And this is absolutely not true.
It’s certainly not a majority view around these parts.
I’m not calling you out for condescension to make you feel sad. ZOMG why do some UnStuckers assume everything is personal. I’m pointing out, primarily to the lurkers, this: There are much deeper issues involved that the stilted narrow confines of Q#2. And… these deeper issues are being dismissed, sometimes condescendingly, by certain folks, including fellow UnStuckers.
Again, I didn’t present these three sub-topics for you to give me your feelings regarding them. My point is that these are all fully legitimate sub-topics of the overall “WTF to do with the police”. That none of them should be dismissed, and certainly not in a condescending way.
Now the following are just my feelings… so sue me if I go astray. You DGAF about #1 or #3. You are only really interested in chatting about #2. While OTOH, @ ggoreo has made it clear that he’s not really interested in chatting about #2. Which is all fine & good… nobody needs to chat about what they don’t care to chat about.
But you are doing the exact same thingee you are whining about.
When you carry on about “where’s the proposals” you are assuming your feelings about #1 are “true”, and are dismissing #3 as silly. When others respond to that with “abolish the police”, they are assuming that your feelings about #1 are “false”, and are dismissing #2 as prearranging deck chairs.
Here’s the difference however: I’m going to predict that those on the “abolish” side would be generally happy to have an in depth chat about #1. You, and again it’s my only my feelings, would never be able to sit still for any substantive chat regarding #1. Your feelings are made-up, and you aren’t going to change them.
This is true with reformist types in general, regardless of topic.
And this was the larger point I was trying to make. So… and again it just makes me LOL that you have characterized a quite polite and very on-topic chat as “not letting go”… I guess I’ll “let you go” now, if you really want to stop chatting about the issues at hand.
I ignored this Q because it’s not even close to being on-topic regarding even this off-topic “abolish” derail in this, the real-time protest thread. Start your own thread if you want to chat about this.
Oh boy… another “outside agitators” screed, and more patronizing crap about how black folk cannot have a class consciousness on their own. Of course, to hold such an opinion you’d have to studiously ignore… the three founders of the BLM Network, and all those you condescending call “kids”. And this obscure dead labor organizer dude too…
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.
“ In a sense, you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.”
“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”
“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”
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Show me one unstucker besides Ins0 or wireless bro who thinks ICE shouldn’t be abolished.
Needs a reform and massively (but not completely obviously) defund option.
I voted defund given your definition.
There have been plenty of effective solutions. Police departments have reformed. State laws have fixed things. Just because you’re not personally aware of them or don’t believe them doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
As we’ve pointed out “not that” is not a solution to the legitimate duties that cops carry out. Most of the people in these marginalized communities do not want “not that”. They want not-racist, not-trigger-happy, not-abusive police.
What that polling found was, it’s true, for instance, African Americans have a less favorable view of local police, but it’s still very favorable. So white people have a 79% favorable view of the local police, Hispanic 77%, and black people 58%. And even given that the numbers are very close in terms of when you pull the different groups on whether or not they want to see more police officers hired into their communities. So among white people, 65% say they support that and 13% oppose it; among Hispanic folks, 64% supported and 13% oppose it. And among black people, 60% supported and 18% opposed it. So it is a little bit less popular in black communities, but not that much.
I know vox, liberal, evil. So then show me a different poll which shows the people in these communities really want what you think is best for them.
I think you’re way off base if you think meat and the police are interchangeable in this context. People’s relationship to meet versus their relationship to police are nothing alike. There are a large portion of people for whom the police provide safety and security. Meat is essentially a luxury item that people like because it tastes good. When you suggest abolishing the police, you’re tapping into a way different set of emotions than you are when you try to make people feel guilty or ashamed by calling meat murder. The reaction you are going to get is going to be fundamentally different. Taking away people’s perceived security is going to inspire fear and opposition. Calling meat murder might inspire some shame or guilt, but that doesn’t threaten people on the same way.
We’re arguing about here. I’m responding to the dunking on/BestOf/high-five bro I just got from catface - to the effect that me and the others on unstuck who don’t think abolish the police is realistic, wouldn’t be for abolishing slavery.
Show me an example of a state that has fixed things. Please.
You realize you’re the kid in the well right now, right?
?
You said departments have been reformed and state laws have fixed things, and that I’m just not aware of them. So enlighten me.
So you meant states and not “the state” as in non-anarchy, and you meant in terms of the police and not just “when has the state ever done anything for anyone”? If so, ok.
I posted earlier about the sunshine law NY state passed releasing discipline records - in direct response to the protests. This will make a difference in the short run and long run. Hidden discipline records is a huge problem.
