Baby Found Inside One Stolen Car; Armed Teens Found Inside Another

This is why only about 12% of Americans support "defunding the police," when polled about it

There would be more room in jails and prisons if we freed everyone convicted of non violent drug possession charges. The drug war is failed and obsolete.

But people still lack awareness to this extent when they are out in public. Good people must wake up.

FUND THE POLICE! The Drug War failed and now the War on Crime ( which was going well) is now being set up to fail.

Sparkjames, you're right that the war on drugs failed. But the prison population in CT has fallen by 40% from its 2008 peak. The state has closed five adult and one juvenile prisons and parts of others. The legislature decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana in 2011; it is unlikely that anyone whose sole conviction was pot possession is still in prison.

A 13 year old, 14 year old and 15 year old.... with a gun, with warrants out for drugs and stolen cars, inside a stolen car. Children.
Think on that.
A lot of people are going to say, "where are the parents?"
A lot of people are going to say " they are criminals, lock them up."
I say I see three young people, who either don't have parents who know what they're up to, but more likely, and more tragically, they have parents who don't care what they're up to. I see three young people who are on the road to incarceration. I see three young people who desperately need love, guidance, intervention, and somebody to be on their case 24/7 to get them off the track they're currently on. Where are the religious leaders, the community leaders, where are the people in their community who will stand up for these children and prevent them from ruining their lives?
And how many other young people are out there getting into mischief and causing mayhem, not understanding the consequences that they face, and the harm they are causing?
It's time for the community to stand up and for anyone who was a young troublemaker, and who learned the error of their ways, and has since wised up, to reach out to the young people of the community who need their guidance, and make a difference in their lives by getting inlvolved.
Sometimes the people who are the more difficult to love, are the ones who need love the most.

CityYankee,
thanks for admitting the drug war is failed. There are dozens of highly militarized small armies around the country that are awaiting your stand down orders.

A harsh light of reality should be put on the juvey injustice system. The victims are public, the perps are not. They hide under the guise of their age even when they do very adult crimes, cause tens of thousands of dollars in damage and put the public and cops in grave danger.

It is only in a moment of enlightenment that stopped that kid with a gun from getting shot and killed .

Bottom line: These kids are none by cops to be frequent fliers in the system. That's because the injustice system for juveniles provides no justice, no punishment, no accountability. They don't spend time in lockup no matter what they do. There should be serious concern over the quality of the guardian/parent of these kids. Nothing good happens after midnight. If you don't know what you're kid is doing in the middle of the night, there's something wrong.

The Hill is getting quite the rep as a stolen car mecca.

This is craziness. There must be some way to break the cycle.

It is not the job of the police to do anything other than apprehend criminals caught in the act. We already know warrants don't always work. "Defund the Police" was never meant to take funding away from police forces. It was meant to alter the way a police force is funded and to include services that are lacking. For juveniles, it's usually a caring parent and real mental and social supports. New Haven is lagging in education. It's horrible, coupled with a 27% poverty rate and no real youth services in place, the youth can't win. I don't expect anyone to care but policing in most communities is more about hanging out in poor neighborhoods and waiting for black & brown youth to act up. When actually crime rates are no different based on race. You can easily hang out on Yale's campus and rack up arrests for underage drinking, drug possession. You can easily go to the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and find plenty of traders in possession of drugs.

But the police don't stop there, do they? And because most of you don't care about or review good public policy, you swear the police are doing their job. They are actually only doing what they are trained to do. They are trained to view certain communities as subhuman the same way our outgoing president emboldened people to believe in a superiority that does not exist. Keep falling for the same rhetoric and actually, things will never get better. Crime belongs to everyone but only poor communities are dragged out into the media for you to consume. And of course you grow up believing that only certain kinds of people commit crime but the news told you that and your parents backed up that rhetoric with more racist xenophobic talk. @sparkjames we don't need more room in jails. @Heather C. is the only sane voice in this discussion.

Unless you've worked directly with struggling families you are just bystanders wanting the problem to go away and not interested in helping our community's youth.

Sabrina, you and others may not take "defund the police" to mean "taking funding away from police forces." But defund means to reduce or eliminate funding. We need to address the racism and classism that is endemic in the criminal justice system and to provide better supports for struggling families. But "defund the police" is a counterproductive meme.

@Kevin McCarthy I understand the meaning of the word 'defund'. With all due respect, I went to private school and I have 2 master's degrees. From a policy standpoint 'defund the police' is exactly what I said. The police need to partner with other community services to create a new kind of policing. Poor communities are tired of receiving the brunt of policing. Especially when it is militarized.

If white children were gunned down in a manner like Tamir Rice everyone would be singing a totally different tune.

Sabrina, you're right that the response to Tamir Rice's killing would have been very different had he been white (and it is extremely unlikely that a white boy would have been killed under those circumstances). And you're right that "the police need to partner with other community services to create a new kind of policing." I particularly agree with you on the need to de-militarize the police.

In your view, " 'defund the police' was never meant to take funding away from police forces." Here are some dictionary definitions of "defund":

to withdraw money from (Merriam-Webster)
to stop providing funds, esp. government funds for (a program, group, etc.) (Collins)
to stop the flow of funds to (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)
to cancel funding for (Wiktionary)

Words often change their meaning over time. But the dictionary definitions reflect how the people who determine agency budgets understand "defund."

I disagree with Kevin McCarthy's response where he said that a white youth would most likely not have been killed in the same circumstances. That is conjecture and we cannot assert that. Plenty of white people are shot by police. I do agree that "defund" means what he quoted and I oppose that. You can try to educate police officers in certain ways but basically they are there to fight crime and if they are in life/death situations; it is impossible to prepare for what they could face and what they should do. Why is it so important to the woke community that more cops die in the line of duty ? The job is dangerous enough!

CityYankee, Tamir Rice was 12 and unarmed when he was killed. Can you identify a single white child killed by the police under similar circumstances?