My NYT article headlined “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish The Police” is provoking a lot of questions already answered by the headline.
I don’t refuse to discuss police reform. For example, requiring all or most officers to live wherever they work would be a good reform. Fewer police. Many of them routinely not carrying fire arms. Much less military type equipment. I’m happy to talk about police reforms.
I know the world is full of bloodthirsty law and order xenophobic nationalistic patriotic bootlickers and there’s never going to be no state and no police and no borders. Duh. But still, Abolish the Police!
“Abolish the Police” is kind of like “Repeal and Replace”. People might think it’s a good idea in theory, but ultimately, they’re going to balk unless you convince them that a world without the police/Obamacare is better than the status quo. It’s really easy to be against something. It’s a lot harder to be for something.
Abolish the Police works if you whip people up into a frenzy where they are so mad at the cops that they think that anything must be better than this, the “what do you have to lose” argument. This can be done by treating cops as the Other and saying that there is no such thing as a good cop, or that they are so few that you can treat them as such.
If we talk about guillotines for billionaires, then why not guillotines for cops? I’m not quite there yet, but I’m open to being convinced that is the appropriate line to take.
Police reform:
Cops don’t get guns anymore.
We start a national tracking website, and count each time a copy gets murdered on duty.
When the count gets to 5 or 10 or X, they get their guns back, and the tally goes back to 0 and we start counting cops killing citizens.
Rinse, repeat, and profit?
Does anyone other than you talk about guillotines?
There’s also this group, of which I am not a member:
Maybe one of those slightly resembled being serious. Maybe not. But, maybe that’s your point. You’re here to make fun of liberals and their histrionics.
What exactly do we have to lose?
Peaceful protests were brutally crushed.
Violent protests and beyond met minimal resistance.
I don’t need to label the groups.
Police abolition largely already exists for white supremacists and for the rich.
We still pay to be policed.
This is a very short FAQ
It features the following
“Sure, in this long transition process, we may need a
small, specialized class of public servants whose job is to
respond to violent crimes.”
The goal is not in fact, to Thanos snap all police and do nothing afterwards.
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If they don’t like the first amendment they’re free to secede imo.
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While offensive language and personal insults are protected by the First Amendment, “fighting words” that have a tendency to incite a confrontation are not protected by the First Amendment. (See Chaplinsky v New Hampshire.)
I would expect the Supreme Court in its current configuration to uphold at least part of this, if it becomes a law. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Court vote 9-0 to uphold the part about “gestures or other physical contact that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response” if this leads to a court case.
Touching a cop has always been assault when they want it to be. That’s nothing new. I know someone who was beaten and arrested because she touched a cop with one finger after being dared to do it by the cop.
I expect this SCOTUS to not uphold that telling a cop you want to defund them is an assault even if you call them a pig.
Can we assume there is an exception for Karens or other white people?
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I don’t see Sotomayor voting for that.
I would expect her to uphold the “fighting words” doctrine as an exception to the First Amendment, but not necessarily to agree that whatever incident prompted the court case was an example of fighting words. She would probably end up writing an opinion that was a concurrence in part and a dissent in part if this came before the SCOTUS.
This is my favorite part. “Fuck you! Unless you’re poor, then fuck you extra hard!”
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Tell the police to fuck off and you have to treat capital gains as ordinary income for 3 months!
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This will just force them to hodl which will invariably make more them more money as their stonks will stonk.