| ▲ | aldebran 2 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal. We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles. Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car. Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up. Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time. There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in. Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | scarmig 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion: https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun... Why? https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo... https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po... https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off... Now, will Flock help with this? No. But the visceral lack of safety people feel makes them more likely to see it as a necessary evil, not snake oil. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | gunsle a day ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Police departments in a lot of major cities are absolutely unstaffed relative to population growth after decades of demonization in the media. You are ignorant. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||