Abolishing the Police

Politics & News
1121

I was thinking the same thing the other day. Almost everyone viscerally reacts when a police car is behind them or is walking nearby.

It’s all because their agenda has them inflicting hostility and aggression into every single encounter. It’s dumb.

I think most cops on traffic duty are just gambling. They profile a car/driver, pull them over hope to see some pretext to search the vehicle and harass the occupants. One in a million results in a bad hombre being removed from the roads. They yell JACKPOT

1122

Do people react because they think they are driving unsafe or because they are worried about a confrontation with police?

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1123

I assume a little of both. I just want to make sure I’m not going over the speed limit and nothing else is amiss.

1124

Yah I’m sure there are some sinister motivations and other bad historical stuff, but in much the same way that cops trying to hide and catch people to give them tickets to make fine $ makes people habitually pucker when they see them, it must also have had a legacy of change in the way police view the public (i.e. as targets to hunt down and extract value from).

1125

Traffic and even parking tickets eff up people who aren’t rich. If it’s about deterrence it should all be on a sliding scale or time in jail or caning or nothing. Something that deters people more or less the same.

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1126
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1128

More annoying? Maybe.

Worse? I’m not sure. Cameras never shot anybody.

1129

Anyone want to tell me what they do to tourists who are caught speeding?

1130

That’s because (and full disclosure, I’ve made the same argument myself more than once; saying the cops started as slave patrols is wildly effective rhetoric!) the argument is inherently fallacious. Of course they were slave patrols, we were a fucking slaver colony. Then slavery was abolished and hypercapitalist wage slavery became the rage so the cops enforced that. When we become an egalitarian _____ and just ____ with all good things and ____ then there will be civil servants who help enforce that, and if you don’t want to call them police then fine, that might be a good idea from a branding perspective (I hope this irony isn’t lost on anybody) but let’s not get too cute.

It’s like, I feel like we’re close (I mean, relatively, really close) so it’s time to put the fancy play syndrome aside. I’ve been around and involved with this all my life to various degrees, I know what the rhetoric is and why it’s deployed, but I also know how the rabbit is pulled out of the hat. You have to work some magic to get people on your side but once they are mostly, it’s time for the grown-up talk.

Then again, maybe I’m just too jaded and should stfu, because my prevailing sentiment (as always, present company excluded, I’m talking about the lowest common denominator seen around the larger internet) is still that abolition concepts are purposefully obfuscated because the espousers actually don’t want them to succeed. Dogs don’t really actually want to catch the car and get a snoutful of bumper and tailpipe. This is what I meant in some other long ass post about change being scary. It’s not about the privileged being scared of giving up something, it’s about forming your life and identity around being a part the of oppressed engaged in the righteous fight and facing the fear of giving all that up and having the responsibility of what happens if you actually, like, win.

1131

I mean, @LouisCyphre and @ChrisV and @anon10396289 are far from idiots and especially with Ked their reactions really boil down to, “Ok, this abolition rhetoric sounds great but you do know that, post-abolition, you’re basically still just describing a police force, right?”

1132

If we need to patrol around with guns to protect people from bad guys we should rotate (like mods). Is that a police force?

1134

Even if I or you say no, it’s pretty easy to understand how somebody could say yes. Somebody policing something.

1135

What if it’s really unorganized (really self-organized)? Like a pick-up basketball game version. Or like Food-Not-Bombs. Sure there’s “policing”, but there’s not a “police force”.

1136

Based on what you know about me, why would you assume I didn’t and haven’t thoroughly factored all that in when I made that post and previous posts?

1137

I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of community defense groups because I don’t think I would prefer them to the police as we currently know them if I lived in a community where Trump got over 50%.

1138

If you abolish capitalism, you probably need a police-like organization to enforce the dissolution of capitalism.

1139

2016 police poll

image

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1140

I’m leaning towards yes but regardless my larger issue is once we get to the point where we’re discussing whether or not a force who polices is a police force, we’ve gone wildly off track.

1141

I’m aware of that, but I fear an untrained horde of Trump supporters cos-playing as cops more than a trained horde of Trump supporters cos-playing as the military.

1142

This should explain my stance better: I’ve never wanted to talk about it because, honestly, it’s the thing that made me jaded and hate everybody, and I only alluded to it once, here,

The focus was on juveniles who were tried and convicted as adults. So, murderers. Mostly poor black juveniles from Chicago. We actually corresponded heavily with these kids and that’s what preempted the idea of the book. Doing any advocacy in this regard can’t help but get you involved in the prison abolition movement.

So that was the start of losing my faith. It was like, talking in these circles, “Ok, that’s great that all your guys are apparently members of the church choir who plant flower beds, but my guys have multiple murders under their belt at the age of 16, like, actual fucking murderers, so what about them?”

This is why I get beyond infuriated when I see the responses to people trying to police (heh) the message, saying “abolish the police” is a bad slogan. Like yeah, the majority of them are being dishonest, fuck them, but for God’s sake the whole “abolish the police” slogan is a repurposing of the prison abolition message! Everybody has been fucked with by the police. Even well-to-do white people get a little sketched out, and barring that there’s the recent posts itt about ridiculous traffic stop ticket quotas and other nonsense. That’s all a way easier message than, “What about the 16yo murderers?”

Because, my kids were good kids and there but for the grace of God goes anyone else’s kids. I don’t need anybody to talk down to me about the ideal post-capitalist society resulting in a reduction or elimination of crime and “crime” and subsequently the PIC, mfs, holy shit, that’s my entire point in calling them fundamentally good kids! Why do you think (lol this is assuming people actually read my posts even though I post like nobody does) I’ve more than once derided and mocked and laughed-at-to-keep-from-crying the concept of posting Trayvon Martin’s prepubescent pictures? Fine, Trayvon was disappointingly not a cat burglar and was closer to an angel than not, that’s great, but that’s why I’m not concerned about him (conceptually, duh, specifically it’s a fucking tragedy) because he’s not where the rubber meets the road.

In short, it’s whatever, this is just me offering one of my standpoints in these discussions.

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