Aug 17, 2020 12:46 AM
(This post was last modified: Aug 17, 2020 12:51 AM by C C.)
The movement to defund police has won historic victories across the US. What's next?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020...-what-next
EXCERPT: . . . In the past two months, a dozen municipal governments voted in favor of proposals that they say will reduce their local law enforcement budgets by a total of more than $1.4bn, including in major US cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia. The defunding votes included proposals to remove police as responders for “non-criminal” calls, homeless services, traffic enforcement, mental health emergencies, substance abuse, public transit and other areas of social service that advocates have long argued do not merit armed law enforcement responses. School officials in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver, Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia also followed Minneapolis’ lead, voting to reduce police presence in schools or completely end contracts with local law enforcement agencies.
The cuts mark a significant reversal in American politics, where police budgets have for decades consistently expanded, with governments hiring more officers to respond to all sorts of social challenges, passing laws that criminalize poverty and building larger jails and prisons. The shift is a testament to this year’s sustained protests and the long-term work of Black Lives Matter groups. The fine print of some of the defunding proposals adopted so far, however, has yielded mixed reactions from activists, including criticisms that the changes are only cosmetic reforms meant to appease protesters, and that the scale of the divestment so far has been minuscule relative to activist proposals.
The movement has also sparked aggressive backlash from some police chiefs and unions, including high-profile resignations, reports of organized “sick-outs” by officers to protest the changes, and unsubstantiated and false claims linking defunding votes to a rise in crime. “It’s a huge and substantial shift,” said Chris Harris, a community organizer in Austin, Texas, where the city council voted this week to cut $150m from the police budget. “But it needs to just be a first step. This is still a far cry from community demands.” (MORE - details)
Hollywood Apocalypse: The rich and famous are fleeing in droves
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...roves.html
EXCERPTS: Gold's Gym has become synonymous with the Hollywood Dream. [...] Yet today Gold's sits amid post-apocalyptic scenes which have consumed much of LA, turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people are fleeing in droves.
Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies – all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific. Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes. TV bulletins are filled with horror stories from across the city; of women being attacked during their morning jog or residents returning home to find strangers defecating in their front gardens.
Today, Los Angeles is a city on the brink. 'For Sale' signs are seemingly dotted on every suburban street as the middle classes, particularly those with families, flee for the safer suburbs, with many choosing to leave LA altogether.
British-born Danny O'Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. 'There is a mass exodus from Hollywood,' he says. 'And a lot of it is to do with politics.' His business is booming. 'August has already set records and we are only halfway through the month,' he tells me. 'People are getting out in droves. Last week I moved a prominent person in the music industry from a $6.5 million [£5 million] mansion above Sunset Boulevard to Nashville.'
O'Brien, 58, who moved to LA from London 34 years ago, is also planning to move to Tennessee. 'Liberal politics has destroyed this city,' he says. 'The homeless encampments are legal and there's nothing the police can do. White, affluent middle-class folk are getting out. People don't feel safe any more.'
With movie studios still shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic and businesses only just starting to remove the wooden boards put up after city-wide rioting following the death of George Floyd while being arrested by three white officers in Minneapolis, LA is now in the grip of white flight.
[...] The virus only made matters worse. There are homeless encampments in some of the most instantly recognisable tourist traps. Stretches of Hollywood Boulevard - embedded with glittering stars representing those who achieved their dream of fame and fortune - resemble a Third World shanty town rather than the heart of America's second-largest city.
[...] Car parks beside the beach in Santa Monica - a popular tourist destination for Britons - are filled with bashed-up motorhomes, each housing several people. The authorities have even put portable toilets on the streets to try to stop the homeless relieving themselves on private property. The Westwood area of LA, home to some of the most upmarket blocks of flats in the city, has been renamed 'West Hood' by locals appalled by rising crime.
Veteran publicist Ed Lozzi says: 'The city was changing before coronavirus brought us to our knees. The homeless problem has been escalating for years, exacerbated by weak politicians making bad decisions. Hollywood has always been the wokest of the woke, so politicians have done nothing to stop people sleeping on the streets. It's not illegal and the weather's nice, so they keep coming. There is insufficient housing, inadequate mental health care. Add in Covid and it's a perfect storm. When I first arrived in LA 40 years ago, the town smelled of orange blossoms. Now the streets stink of urine. There is a beautiful park in Westwood but you can't go there because there are people slumped on the ground and you step on a carpet of needles. White flight is real. The elites and middle classes are leaving. People are taking losses on the sales of their homes to get out.' (MORE - details)
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The cynic's feast: So...? The applicable, poseur population promotes and gives lip-service to these policies over the years, then packs-up and leaves when the consequences are reaped? The tragedy of those who can easily afford mobility, and are without roots, heavily facilitating these decisions for the overall local population? When they themselves won't have to live in the disastrous results, can conveniently leave such behind? The "what happens" when the rich and famous and a significant part of the upper-middle class vocally and superficially pretend to be Gospel of Woke devotees, when they really are not in practice, or where and when it matters?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020...-what-next
EXCERPT: . . . In the past two months, a dozen municipal governments voted in favor of proposals that they say will reduce their local law enforcement budgets by a total of more than $1.4bn, including in major US cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia. The defunding votes included proposals to remove police as responders for “non-criminal” calls, homeless services, traffic enforcement, mental health emergencies, substance abuse, public transit and other areas of social service that advocates have long argued do not merit armed law enforcement responses. School officials in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver, Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia also followed Minneapolis’ lead, voting to reduce police presence in schools or completely end contracts with local law enforcement agencies.
