ACAB (formerly G Floyd) - Tyre Nichols video released, it's bad

[6ix]

@Danspartan

I strongly suspect it had to do with the video and less with integrity.

Yeah, I feel like it had to do with Chauvin giving up the game. I mean, even shooting a fleeing suspect in the back can be chalked up to the heat of the moment, a panicked cop in the midst of an altercation, etc, despite everybody knowing that’s immoral and unethical bullshit. But with Chauvin the altercation was over, and the public isn’t supposed to see the placid, detached evil that happens in between altercations. The curtain was pulled back to show a whole separate thing.

[microbet]

On the right track. What he’s doing is kidnapping and attempting to keep that person prisoner potentially for many years.

[6ix]

The gravity of it is so extreme I don’t fault people for not internalizing the entire thing. It’s so indescribably obscene.

[microbet]

This is something for West Wingy rainbow and unicorn reformers and not pragmatic clear headed realistic abolitionists, but the incentives suck here. Somehow it’s a good for cops if they arrest a lot of people and those arrests lead to convictions. Their careers advance and they make money based on it.

[Danspartan]

For a culture that specifically separated black men from their families to call out black men being separate from their families…

[boredsocial]

This is really the whole ballgame as I see it. The issue we have is that cops are currently incentivized to catch people doing crimes in high volume and get rewarded when those people get convicted. That very strongly pushes cops to catch people doing obvious stuff who can’t mount much of a defense. That’s going to push them toward focusing on minorities, the mentally ill, the homeless, and basically anyone else who can’t defend themselves. The reason black cops tend to be just as bad as white cops is that they have the same incentive structure to navigate, and no institution is immune from bad incentives triggering significant wrongdoing when the going gets tough.

If you really look at the world through the eyes of a cop who is looking to get a good performance review and stay on the career cop / promotion track there is absolutely no incentive to hunt difficult to catch professional criminals and every incentive to carefully watch poor people, preferably POC poors but poor whites will do in a pinch, and wait for them to make a mistake they can be charged for.

Meanwhile in the exact same time and place there are professional criminals who put in the absolutely minimum level of effort into not being easy to catch operating damn near in the open and the cops can’t be bothered to even test them because hassling poor people is a much better use of an hour of work for their stats.

I’m on team abolish because I know that every single cop from the most senior to the most junior has spent their entire career in a system built on hassling the poor instead of chasing robbers/rapists, and I honestly don’t think they’re qualified to play the chasing robbers/rapists game on a professional level. I don’t think they have any real expertise, I don’t think the people who trained them decades ago had any real expertise, and I think starting over is a much more realistic way to get what we actually need (and we do need law enforcement because there really are very predatory people out there) out of law enforcement.

Our prison population should be <10% of what it is now and those prisons should be oriented entirely toward rehabilitating people, and in the case of people with really serious personality disorders who really are super dangerous to the public humane storage. If Scandinavian prison costs too much per prisoner we should quarter the budget and then make them release as many as it takes to make the numbers crunch.

[6ix]

@JohnnyTruant

I have not clicked any of the links about it, either.

Um. You probably should, a whole lot of this would start to make a whole lot more sense. I did say nobody in this thread is fundamentally disagreeing with you.

Like,

Ship of Theseus

[MysteryConman]

Because of the interconnected-ness between abolitionist movements, and specifically Abolishing Police and Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex, I feel that insight and understanding can be drawn from reading sources that are focused on either topic.

Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? is available for free online.

This excerpt from the second chapter, provides historical perspective to abolitionist movements.

Chapter 2. Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison

The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not conceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind. Although as early as the American Revolution antislavery advocates promoted the elimination of African bondage, it took almost a century to achieve the abolition of the “peculiar institution.” White antislavery abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics. When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an antislavery orator, white people-even those who were passionate abolitionists-refused to believe that a black slave could display such intelligence. The belief in the permanence of slavery was so widespread that even white abolitionists found it difficult to imagine black people as equals.

It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally disestablish the "peculiar institution. Even though the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to be embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted for many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures such as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually legitimized during the first half of the twentieth century. The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct legal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these efforts to abolish lynching.

Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a century after the abolition of slavery. Many people who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined by racial equality. When the governor of Alabama personally attempted to prevent Arthurine Lucy from enrolling in the University of Alabama, his stance represented the inability to imagine black and white people ever peaceably living and studying together. “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” are the most well known words of this politician, who was forced to repudiate them some years later when segregation had proved far more vulnerable than he could have imagined.

Although government, corporations, and the dominant media try to represent racism as an unfortunate aberration of the past that has been relegated to the graveyard of U.S. history, it continues to profoundly influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors. Nevertheless, anyone who would dare to call for the reintroduction of slavery, the organization of lynch mobs, or the reestablishment of legal segregation would be summarily dismissed. But it should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation.

I have referred to these historical examples of efforts to dismantle racist institutions because they have considerable relevance to our discussion of prisons and prison abolition. It is true that slavery, lynching, and segregation acquired such a stalwart ideological quality that many, if not most, could not foresee their decline and collapse. Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples, we can point to movements that assumed the radical stance of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions. It may help us gain perspective on the prison if we try to imagine how strange and discomforting the debates about the obsolescence of slavery must have been to those who took the “peculiar institution” for granted-and especially to those who reaped direct benefits from this dreadful system of racist exploitation. And even though there was widespread resistance among black slaves, there were even some among them who assumed that they and their progeny would be always subjected to the tyranny of slavery.

