On Oct 1, 2020, at 12:10, SSJ-Forum Moderator

<ssjmod@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp> wrote:

From: Lawrence Repeta <repeta55@live.com>

Date: 2020/09/27

By the way, I'm not aware of any efforts to "de-fund" the Japanese police. If any Forum members do know of such a development, please send a message.

Why would there be a movement to "de-fund" the Japanese police ? The movement seems to have started in the US as a response to:

1) the over-militarization of local police forces due to the relatively recently uncovered transfer of military surpluses allowed by a Pentagon program that started in 1990 and allegedly (as of 2014) transferred about 5 billion USD worth of equipment to local police forces (to "wage the war on drugs")
2) the defunding of local social services that forces the police forces to answer calls that should otherwise be handled by more relevant public services (for ex. homelessness support, drug addiction support, mental health support, etc.)
3) the lack of proper de-escalation training of local police forces that frequently leads to police shootings in cases where violence was clearly not required (linked to 2) above)
4) the infiltration of white supremacist groups in local police forces that aggravates 3) above.
5) and, of course, the over-policing of poorer areas with the clear objective to increase the income of local police forces.

None of the above phenomenons are seen in Japan, at least certainly not to the scale they are seen in the US (specifically 2) and 5), especially since local forces income sources does *not* directly comes from locally paid fines).

There are probably a number of issues with the Japanese police forces, but I fail to see which one would have the Japanese people ask for their de-funding.

Jean-Christophe Helary
MA student, University of Paris