These are some random things I’ve found when researching the police that I thought was insane about police culture in the United States that didn’t really fit into the reform or defund blog posts. An Aside: Domestic Violence This is something I’ve learned about researching this but isn’t directly tied to the protests and it’s about domestic violence in police families. There hasn’t been a lot of studies on this and most seem to date back to the 90s, but it seems that the percentage of domestic abuse among cops is high. As high as 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, The main things that come from are: – Cops know how to use the system and obviously the partner of a cop is obviously reluctant to report things. – Cops will have their convictions expunged (see things about police union reforms) – There is little repercussions to ...(Read More)

There’s been a lot of calls for #defundthepolice. It initially sounds like people want to get rid of the cops which is usually not the case. There are organizations that are aiming for that like MPD150. They certainly have the goal to get rid of the police entirely in a very long term way but I’m just going to assume that won’t be as politically viable in the United States. Most of the movement is about reducing the funding for the police and directing it to society’s actual problems ahead of time. Why catch the criminal instead of preventing them being one? Background: What do we spend on policing? We spend a lot on policing! So here’s a fun fact. If you’ve never heard the term discretionary and non-discretionary funds it’s an important distinction. Non-discretionary funds must be paid for by commitment or law. This includes things like debt, public ...(Read More)

I’ve been investigating and trying to understand police reforms over the past few weeks but there’s so many posts that it’s overwhelming. Especially as the rallying cry for it as come up more and more. I was hoping to accomplish a few things in this post: 1) Try to create a comprehensive list that talks about the various procedural reforms. 2) Try to focus and articulate my thoughts about all of them. 3) Allow for anyone to discuss or elaborate or counter any thing I’ve brought up here. (Leave comments on Facebook or message me individually). Also acknowledging here that I’m a upper middle class software engineer who lives in San Francisco near a predominately white neighborhood, I am not the target of the police misconduct. I was stopped more by the cops in Japan than I’ve been stopped in the US even though I’ve lived here most of my ...(Read More)

I’ve picked up a few habits over the past few years and I figured I would write about them for my January post. Some of these things are just ways to push my self defeating habits out of the way. Others are to recall and try to get better information that I can collect with minimal effort over the weeks. Weekly prompts I’ve done two prompts over the past year as way to find out what are my biggest sources of joy and happiness and which things are causing me distress. The joys are just a nice way to visualize all the happy things in the year. The sad ones are used to identify if there are things I can change easily and then figure out plans for the ones that might be harder to change. It’s just two prompts once a week: What’s something this week that brought you ...(Read More)

I went on a recent trip (October-November 2019) to Namibia a beautiful country on the southern side of Africa. Honestly, it wasn’t really on my radar until somebody suggested it as a location to go and it had a a diverse set of awesome activities to do. The country divorced itself from South Africa in the 90s and is this huge mostly empty country. The highlights include safari animals (lions, elephants, etc), delicious sea food and the tallest sand dunes in the world. You could do the entire thing on tour but honestly driving yourself around is also pretty reasonable. The big thing is that you have huge distances between the places but having your own car is pretty comfortable to set your schedule. When to go Namibia’s dry season is in September/October which makes finding animals a lot easier as many of them are hanging around the watering holes ...(Read More)