I'm really hoping a couple of my American followers are happy to engage with ek on this topic as I know it can be one that gets a lot of people worked up (although given that most of you guys came to me through jumblr, I like to think you understand nuance).
Now I live in the UK and our police force have plenty of their own issues (if you have seen the news out of the UK recently, you'll be fully aware of yet another scandal) but I have always found the whole ACAB thing very difficult to stomach and I think I've worked out why.
It feels like yet another jargon slang word thrown around by, again, people who want to show that they are Good and Virtuous and On The Right Side Of History without having to do any work or actually put any thought into the fact society is complex. I'm very aware of the systemic racism within the police in US society but the issue I have realised I see from the ACAB crowd is a refusal to engage with what happens if there is no police.
It would be a joy to live in a society where no one commited crime and everyone loved happily together however this is the real world and we all know that this is simply not how it works (and boy oh boy am I familiar with being on the recieving end of death threats and hate speech). So if we had no cops, there would be no one to stop someone wandering into my house, stabbing me and stealing my stuff - other than me of course and I would obviously fight back. There would be no one to enforce the rules of society unless suddenly we went back to mob rule where different groups run protection rackets. Personally, rather than paying some mafioso to keep me safe, I'd prefer to pay a centralised group who are accountable to the entirety of society and have to enforce our shared laws rather than inflict their own personal laws on us. But this is just recreating the police.
So surely, if you want to live in an actual functioning society, you do actually need a police force and the refusal to acknowledge that from many in the ACAB crowd seems completely unhelpful to the desire to actually improve the police.
But then again, this comes from the point of view of a Brit and I know our relationship to the police is very different to that in the US which is why I'd hugely appreciate it if someone of jynUS followers would be willing to share their views/experience on the topic?
So as an American Jew, I feel like I have a somewhat nuanced view here.
On the one hand, the system is broken. US police are trained to think everyone is trying to kill them in a way that makes them have twitchy trigger fingers, and there's a lot of racism/sexism/etc. going on there in a way that's incredibly disturbing. The number of US police who are perpetrators of domestic violence is, frankly, disturbingly high. The number of white supremacists is worse.
So even if we need an institution like the police, it really has to be torn down and completely rebuilt. And it certainly doesn't need to do all its doing. A lot of cases would be much better served by social workers than cops.
On the other hand, we *do* need an institution run by the government that's dedicated to keep people safe, and that's basically what the police are meant to do...at least in the best of worlds.
And I think this is where my experience as a Jew comes into play -- I grew up with cops protecting us, considering how risky it is just being Jewish in America, let alone doing something like going to a synagogue, a known Jewish location, on major Jewish holidays, which are known times for a lot of Jews to gather. At my synagogue, you can literally see the police cars' flashing lights through the stained glass windows during every major service, because the risk of someone attacking the building is just that high that there's cops sitting directly outside it the entire time.
So unlike a lot of US liberals, I do see the good the police can do.
Ultimately, I think we do need police (or, as you say, something very similar), but we also need a serious reckoning with the current state of US police. So yeah. There's no easy answers here, but black and white thinking in either direction (both ACAB and "the police are always there to help you!") isn't helpful.