The cuts mark a significant reversal in American politics, where police budgets have for decades consistently expanded, with governments hiring more officers to respond to all sorts of social challenges, passing laws that criminalize poverty and building larger jails and prisons. The shift is a testament to this year’s sustained protests and the long-term work of Black Lives Matter groups. The fine print of some of the defunding proposals adopted so far, however, has yielded mixed reactions from activists, including criticisms that the changes are only cosmetic reforms meant to appease protesters, and that the scale of the divestment so far has been minuscule relative to activist proposals.
The movement has also sparked aggressive backlash from some police chiefs and unions, including high-profile resignations, reports of organized “sick-outs” by officers to protest the changes, and unsubstantiated and false claims linking defunding votes to a rise in crime. “It’s a huge and substantial shift,” said Chris Harris, a community organizer in Austin, Texas, where the city council voted this week to cut $150m from the police budget. “But it needs to just be a first step. This is still a far cry from community demands.” (MORE - details)
Hollywood Apocalypse: The rich and famous are fleeing in droves
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...roves.html
EXCERPTS: Gold's Gym has become synonymous with the Hollywood Dream. [...] Yet today Gold's sits amid post-apocalyptic scenes which have consumed much of LA, turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people are fleeing in droves.
Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies – all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific. Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes. TV bulletins are filled with horror stories from across the city; of women being attacked during their morning jog or residents returning home to find strangers defecating in their front gardens.
Today, Los Angeles is a city on the brink. 'For Sale' signs are seemingly dotted on every suburban street as the middle classes, particularly those with families, flee for the safer suburbs, with many choosing to leave LA altogether.
British-born Danny O'Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. 'There is a mass exodus from Hollywood,' he says. 'And a lot of it is to do with politics.' His business is booming. 'August has already set records and we are only halfway through the month,' he tells me. 'People are getting out in droves. Last week I moved a prominent person in the music industry from a $6.5 million [£5 million] mansion above Sunset Boulevard to Nashville.'
O'Brien, 58, who moved to LA from London 34 years ago, is also planning to move to Tennessee. 'Liberal politics has destroyed this city,' he says. 'The homeless encampments are legal and there's nothing the police can do. White, affluent middle-class folk are getting out. People don't feel safe any more.'
With movie studios still shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic and businesses only just starting to remove the wooden boards put up after city-wide rioting following the death of George Floyd while being arrested by three white officers in Minneapolis, LA is now in the grip of white flight.
[...] The virus only made matters worse. There are homeless encampments in some of the most instantly recognisable tourist traps. Stretches of Hollywood Boulevard - embedded with glittering stars representing those who achieved their dream of fame and fortune - resemble a Third World shanty town rather than the heart of America's second-largest city.
[...] Car parks beside the beach in Santa Monica - a popular tourist destination for Britons - are filled with bashed-up motorhomes, each housing several people. The authorities have even put portable toilets on the streets to try to stop the homeless relieving themselves on private property. The Westwood area of LA, home to some of the most upmarket blocks of flats in the city, has been renamed 'West Hood' by locals appalled by rising crime.
Veteran publicist Ed Lozzi says: 'The city was changing before coronavirus brought us to our knees. The homeless problem has been escalating for years, exacerbated by weak politicians making bad decisions. Hollywood has always been the wokest of the woke, so politicians have done nothing to stop people sleeping on the streets. It's not illegal and the weather's nice, so they keep coming. There is insufficient housing, inadequate mental health care. Add in Covid and it's a perfect storm. When I first arrived in LA 40 years ago, the town smelled of orange blossoms. Now the streets stink of urine. There is a beautiful park in Westwood but you can't go there because there are people slumped on the ground and you step on a carpet of needles. White flight is real. The elites and middle classes are leaving. People are taking losses on the sales of their homes to get out.' (MORE - details)
- - -
The cynic's feast: So...? The applicable, poseur population promotes and gives lip-service to these policies over the years, then packs-up and leaves when the consequences are reaped? The tragedy of those who can easily afford mobility, and are without roots, heavily facilitating these decisions for the overall local population? When they themselves won't have to live in the disastrous results, can conveniently leave such behind? The "what happens" when the rich and famous and a significant part of the upper-middle class vocally and superficially pretend to be Gospel of Woke devotees, when they really are not in practice, or where and when it matters?