@dreamaux replied to your post “where’s that thread about some northeastern(?) city in america...”
i saw this on twitter https://twitter.com/pixeldreamgirl/status/1269753388851515394 (help ik the article is jacobin but it makes the points necessary). also liberals have been co-opting "abolish the police" with community policing and "sensitive social worker training" rhetoric so camden has been popping up like crazy *crying emoji*
*conflating..... but yes also co-opting i've seen this dumb titok with 20k+ rts that's like "actually we just mean abolish the police /as we know it/ <3"
THANK YOU yeah this was the tweet that i saw screenshots of on facebook. like i Wanna fall back on non-institutionalised community-based programs? teams that are not based in social work? but nextdoor is pretty much informal community policing in practice and reports tend to be full of racialised shit too.
I had an argument with my dad today about what comes after the US police force is abolished and he thinks that once we get rid of police + the laws/unions protecting them, society needs a new set of police from scratch cos “there’s gotta be someone who enforces the laws.” and like maybe my head is way in the clouds but I wanna live in a society where we Don’t need people whose only jobs is to “enforce laws” cos I think as long as our laws don’t protect everyone equally, that as a job description easily segues into power abuse all the same.
but I can’t say that I successfully endorsed community-based anything cos I wanna believe that communities can keep each other safe + accountable but couldn’t think of any good examples up front- plus that would prob require all of us to first commit to being anti-racist and we know our own Asian American community isn’t even ready for that 101 conversation yet 🤣 and I don’t wanna sway him towards “community-led public safety” + Camden as a model lmao he installed security cameras in our own house so clearly he doesn’t think that surveillance is an issue. as long as amazon is still successfully selling fuckin alexas and ring doorbells idk what it’s gonna take for (non-Black, non-Muslim) people to realise that maybe constant surveillance is bad 😳
I think i got a lot of abolitionist reading to do, re: assuming that we already believe that police + prisons should be abolished, what it takes/what a community needs for enforcement of laws to not even be necessary. what I feel like the broad answer ultimately is, though, is that white supremacy/capitalism/maybe even the US itself gotta be upended entirely
