Abolishing the Police

The guy they were chasing is a murder suspect and committed an additional carjacking during the chase. The fatality was the bystander SUV.

https://twitter.com/MeganHickeyTV/status/1268661967121723394?s=19

One vote against.

I don’t understand the definition of direct action you are using. Typical direct action means things like strikes, blockades, sit-ins. Protests are not normally direct action. The last week has been 95% protests and maybe 5% what I think of as direct action. Certainly the protests are the effective things right now and they are largely about messaging to the electorate and elected.

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Falling behind in the vote already. I’m open to reconsidering my point

The majority of people smarter than me want to " abolish " the police so that makes me want to support it. When in doubt I usually just go with what the majority of smart people think. That said there are some smart people against, but a lot of them are centrists and I’d feel weird siding with centrists instead of my progressives brothers, but I’m having a hard time buying that the majority of dems campaigning on abolishing the police ends in anything other than Trump winning like 45+ states.

I think its a goal we can work towards. Starting with defunding the police a lot, but I also think the biggest thing being missed is accountability. I think a huge reason why cops are the way they are is because there are 0 consequences.

I think the idea of making civil suits coming out of their pension funds would shape these fuckers up real quick.

Then again I have no real answer for how to hold them accountable because even when it makes it to a jury trial they’re found innocent like 99% of the time, so how the fuck do you fix that.

Long post to say I’m undecided, it’s a tough call.

Just remember that a lot of ā€œsmart peopleā€ have absolutely zero common sense.

The police is abolished, someone becomes the victim of a violent crime. What happens next?

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I agree that protesting is not normally considered Direct Action. But the cops arent gassing people because they are afraid of protest. In my opinion the gassing/beating happens so that those protesting can’t effectively organize and start doing the DA.

I think the vast majority of them are for replacing it. But they want to abolish it first so they can start from the ground up.

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Part of what is driving this confusion is everyone who says ā€œabolish the policeā€ means something different. Some mean it literally. Others mean dramatically reduce their power. Still others mean it as a pure political rhetoric.

Everyone is arguing past each other.

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Are they? And if yes, replace it with something other than police?

Then they should come out and say that instead. Who here is even arguing that the US police doesn’t need a complete overhaul?

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The traffic/automobile discussion seems like a pretty good toy model for the larger problem. I can imagine a whole spectrum of approaches to traffic, including things like.

  • Complete anarchy. No rules or regulations. Bring your horse, your tank, the motorcycle your 10 year old built from stuff they made on a 3d printer and have a great time going just as fast or slow as you want wherever you want.
  • We regulate the types of vehicles that can be operated on the roads, put up some speed limits and traffic lights and expect that most people will obey the rules. But the enforcement mechanisms are pretty weak, maybe some red light cameras, speed cameras, reliance on insurance companies to not cover vehicles that are not up to code. Maybe some unarmed traffic safety officers show up when accidents happen in order to divert traffic and prepare reports for insurance purposes.
  • Unarmed road safety enforcement officers that proactively enforce laws that threaten safety (running red lights, speed well in excess of the limits), but don’t proactively enforce non safety related issues (like, say, expired tags) or investigate other crimes (if they catch you speeding, they don’t have authority to search your car for drugs). Because everyone knows they are unarmed and that they will not be digging for evidence of other crimes, a traffic stop is less dangerous for all involved.
  • Current situation where the police are asked to do the full gamut of tasks from assisting at the scene of an accident, to writing a ticket to the person who got a little bit of a lead foot because their favorite song just came on and that thing really slaps, to drug interdiction along major highways.

I imagine lots of people could come down on different places on the spectrum, but, to me, it seems clear that where we are now is a pretty extreme position.

Can we start with a list of what the police actually do?

  • Traffic violations
  • Parking violations
  • If your car is broken into they will write up a police report you can file with your insurance and then not investigate.

anything else?

Not at all. I simply think that massive police overhauls are extremely live to happen right now if the Charlie Brown left doesn’t try to kick the abolishPolice&PropertyWhileYoureAtIt football one more time.

I’m not sure I agree. The cops are gassing people more because they are scared of the protesting than the direct action, like vandalism.

They see the message working. They see their power being widely questioned. They see it slipping away. They are far more comfortable in interactions involving vandalism. They think they win that messaging war. They are scared they lose the protesting one. The ā€œI can’t breatheā€ scares them far more than any broken windows so they lash out with violence because they See their social license to violence slipping away.

I definitely don’t think Biden should campaign on Abolishing the Police. Abolish ICE is probably going too far if he still hopes to win. A lot of Americans suck :man_shrugging:.

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You know I like my rome comparisons, although I’m aware it was so long ago it isn’t relevant at all. But listening to Dan Carlin it sounds like Rome not having something similar to police caused a massive amount of problems. People would form gangs, not like our gangs but political gangs. They would use these gangs to legit take over politics and gain massive amounts of power. I could absolutely see conservatives patrolling voting booths with AR-15s and forcing the vote to go their way. Although they’re mostly old fat cowards so if young people actually wanted to get involved in politics we would totally kick the shit out of them and uno reverse card them real quick.

But these gangs would take over, which made the political leaders call in a dictator who would bring in the army to crush the gangs. USA wouldn’t survive a single one of those happening because nobody would ever give up power here.

If you think neighborhood watch is gonna stop the MAGAs from patroling with AR15s forcing you to vote how they want you definitely wrong. So we’d have to out gun them.

I dunno I’m rambling nonsense, I just wanted to do a rome comparison tbh

We don’t have to go all the way to ancient Rome. Look at what happens in the Mexican states that have been taken over by drug cartels.

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Well I mean if people here are confused and not sure you’re 100% fucked six ways from sunday with the general populace.

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