There are lots of cities you don’t hear about, where the police have made big outreach programs and things have gotten much better, like Dallas (which didn’t have major riots and had cops out there kneeling with protesters - yes I’m sure there are still bad incidents):
If the Dallas Police Department has now become a poster child for police reform due to Brown’s efforts to increase transparency and train officers to reduce the lethality of interactions between police and the community, that was not always the case. Dallas was once notorious for police violence. For years, the third largest city in Texas has had a higher per-capita rate of police-involved shootings than Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles.
This trend began to reverse around four years ago. On July 24, 2012, a Dallas police officer shot and killed James Harper, an unarmed black man. Residents took to the streets. A confrontation with police appeared imminent. But despite the potent and often combustible combination of angry citizens and riot police, a concerted effort by both sides kept the streets relatively peaceful.
In the wake of this near catastrophe, Dallas embraced a new model of community policing which Brown announced over Facebook. “The citizens of Dallas have shown great trust and confidence in the Dallas Police Department,” Brown wrote at the time. “My pledge is that we will continue to work as hard to maintain and improve citizens’ trust as we did to earn it.”
The department committed itself to transparency. It developed a new foot pursuit policy that emphasized de-escalation. One proposal would make police officers in Dallas subject to lethal force training every two months instead of every two years. Brown released an enormous amount of police data, too, publishing statistics including 12 years worth of data on police shootings on an official online repository. The number of body cameras used by officers increased. Poor performing police officers were fired. And after Brown declared that traffic citations were not intended to “raise revenue,” his officers issued half as many tickets at last count as they did in 2006.
To me the biggest problem is blanket immunity granted by SCOTUS. Cops didn’t always have that. If we take it away again it will make a gigantic difference. We should be fighting hard for that imo.
Stuff like this, which is literally just undoing a terrible judicial standard, to me has a much more realistic chance of making a big difference and actually helping people vs focusing on stuff like abolish the police which has never really been tried and is a huge long shot to ever happen.
My point has nothing to do with the two examples I gave themselves. Like, if somebody said “J.Robinson was the first black MLBer”, I might respond with an example to disprove that statement. That doesn’t mean I’m claiming that J.Robinson and my example are “equivalent”, or “interchangeable”… or even otherwise related at all. Same thing here…
My point is that watchwords can be successful even when they alienate certain segments of the general public, even a majority.
I gave two examples of this: “meat is murder” & “disunion”. Both alienated a majority of the general population. Both were very successful as watchwords.
I agree with you that doing away with qualified immunity would go a long way towards curbing police misconduct—assuming their communities want to hold the police responsible for their actions.
Abolish ICE is a half measure. Abolish the border.
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It’s the #1 root of this problem, other than racism. The standard that all a cop has to do is say they were scared, and no test of whether a reasonable person (much less a trained officer) can be applied - is ludicrous.
Regular citizens even have to pass the standard of reasonable reason to be scared for their life in self-defense shootings.
“In particular, the Dallas Police Department’s response during the early days of the demonstrations, between May 29 and June 1, was the subject of such immense scrutiny that it culminated in a more than 80-page After-Action Report.
During that period, police used chemical deterrents and nonlethal ammunition on protesters and also conducted a “mass arrest event” on June 1 in which 674 people were taken into custody after protesters marched onto the city’s Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.”
The things you’re talking about are window dressing. These departments are inherently bad.
I don’t know that we really need to keep going back and forth, I don’t think we’re on the same page in terms of what we consider acceptable outcomes.
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I’m ok with that.
People who make it to this country to make a better life for themselves >>>>>>>>> racists who never leave their home town and except the world handed to them.
The US should have a North America zone like the Euro Zone.
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Dude - that second one was just straight up murder by a person who happened to be a cop. She did not get away with it. The system worked.
The first one sucks. You can watch it all here:
The cops screwed up but they don’t seem to be trying to hurt the guy who was clearly having a psychotic break and also had cocaine in him. They’re trying to calm him down the whole time.
The original handcuffs were put on by private security guards - who seemed pretty flummoxed by the situation but not out to hurt the guy either. Are we going to abolish private security guards too?
This case is a great example of dispatching someone other than armed cops to these kinds of situations - which can be accomplished w/o completely abolishing the police.
In any case if you’re standard is zero officer screwups over many years - then yeah - abolishing the police is the only way.
It appears that Chauvin’s defense is going to be that George Floyd had run in with the law in the past, and that he swallowed drugs prior to Chauvin killing him and obviously that’s why he died, not because Chauvin had his knee on his throat for 10 minutes: