I'd be amazed if they even got a response

>Imagine everyone broken their arm at the same time, A+E would collapse, orthopaedics would collapse, any requirement for surgery would be overwhelmed (it is needed in 2 weeks), there would be no ability to get people effective rehabilitation, and people would start dying from complications of broken arms.

Excellent example. The biggest risk with something like COVID are the huge waves of cases that overwhelm response systems. Sure, the vast majority of hospitalized people will survive with some supplemental oxygen, but if you only have enough tanks and masks for half of them the death rate skyrockets.

Bear in mind there's usually a concerted effort to brigade those types of stories.

I know someone who had their rent hiked nearly $500 last year (50% increase). By some standards that's a pretty reasonable hike all things considered.

The other stuff is some shady nickle and time stuff for sure, but just putting it in perspective.

Well, it's been demonstrated over and over again that the best way to reduce crime is to reduce poverty. Social programs for violence intervention, better education, etc have all been better correlated to long term crime reduction than increased policing. As I mentioned, these things are outside the purview of RPD. IMO, police are better equipped to solve crimes than directly prevent it, so there should be a greater emphasis on that (and coincidentally less blame for failing to prevent it than what OP has given them). If the police demonstrated an actual ability to solve crimes and make people's lives better through that over some of the tactics we've seen in the past (there are good reasons these communities avoid involving police), you'd certainly see more cooperation and better relations between these communities and police in general.

Definitely a factor, but I want draw a distinction between preventing and solving crime.

Lol Yes, been ages since I went through The Wire so brainfarted on the name.

I don't think it took a lot of resources given how open they were about it lol The raid itself, maybe but I don't think they needed a team of detectives working the case for months or anything. Stopping street murders though? That takes a lot of resources and ones RPD don't actually control. Lest anyone think I'm actually defending RPD, I actually view the general inability of police to prevent such crimes to be a good indicator that they need to do a lot of stuff differently. I'm just trying to be consistent in acknowledging that there's not too much they could have done to prevent said murder in the first place.

The Happy Trees dude only got nailed because he was flaunting the law hard. They probably would have left the pop ups alone if they hadn't branched out into shrooms and stuff. They were very quickly morphing from a pot based grey market to a black market, and within a few months probably would've gone full Hamster Town based on the trajectory. He's like the last person we want to be the face of legal retail weed.

I'll be the first to say RPD routinely has their priorities messed up, but let's not pretend some great injustice was brought down on Happy Trees.