instead of praying which will be of no help, just send money which will be of some help.
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