Step one: dismantle the police.

Step two: release the violent criminals.

Step three: arrest anyone who defends themselves.

Step four: sit back and watch the money roll in!

There may be a flaw in this plan but I can't see it.

This young man is breathlessly twit-porting what other news outlets have already reported (the "trove of leaked documents" appears to have leaked out to everyone), but he's left out one eensy weensy detail:

The county does not intend to close its other adult jail, the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent.

https://apnews.com/c96b2fd00aa122355ff66bfe5a45aaad

So Seattle has two adult jails, one of which will definitely not close and the other which this commissioner wants to close.

The plan indeed sounds dopey — and the stupid PowerPoint has little to do with correctional facilities and everything to do with 2020 buzzwords — but there are quite a few better-reported stories on this issue just a Google News search away.

Deer criminals in Florida,

Please move to King County, WA. Not only do they offer $15/hr minimum wage for honest work, they will serve up victims for you to rob or otherwise do with as you will.

I suspect once they have an influx of Florida Criminal, they'll demand to have a wall built.

Actually, Gog, Step 5 is the drawback.

Step 5: The violent criminals aren’t all the stupid Troglodytes you imagine them to be, and watching all the money you have rolling in will come take it from you and keep it for themselves.

The history of Revolutions follow this pattern - there comes a point when the leaders of the guys will decide they should be in charge, and implement Stalin’s dictum: A prison has 3 walls too many. However, Grievance Studies Majors don’t study history and are ignorant of the outcome.

While jail sentences have not been shown to significantly reduce crime, they do keep criminals off the streets and, thus, protect society. Closing a jail - i.e., the wholesale freeing of criminals on their own recognizance - does not provide protection to society; does not maintain civic order when those criminals have proven themselves to be dangerous to the public.

While our justice system started with the idea of protecting the innocent with the Fifth Amendment and jury trials, and has evolved over time to protect the wrongly accused with Miranda rights, public defenders, and a presumption of innocence, it is not a social suicide pact. Nothing in our system of justice mandates the release of dangerous people into society, even if they're under 18. The presumption of innocence is not like an evangelical baptism; it does not wash away all past sins and leave one pure.

Nor is every arrest of a non-white person an expression of systemic bias. Sometimes minorities commit crimes and get arrested for them. Abolishing the detention system for accused criminals will not "reveal the racism inherent in the system," but will endanger the public with the release of dangerous repeat criminals who should have been detained.

Luckily you can't do step 3 after you've done step 1...

Democracy is a form of government in which the people vote for what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
h/t Mencken

Instapundit has some thoughts. If you leave no witnesses to rat you out, how will they prosecute you? emphasis mine.

Well, we’ll see a lot of vigilante justice. And what are people gonna do about it? Call the cops? Remember, in the end the police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, they’re there to protect criminals from the public. Communities dealt with crime long before police were invented, usually in rather harsh and low-due-process ways. The bargain was, let the police handle it instead. No police, no bargain.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/384041/

Bemjamin Boyce has been covering the recent actions of municipal governments in the region of Olympia to Seattle - he's otherwise known for his documentary coverage of Evergreen State College. His youtube channel has a bunch of coverage elucidating the mindset behind policies of this sort.

It's apparent that a very culty therapy culture has taken hold in the region and it has adopted 'social justice' as its spiritual mission. You see the same psycho-political assumptions and language employed consistently. And the actors tend to use the same tactics, they conceal and misrepresent what they're doing and feel they have the right to put people at risk to 'teach them a lesson'. Their goal is essentially to establish a dictatorship of the oppressed so that they can exact retribution on the public.

You could see the same mindset present in Minneapolis, among the commissioners. That infamous interview with their lead representative, in which she declared that expecting police to protect white people reporting an active break-in was evidence of their 'privilege', and so would no longer happen, was indicative of such beliefs. She even has the same physical attributes and bearing as the people Boyce has covered in Washington. They tend to look a bit new-agey and pallid, and to speak similarly - their language is very sententious and indirect.

A few people have made a connection between BLM's tactics and those of the 'encounter therapy' methods adopted by some radical cults in the early 70's. These folks have the same vibe, and appear to have coordinated with BLM. So you have to wonder what else they are up to.

I read an account of an American who was in a market in Nigeria when a merchant yelled "thief thief" as a young man ran away. The crowd closed around the thief (if he actually was one) and beat him to death and then casually resumed their day. This is what "no police" looks like.

In Chicago when the riots were ongoing, the hispanic gangs blocked streets coming into their neighborhoods and did not let the rioters in. I applaud them in this case but do we really want gangs determining outcomes?

In the 1700s in England, there was not much money for jails so they hung people for all sorts of offenses--like stealing a loaf of bread. Cheap, fast "justice".
The idea that social justice will have some magic way of stopping gangs or rapists is simply delusional. I have not heard a single concrete proposal out of all this "defund" talk. It is all magical thinking.

In the 1700s in England, there was not much money for jails so they hung people for all sorts of offenses--like stealing a loaf of bread. Cheap, fast "justice".
The idea that social justice will have some magic way of stopping gangs or rapists is simply delusional. I have not heard a single concrete proposal out of all this "defund" talk. It is all magical thinking.

cc at July 25, 2020 3:19 PM

That wasn’t as common as you might think. One of the most severe punishments, usually to get rid of the political trouble makers, and not leave grieving families of the executed to encourage rebellion and retribution, was * transportation*
When the American revolution closed off the American colonies as England’s dumping ground, they turned to Australia.

Many of the Scots here in the US are descended from the losers of the Battle of Culloden. I know I am.

I read an account by an Aussie who was riding in a taxi in India with an Indian companion. Driver screwed up, wrecked the car, ran over a kid.

Companion was frantic to get them both out of the taxi *RIGHT NOW* and run the hell away. He explained later that when the crowd came to lynch the driver they might lynch the passengers too.