what is the best way to explain to someone why all cops are bastards and not just "bad cops" or "American cops"
Okay, this is going to be a longer explanation.
If Iâm going to be honest here, I think that anarchists often oversell this notion, mostly due to a totally legitimate emotional response to oppression that people endure at the hands of the state. This is why youâll often find really frustrating arguments between anarchists and other people that look something like this:
Person: âWell my uncle is a cop, and heâs a nice guy, and he puts his life on the line every day so stop generalizing a whole group of people due to the few bad onesâ
Anarchist: âFuck your uncle, itâs not my fault he decided to be a pigâ
Person: âWell, I never! *huffs away*â
And nobody ever gets anywhere. The problem here is that when anarchists say âAll cops are bastards,â what anarchists actually mean is âthe role of a cop is systemically and inherently immoral, since they violently enforce the power of the ruling class at the severe disadvantage to the poor and marginalized, sometimes including murdering the poor and marginalized with zero repercussions.â And I suppose anarchists could just say that every single time, but it is easier to just say âall cops are bastards.â
But letâs examine that second sentence for a bit. Due to a lot of popular media presentations (like Law & Order), cops are often presented as these heroic figures that do mostly good things like protect people from murderers and stop child predators. But the reality is, the vast majority of things a cop does is not like that at all. You could probably even ask a cop and they would agree with the notion that most of their job is not like that. In fact, the vast majority of things a cop does is enforcing pointless bureaucracy that only serves the ruling classes and oppresses the poor for no reason. You could even say that all a cop really is is a bureaucrat with access to military grade weaponry, and you would be pretty on the nose.
For an example, lets talk about the disparate response to two actually common occurrences that cops often are called in to help with. In one case, we have domestic violence, and in another case, we have someone who is driving a car without a license plate. Okay.
So, if somebody calls the police to help with a domestic abuse situation, often times the cops donât show up until the domestic abuse has already gotten way out of hand. The person being abused has already been harmed to some serious degree. So the police didnât do anything to actually prevent the abuse. Once the police do show up, sometimes the person who is being abused is disbelieved, or the police decide that both sides are to blame. Sometimes the abused person isnât even taken out of harms way of the abuser. If the abused person is believed, then they have to file a bunch of paper work, find a shelter, occasionally pay for a hotel or some other place to go, and generally go through tons of hoops of bureaucracy in order to actually leave harms way. And the police officer is there the entire time ensuring that the proper bureaucratic steps are followed. Thatâs really their job. Thatâs their actual role in the case of a domestic abuse. They have to make sure that all of the proper paperwork is correctly filed and the steps are taken just so. This is why I said in a previous post that 24-hr womenâs shelters and other forms of help against domestic abuse do far more to actually combat domestic abuse than any cop has ever done. Because they are just helping for the sake of helping rather than being the bureaucrat.
Compare this to driving without a license plate. If you drove around town in a car without a license plate, there would be a cop on your tail probably within 15-30 minutes maximum. And if you refused to do what he said, you would probably be handcuffed and whisked off to jail and you would probably be charged with multiple crimes, including possibly resisting arrest, which is a felony. All of that for just not having a license plate on your vehicle and then not doing what the cop asked. None of those things have anything to do with helping anybody. They are just bureaucratic rules put in place by the ruling class. But cops are way more likely to be found enforcing rules like that then actually helping anybody. Because that is their actual job. They are the violent arm of the bureaucratic state.
And all of this without even bringing up the fact that they also have access to military grade weaponry that they can basically use at their own discretion, for any reason, with no real risk of repercussion. And the laws and regulations of the state change all of the time - and cops are basically just told to enforce those rules, no matter what they are. So in a neoliberal capitalist state, they are bureaucrats with access to military grade weapons. But in a fascist state, they easily become concentration camp operators or SS officers. And their role never really changes. They are just the violent enforcers of the state bureaucracy.
So when you have somebody who has an uncle who is a cop, or a cousin, or a parent, or whatever - that is really neither here nor there. Your uncle might be a nice guy who wanted to be a cop to help people. Iâm not saying that isnât true. I have no way of knowing if that is true. All Iâm saying is he isnât actually helping people. That isnât his job. His job is to enforce a bureaucracy that disproportionately benefits the ruling class and oppresses the poor and marginalized.
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