I have introduced three abolition campaigns that were eventually more or less successful to make the point that social circumstances transform and popular attitudes shift, in part in response to organized social movements.

The parallels between current and past abolitionist movements and the contemporaneous popular reactions to them, gives me hope that eventually humanity will view the abolition of prisons and police in the same light as that of slavery.

For the institutions that promulgate human exploitation, misery, and suffering; may there be a day in the not so distant future where George Wallace’s infamous campaign pledge on segregation will be turned on its head: “Abolition today, abolition tomorrow, abolition forever!”

[superuberbob]

I feel like I’m watching a bullshido video.

Kiai Master vs MMA

[6ix]

After making all those posts the other day and then reading the threads, I put my finger on what was nagging at me: It’s like somebody took all the prison abolition talking points and slapped them over police abolition, except they don’t really fit 1:1. They fit super close in a lot of spots for obvious reasons, close enough that it’s not even wrong to say they’re basically the same thing, but off enough that friction arises. To me at least, prison abolition rhetoric, anti-PIC rhetoric, is simple and pure. Like,

1. a. Decriminalize a bunch of silly shit that shouldn’t be against the law in the first place.
   b. Transform society such that crime disappears. The common example is, if you’re not poor and hungry you don’t need to steal bread. Voila, no more bread theft.

2. ???

3. For crimes committed, transform the criminal justice system such that rehabilitation and restorative justice replaces punishment and punitive justice.

Easier said that done in practice, sure, but this concept is so simple that it almost transcends politics itself. The problem though, is that ??? in number 2. If 1 and 3 were achieved even partially, 2 would start to look like something unrecognizable, maybe to the point that we could say it was abolished and something new and good was rose from its ashes. But, rhetorically focusing on number 2 kinda puts the cart before the horse and results in these ridiculous conversations like “well, uh, who’s gonna go get the guy stealing all the bread?” I don’t know, some sort of civil servant? Somebody go get the bread bandit and bring him in and see what his whole deal is. Give him some bread or money to buy some bread or whatever so he’s not running around stealing everybody else’s bread.

[6ix]

@superuberbob

I feel like I’m watching a bullshido video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I

lol yeah, it’s the same psychology

[Marksman]

We should abolish police on the fact that so many of them are ridiculously stupid.

[Marksman]

They had no plausible deniability in the Chauvin case which they need to deal with their family, friends and neighbors.

They used to have it guaranteed. They still almost always have it. There is enough murkiness they can spin their acceptance as something less awful.

Chauvin was impossible. I am sure many tried initially and found themselves flailing and under attack.

[Marksman]

Yeah it’s dumb. Arrests can’t be a positive metric in a police force type agency.

[6ix]

@Marksman

We should abolish police on the fact that so many of them are ridiculously stupid.

In practice, sure, they’re criminal fucking deviants and we should abolish the shit out of them.

[MysteryConman]

‘Snarshall’ Starbucks shuts drive-through after workers object to police...

Rather than wait for “reform”-minded politicians, workers took direct action. They organized themselves, and took action to remove the police presence near their work place. (This Starbucks is located is just a few miles east of where George Floyd was murdered.)

Most workers at the site, which is believed to be one of the busiest Starbucks in the state, have declined to open the store if a St. Paul Police officer remains on duty directing drive-through traffic… “We basically gave an ultimatum to our district manager and our regional vice president,” said a Starbucks employee, who asked not to be identified as workers have been instructed to direct media inquiries to a corporate office.

The workers have identified themselves as mostly “queer” women in their 20s, many of them women of color who began organizing among themselves last June. Among their concerns were interactions between the six or seven off-duty officers hired by Starbucks to direct traffic off Marshall Avenue — all of them white males, according to workers — and the coffee shop’s many Black and Somali customers. The death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer last May proved to be a catalyst. “After the murder of George Floyd, we decided we needed immediate divestment from the St. Paul Police Department,” the worker said.

On Monday, St. Paul Police confirmed they had been dis-invited from the store, despite a contract agreement that calls for off-duty officers to direct traffic there into August.

[Devil]

@JohnnyTruant

Kind of creeping me out a bit.

I’m guessing you’re not a big Star Trek fan.

[StimAbuser]

1. Hell yeah
2. What in the absolute fuck is starbucks thinking.
3. who gets the money from this contract and how is it distributed? The specific police station I’m guessing, does it just go into their general fund? Their pension? Distributed bonus to all the officers?

I always wondered what the set up was when I see police working at businesses. Hopefully this is a trend and we see this stop soon. I’m definitely not going to give any business that hires cops my money.

Well except my local casino, but I think they just have their own police force and aren’t hiring actual cops. Although they certainly look like cops…

[MysteryConman]

@StimAbuser

• What in the absolute fuck is starbucks thinking.
• who gets the money from this contract and how is it distributed?

I don’t know the details on this exact contract that Starbucks has with the SPD, however, the hiring of off-duty police officers to do things like this is common place(at least in MN). My good friend who just quit the Minneapolis PD last year would get 20+ hours a week of work like this for $50-80/hr. Examples are: traffic control for private business or construction sites, work at the bar or club on the weekend.

[eyebooger]

@MysteryConman

My good friend who just quit the Minneapolis PD last year would get 20+ hours a week of work like this for $50-80/hr. Examples are: traffic control for private business or construction sites, work at the bar or club on the weekend.

What the fuck $50+/hr for “traffic control”?