- cross-posted to:
- climate
- cross-posted to:
- climate
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Crazy idea time.
The police in California don’t really answer calls for much and when they do, they often make shit worse. LAPD’s annual budget is 3 billion and who knows what the other cities pay out. Now, I know everybody says "defund the police’ but maybe they can keep their money and just start working directly for the state in safeguarding the coasts and cutting down brush that can cause fires. They’re already civil servants and their hearts clearly aren’t in serving the communities as peace officers. What makes them just have to be law enforcement? Let’s let them keep their paychecks, gain some new skills, and fight climate issues. They keep their fat paychecks, become more skilled, and our state recaptures at least 10 billion. Win, win!
I like the concept, though I’d have them working prescribed burns, not just clearing brush.
I think we need a higher level of competence for that. Firefighters and Indigenous groups working together have a good track record for controlled burns. Police would probably just go out in the chaparral and tase something until it caught fire, then shoot at the flames.
What you just described are California State Park Peace Officers. These are the Park Rangers for CA State Parks (Rangers), and Beaches (Permanent Lifeguards).
A small part of what they do is handling unruly people, the vast majority of the time they’re overseeing Jr. Ranger/Jr. Lifeguard programs, running park/beach/campsite operations, responding to complaints, being the first one on scene to render medical assistance, and enforcing rules on environmentally protected areas. They can give out tickets, but that’s usually a rare occurence unless you’re talking back and arguing with them.
The only thing they don’t usually do would be cutting down brush for forest fires, that’s usually contracted out to fire departments.
Some cities and counties already fund them to watch over their beaches/parks (especially when the boundaries become very mixed between which part of the beach is city/county vs state property).
For County and City PD, it’s different for every group and it’s up to the city/county to come up with
In general they all have quotas even if they don’t call them quotas. In many cases they have big incentives for making arrests and handing out citations.
In my opinion, what we need to do is push for a ravamp of how those quotas are handed out. Arrests and citations should be much lower on the list, while activities that can be beneficial for all parties should become their top priorities.
Higher incentives should be given for them to handle homeless outreach. They already interact with homeless people on a daily basis, reward them for helping these people to get access to benefits finding shelter or even just being someone that can be there for them to talk and tell their story.
Rather than just arrests/citations for crimes, try to find out the underlying issues that are causing these things and oversee/come up with projects that address those issues.
In addition it would be beneficial to have a system in place to review officers that make the most arrests out of their peers. If an officer is arresting way more than any of their peers, scrutinize each of those arrests instead of rewarding them for being the one to make the most arrests.
So, reading the article, a non-trivial amount of the cuts come from programs intended to get more EVs on the road. That’s honestly a mixed-bag of a climate change measure at best anyway, since EVs barely break even on carbon by the time their batteries start taking a huge dump. Not to mention that EVs STILL produce enormous quantities of microplastics pollution in the form of tire dust, because they still use tires. And that’s without wading into the issue of car-dependency that’s going to need to be dealt with as part of dealing with GHG emissions.
Tire dust isn’t a problem particular to EVs, notice how nobody said shit about 18 wheelers, even now…
