also true when police abolitionists are like āwell weād just create community groups that go stop domestic abuseāā¦.like fam we can barely even get people to do anything but avert eyes and shuffle along when women are beaten up in public. I mean trust meā¦fuck the police I know theyāre already like āoh nooooo our hands are tied! nothing we can do!ā when it comes to domestic abuse survivors. but I donāt think the solution isā¦.shout out the window
#ive never seen a proposed form of community policing that im convinced will work
Having been ostracized by my elementary school community (and by extension, my neighborhood) as a fucking CHILD, community policing gives me the willies. Fuck, no. You just wonāt hear about the bad shit anymore and weird gross things like me who are a little too brown, a little too smart, a little too loud, a little too strange, will die behind closed doors where we canāt bother anyone with our existence anymore.
Yeah. Thereās a lot I donāt like about the institutions weāve developed, but most propositions I see for replacing them seem to look entirely too much like āletās not have any history whatsoever of rethinking whatās fair and not fair.ā
The whole problem with America police is 1. theyāre rarely held accountable for violating the laws that are supposed to maintain justice. And 2. Theyāre not properly screened for violent abusers. The solution to that not to replace them with a completely unregulated force of unscreened, untrained people. And yaāll guna completely forget Trayvon Martin?? Really? He was killed by a community watch volunteer.
Yup. My first thought on ācommunity policingā isnāt āyay, everyone knows everyoneā itās āfifty George Zimmermans are exactly what we need. No Sketchy Youthā¢ will ever menace us with Skittles if theyāre all dead.ā
This violates rule #1 of designing a system of governance: if it requires leaders to think and act just like you in order to work, you really just want to be an omnipotent dictator.
āCops are awful, so what if we were the copsā only works for certain values of āwe,ā as amply demonstrated upthread.
Itās like criticisms of capitalism in which people complain that there are too many different kinds of consumer good X, or thereās a version of consumer good X that is too fancy for anyone to really need. It begs the question āwho the hell are you and why does your arbitrary ideal number of varieties of peanut butter matter more than my ideal number?ā
If you donāt like cops, change the laws about immunity. Rewrite the rules allowing cops to conspire to stick to a story before getting interviewed about an incident. Heck, thereās little stopping a lot of these police abolitionists from being the cop they want to see in the world. A lot of big city departments are always hiring.
But building, maintaining and improving functional systems is hard. Harder than dictator fantasies.
āBut building, maintaining and improving functional systems is hard. Harder than dictator fantasies.ā
Oh look, itās my problem with extremists of pretty much any stripe.
this was a bummer of a thread and Iām sorry followers had to read it but itās also my specific beliefs like. coming from a place where cops will close your head in a door for being a pacifist antiwar protestor to a place where police will sit there and let you throw stuff on em because Free Speech Must Be ProtectedĀ
Specific organizations have specific leaders and specific policies. Those can be changed by continuous interrogation and engagement. Random-ass affiliations of vigilantes tend to hew to the dominant prejudices of their communities as hard as police do, but they do it without any chance at oversight or reform.Ā
Iām sorry, but this entire thread from beginning to end is just repeated displays of ignorance about what the police abolitionist critique of law enforcement actually is. There is something of a point to be made about the way some self-proclaimedĀ āpolice abolitionistsā just want to recreate police with Their People in charge (see: Marxist-Leninists), but if your answer to that is simplyĀ āapply for a job at a police department and be the cop you want to see,ā I cannot overstate just how profoundly youāre missing the entire flipping point.
The criticism of modern law enforcement is first, that they were created to enforce private property norms that emerged in early capitalism during the 1600s, when common land was enclosed and made private for the benefit of wealthy landowners. So right from their very origins, their purpose was to uphold an economic system that police abolitionists almost always oppose. The second is that the police act as a social class thatās entirely separate from the majority of the populace. Law enforcement institutions, by design, are not civilians. That means they have privileges that civilians donāt have, and are shielded from the consequences of their actions. Itās always going to be substantially harder to hold law enforcement accountable to laws, becauseā¦ well, theyāre the ones who enforce them.
For anarchists in particular, we tend to oppose not only law enforcement, but alsoĀ ālawsā in general, since systemic rules that are enforced through the implicit threat of violence is exactly the sort of domination our politics are centered on opposing. There would be norms, certainly, but those norms wouldnāt be created and maintained through institutional violence. If there is anti-social behavior, it wouldnāt be dealt with through a separate class with special privileges and protections.
Cops are bad because they constitute a social class with more power than the people they enforce laws on, and every abuse they are able to get away with stems from that.Ā āCommunity policingā that recreates that same hierarchy of power is of course not a proper way to address the issue, but just keeping that hierarchy intact isnāt either. You canāt justĀ ābe the type of cop you want to seeā if you donāt want anyone to have that kind of authority.
