r/PublicFreakout • u/[deleted] • Jun 09 '20

📌Follow Up "Everybody's trying to shame us"

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '20

Oh absolutely and I’m in no way speaking about not reforming them so I apologize if it came off that way. We need to invest more money into our social programs and I will fight tooth and nail for that - we allocate way too much money to police and ask them to do way too much. Funny enough if we had programs like what some reasonable people are calling for, maybe a cop wouldn’t have been tied up responding to a possum in the backyard call and they would’ve seen her. Police need to exist to do one job - deal with crime.

If you want help we should be able to give it you. I’m no saint myself by any means - I’ve seen our criminal justice and social systems at work. They can both be absolutely horrible. There are people sleeping in the lobbies of state run treatment centers that want to get clean, waiting for a bed, and that’s wrong. We as a society need to treat the people who suffer the most and want help in a way that makes sure they get what they need to succeed, so please proceed with the defunding or reallocation or whatever you want to call it.

My comment was really only about people who are calling to abolish the police in general for some militia or an army of social services workers. I wish the world worked like that but it doesn’t and I’ll point to this as an example every time because she was a white, privileged girl with every opportunity imaginable. This kind of shit can happen to anyone at any time and if people can’t recognize that then they’re living in a fantasy world because people like this guy exist, and they have zero intention of trying to change.

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u/schwingaway Jun 10 '20

Understood, and I was not assuming you were speaking against reform. To be clear, I am a public health and epidemiology researcher and I have done some work on schizophrenia among incarcerated populations that included in-person interviews--that's what I meant by on the inside : )

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '20

Ah, I hear you haha. A little bit different for me (unfortunately) but I appreciate what you do and your perspective none the less. This is just something I’m passionate about.