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NutDraw t1_j9g2b1a wrote

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.

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jl55378008 t1_j9gorb5 wrote

>Hamster Town

You mean Hamsterdam? lol

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NutDraw t1_j9gq2rm wrote

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

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idgafau5 t1_j9g8mma wrote

When I saw vendors selling shrooms, I knew it wouldn't last.

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Gwala_BKK t1_j9k410u wrote

Damn I’ve been looking for shrooms too. Would have been nice

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Hiltson87 t1_j9h4pmd wrote

Didn't help they were openly doing it at their legit business either.

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RiverYuppy OP t1_j9g30ko wrote

I don't think it's some great injustice that Happy Trees got brought down.

My issue is that it doesn't feel like there are the appropriate amount of resources being allocated to a situation I think is far worse. Happy Trees is just a case of visible misallocation of resources to me.

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fusion260 t1_j9g8ygt wrote

I think you're conflating the problems Richmond is having with policing and its public image overall with one specific policing event out of many that happened that same day—Except the two murders this article is referring to happened in a completely different week and time of day than the Happy Trees bust.

By saying "appropriate amount of resources," it sounds like you're thinking a majority of RPD's time that day and the days that led up to it were spent on this single bust, when in reality, the resources used likely totaled a small portion of one precinct's staffing.

It's the same type of argument people use on "why spend time and money on removing monuments than our schools?" when there are separate budgets and funds and teams for multiple things.

As shameful as RPD's public image has been these past few years, they are able to do multiple things at once because they have several precincts, units, and investigations going on at the same time.

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NutDraw t1_j9g502w wrote

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.

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choicebutts t1_j9j3vie wrote

It takes a lot of work to solve homicides because the public won't talk to the police when they know something.

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NutDraw t1_j9jhsao wrote

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

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StillPsychological45 t1_j9jii8h wrote

How would you prevent crime?

Sounds like minority report

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NutDraw t1_j9kcchr wrote

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.

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