A Cop Is A Kind Of Human Trafficker, Or, Why Talking to the Liberals I Love Feels Like Grinding My Face Into Concrete
I was having a conversation with my dad a while back, and the subject of the police came up because my then girlfriend's abusive ex was squatting at her house and neither of us wanted to call the police. He knows I'm an abolitionist, its probably my single most vocal belief. And he says, "I know you've had bad experiences with cops but they're not all bad."
And thats when it occurs to me that he hasn't just disagreed with me during our past conversations on the matter, he literally was not listening. Or, he wasn't equipped to listen. I'll explain later on.
When I was arrested, I was not treated particularly bad by the police, and I've never claimed to have been. I was white, and I was in the closet. From the back of the van they loaded me into after cuffing me, I saw first hand how much worse they treated the black man they arrested on the way to taking me to jail, not even allowing him the dignity of stepping inside his home to dress.
When a liberal hears someone say ACAB, they think they're hearing someone say, in addition to being a police officer, every police officer is a bad person. They're all corrupt, they all beat their partners, etc. And thats closer to the truth than not, genuinely, but its still not what we have ever been saying.
Its not the fault of the acronym, that would be a goofy claim. But a more accurate one could be ACIAKOHT: A Cop Is A Kind Of Human Trafficker.
One of the main things a cop gets paid to do is traffick human beings to do forced labor. When they do this to trans women, this forced labor is sexual, it is sexual slavery, something that the vast majority of people I love will risk in every single interaction they are ever made to have with a police officer. Its a matter of policy, its called V-Coding, google it. Even in cases where no forced labor occurs, they are committing kidnapping.
I love my father, but he isn't equipped to understand this, even to understand that this is the position an abolitionist actually holds, no matter how directly it is stated, because he is white, cis, straight, and petit bourgeois. Every axis he exists on incentivizes him not to understand. Because to him, a cop is someone who exists to protect you and your stuff. Because for someone in his position, thats what they are. I could only hold a negative view of the police, in his mind, if I experienced some particular abuse at their hands. I didn't, except for the part where they kidnapped me. Which is what they get paid to do.
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