Good to know they've responded to the people's critiques of policing by doubling down on the problem. I hope more people start taking seriously the idea that we don't need the police, and in fact any value they may offer society is simply not worth the violence. We could legitimately make our society function better by disbanding the police entirely
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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I think the main argument against disbanding the police is that we'd have no mechanism to prevent violence from former cops. I have no expectation that their behavior will improve if we just stop paying them.
Also if we get rid of the police we might as well get rid of a good chunk of the government while we're at it. One of their core functions is to pass laws and with no enforcement arm there's no point having those.
I usually couldn't care less about electoralism, but if any politician has get rid of police and government as their platform, I will vote for them and campaign SO HARD.
Great news is that would be the last time you'd ever have to vote, too. I wonder what kinds of benevolent folks would step into that power vacuum, fun to think about.
This. The actual job of cops is to protect rich b*stards and their stuff from ordinary taxpayers. And making us pay for our own abuse with our own tax dollars.
If that goes away, they'll just hire mercenaries, instead. They won't give up that protection.
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Easier to throw them in jail when you strip them of qualitative immunity though.
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"The answer is not to defund the police! It's to fund them! Fund them!!" - Joe Biden
And then he proceeded to give them money to buy more tear gas canisters and armored vehicles and liberals are surprise Pikachu face-ing when statistics like this come out.
In 100 years (if the earth lasts that long) I hope people look back at police abolition the way we look back at the abolition of slavery: as an obvious step towards a more equitable society.
For real. We need to deescalate things and I don't think that can start with the populace defending itself to stop defending itself. The cops are bullies. The answer isn't to lay down and wait for teacher to see we're getting beat up. We need to deal with the bullies by demonstrating that we're strong together
Any examples of thriving modern societies without a law enforcement arm?
Easy. The US does not have "law enforcement."
The police have no duty to protect the law and they do not. They protect capital and only respond to crime after the fact.
and if you're not a member of the favored class they won't respond even then. In fact, they might make your situation worse just to do it. I got pickpocketed in Louisville and the police basically told me that not having my wallet anymore was a problem I'd have to navigate on my own. Later that day they busted me for driving without a license and vagrancy because I was trying to leave Louisville to return home to VA.
I cannot emphasize enough that when people ask questions to me when I say we should dissolve the police and start anew with some new mechanism for handling crime such as "who will you call when you're the victim of a crime" my answer is almost never the police because its very rare for them to do anything useful
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My issue with this is the notion that there are thriving modern societies. Our modern world is a complex web of torture and exploitation. The police in my country (the USA) act far more as maintainers of the status quo of torture than they do protectors of the populace from violent crime
In fact, the Courts ruled they don't actually have to protect you at all! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
EDIT: District Court
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Contact the police and tell them that you think that the US police departments are sliding into fascism.
I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.
They sent "mental health professionals" to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?
Anyways if you do start down that path with the police, then expect their family and friends, and the other agencies with access to your locale will begin to show you what fascism looks like in full force.
Fucking worth it.
The psych part is key too - if they can claim you are mentally ill, not only can they ignore your concerns but they also have a convenient way to dump you in a psych word if you get to annoying.
Friendly reminder that 988 = 911!
I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.
They sent “mental health professionals” to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?
And now you know why red flag laws are a bad idea
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So is this what the MAGAs mean when they say crime is going up, or…?
I did a quick dig because I wanted to see if the rise in police homicide would trend with population growth and violent crime rates. It did not.
Violent crime has been pretty stable for the past decade. Growth in police homicide exceeded the population growth rate by about 7%, if I did my math right.
I'd like to investigate more when I have the time.
TBF though, US use of force has been underreported and lacked nationwide statistics for most of the previous decades. If I'm not mistaken, one of the federal agencies who attempted to track it stopped giving annual reports in 2017? Idk I'm kind of fuzzy about that.
The most accurate records of how many people were killed by the police in the US are pretty much from a journalist who counted news pieces or something.
Here's the head of the FBI in a hearing of some sort: "We can't have an informed discussion, because we don't have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the United States, last month, last year, or anything about the demographics."
edit oh yeah the thing I was trying to say in the beginning of the comment comes instantly after that bit: researcher Philip Stinson accumulated over a decades worth of Google alerts on police killings
I am europe based. Can I ask why this is such an issue in the US?
Police aren't legally accountable for their actions so long as they're acting in the performance of their duties, and lots of departments knowingly have illegal policies on the books to maintain that immunity for their officers.
People try to sue over it, but the cases are thrown out by the local judge because there's no standing to sue unless the illegal policy had impacted you, so a cop basically has to kill someone before the policies are modified in the smallest way possible, but the killer cop still gets off.
Additionally, police are allowed to lie in most of their interactions with the public. They have created a culture that encourages dishonesty, so perjury isn't an ethical problem in their eyes.
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The prisons are for profit and the state gets to keep anything it seizes.
ACAB includes European cops, by the way. Just because they're especially bad in the USA doesn't mean yours aren't also trash.
Not sure which country you're in, but how have your cops been handling environmental or climate protests? or protests in support of Palestinians?
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Ignoring problems tends to make them rot faster. Hollywood is superficial, it's all we got. None of the basics are taken care of, it's why I left (e.g. wealth before health). No safety nets, desperation is easy to find. Limited opportunities if you can't afford to do anything. It's an unsustainable way to live, if you call that living. It's more like surviving.
Yeah but I was referring specifically to the police attacks. Cause I hear about it regularly in the news just to see another aggression?
Any parallel between expenses and police violence?
We've been hiring these "police trainers" that have been telling police that their job is super dangerous and anyone can kill them at anytime if they're not ready to kill at the drop of a hat. Then creating bullshit scenarios where grandma passes by in the street and shoots them. Like the lady in the red dress in the matrix training.
Anyways being a cop has a lower chance of getting you killed than being a pizza delivery driver, so these people are ALWAYS ON EDGE but the payoff never comes. So they behave like an immune system when nothing is happening by attacking the body.
So they're beating innocents and abusing criminals left right and centre and there is nothing we seem to be able to do about it other than give them more militarized equipment so they can beat us better while feeling safer doing it.
Don't forget the military surplus from endless wars, and the lack of social services causing mentally ill people from biology or circumstance to further burden an untrained police force (obviously shouldn't be their job to begin with, fuck cops). They can keep throwing money at police, but it won't fix any of the causes and people in general are bad with grasping exponential feedback loops.
...partly it's cultural, partly it's legal immunity from abuses of power...
...law enforcement receives negligible training nor regulation, funds itself on the spoils of abuse, bullies anyone who objects, is immune to accountability, and readily hops jurisdictions in the event of public backlash...
Also anyone that tries to fix the system from the inside tends to get targetted, at least by HR if not by their peers whose corruption they are threatening. The bad apples are in control and have a system to either turn new apples bad or toss them out.
And the police unions are used to avoid reform from above, since pretty much any attempt to discipline is challenged with whatever means available.
And they are a gang with state resources available to help enforce their will, plus inside information about how investigations are run and access to those doing the investigations, should their other lines of defense fail.
It's an issue in many other countries as well and there are a great many contributing factors.
- Race and "Tough on Crime" politics - Ever since the emancipation of slaves on the basis of race, there have been political figures passing discriminatory policy that allows police to pursue and harass people at their own discretion: black laws, Jim Crow era laws, forced segregation, the 1994 Crime Bill, etc.
“We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican, said during a hearing for an anti-riot bill that was enacted in April.
It's clear that you can convince people to deregulate and militarize the police if you convince those people they have a greater enemy. You can see these stances and policy directions mirrored across Europe as refugees and immigration from poorer countries have increased in the last decade.
- Lack of Centralization - The FBI is in charge of investigating police departments, and sometimes you see jurisdiction overlaps which allows other agencies like the DEA, State Marshals, Sheriff's Department, etc to investigate each other, but in general a Police Department is held to no standard but their own until things have already escalated past a point of return.
Some federal programs have tried rewarding PDs that behave well and adhere to specific training or standards, but it's far from enforced.
I wonder if we’ll ever connect the dots. The FBI released a report more than 10 years ago that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Sauce: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Supremacist_Infiltration_of_Law_Enforcement
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