OK, to get this thread back on topic, let’s actually chat a little a bit about the G.Floyd Uprising for a change.
Above, we got an actual classic old-school red-baiting outside agitator screed. In 2020. ZOMG. I’ll take the liberty of editing out the gratuitous personal attack, to give us…
I get the impression these anarchist kids (in Portland and elsewhere) see the BLM movement as a convenient ride to hitch to a ??? revolution.
I don’t get the impression these anarchist kids give a shit about what the people and communities who are the overwhelming victims of police brutality actually want. Except in the sense that these anarchist kids think their lives must be better in a post-police anarcho-Marxist utopia or whatever - due to first principles - and these anarchist kids know better than them what’s good for them.
Yep… we got a serious ‘impression’ that these anarchists kids are a buncha outside agitators, who have infiltrated and cooped the BLM movement, in disregard to the victims of police brutality themselves.
Of course, the trope of the outside agitator has a long sordid history in the civil rights movements. The giants upon whose shoulders the heros of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement stood… the leaders of the 1940s Civil Rights Movement were relentlessly red-baited (of course a whole lot were card carriers). But the trope of the outside agitator really comes from the 1960s era.
I dunno I’m not a historian but not having a police force in the old days wasn’t great either. In ancient Rome it was violent gangs that controlled everything and whenever shit got out of hand they had to appoint a dictator and send the military in.
In Europe people just settled shit with fights to the death, or your local lord had you killed.
While I realized our current police are just gangs with law backing them up, I do think the optimal line would be to have them like the police in places like Norway or some shit. Defund the shit out of them, demilitarize them, and hold them super accountable.
Though I’m not sure how to hold them accountable if every cop who did anything bad went to court, because Americans are stupid as fuck and don’t convict them.
And obviously fund social workers, mental health workers etc to take on a ton of the stuff cops currently should not be doing.
But a civilian review board with the power to fire cops reviewing every complaint seems like an obvious move
Gee… I wonder what BLM Portland feels about these damn anti-capitalist kids stealing their thunder…
Black Lives Matter: PDX is a collective of Black folks organizing against capitalism and colonialism. Our people will know freedom in our lifetimes.
LMFAO. BLM has always been anti-capitalist.
But seriously, back to chatting about the outside agitators trope. The reason it was a go-to for the 1960s segregationists was because, when it works, it “others” fellows and allies from each other. There can’t just be civil rights activists… no, it’s got to be propagandized as the “anarchist kids” -vs- BLM. It’s gotta be seen as the “good protester” -vs- the “bad protester”. Divide & suppress.
I voted defund, and while defunding the police is a good start and more on the money in terms of getting across what I think should be done, it’s not really in itself an answer. You can’t simply defund the police and leave it up to police to decide how to spend the reduced budgets. You need to answer the questions about how to make police do less stuff. You need things like sharply reduced traffic stops, a specialist force to handle mental health and drug use issues instead of the police, that sort of thing. What I’m advocating is neither abolishing the police nor reforming them, it’s an incremental chipping away at the functions of the police force and replacing them with specialist agencies.
This is the problem though, like when you dig into what abolitionists are talking about, it’s always like, ASTERISK abolishing the police will not work unless we also completely reform the US to create a more caring society with vastly more social spending and a better safety net. You ask what is to be done about the police and the answer is this totalizing vision of “Step One: We Simply Abolish Capitalism”. Well if we assume capitalism isn’t going anywhere in the near term, then now what?
Like take one of the concluding paragraphs of that “We Literally Mean Abolish The Police” NYT article I posted earlier:
People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?
Taking this seriously, total police spending across state and federal governments circa 2017 was $117 billion. This amounted to 4% of total state/local spending or around $300 per American per year. That doesn’t buy you “housing, food and education for all” or anything like it. So the answer to her question is “roughly the same as it looks now”.
Would you advocate for police abolition if absolutely nothing else changed? Like what if you just scrapped police forces and gave everyone a 4% state tax cut? Because if not, what you’re advocating for is actually wholesale social change under the guise of police abolition. And in doing so you’re predicating doing something about the police on something else which there is currently no way to achieve. A lot of the problems with law enforcement in the US is because of inequality and despair and the police being used as a means to suppress those problems with force. Are you under the impression I don’t understand that? Police abolition by itself, however, won’t resolve those underlying problems and we don’t have at hand a means to rapidly improve social conditions. So what now? That’s the question that interests me. The question “what would a better overall society look like” is also interesting but not really relevant.
How about this for those who struggle so with the word who struggle so with watchwords. You can try this on your friends and family.
For those who struggle with BLM …
Ask them how they feel about “Black Lives Matter Too”. If you get a positive responsive… ask them if they feel BLM would be more “efficient” if they actually called themselves that. If you get a positive response to that, what have you learned?
For those who struggle with “Abolish the Police”…
Ask them how they feel about “Abolish the police as we know them in a safe and sane manner”. If you get a positive response… ask them if the modern day abolitionists would be more “efficient” if they actually called themselves that. If you get a positive response from that… ask them “Really? You honestly think they’d be more efficient if they called themselves the Abolish-the-police-as-we-know-them-in-a-safe-and-sane-manner-ists?”. And… besides a chance to dunk on them, what have you learned?
This whole argument is just another variation of the center-left undermining a movement with impossible demands for a holistic framework covering all human activity. We don’t actually need to solve the hypothetical of not having police on some obscure web forum. It is far more helpful to simply align yourself with the progressive movements rather than de-legitimize them with constant pedantry.
I’ve stayed mostly out of this thread but this post is just too much.
It’s ok to pontificate on fantasy policies like ending all policing or ending capitalism, but it’s not ok to point out the limitations of these proposals?
Furthermore, the inevitable failure of these policies to be enacted won’t be due to their obvious faults but to “centrists” not being mindless team players and (gasp) pointing out said faults?
This is all, or at least almost all, happening because of the radical demands made by people in the streets. No “centrists” who are saying we can just cut back and reallocate get any credit for this other than slowing it down.
Austin cut their police budget by one-third.
New York cut their police budget $1B.
San Francisco cut their police budget by $120M.
Oakland cut their police budget by $14M.
Washington DC cut their police budget by $15M.
Baltimore cut their police budget $22M.
Portland cut their police budget $16M.
Philadelphia cut their police budget $33M.
Hartfort, Norman OK, SLC, and many more cut their police budgets this year.
Except you are making one giant assumption that is obviously false. All the people in the street over the past few months want to abolish the police. I was one of those people, twice.
I’d guess if you polled the population of people who have been to a BLM protest in the past 3 months you would get sub 20% approval for the extreme version of abolish. And that’s AFTER the obvious selection bias of people who protested.
clovis, can you provide us with a list of all the successful progressive social movements that have been based on detailed policy proposals and polite protest? Go as far back in history as necessary.
I know it is. And? I still don’t get your point in the context of our discussion. Did I say anything was wrong with protesting? Obviously not since I protested. Protesting is obviously why we have movement on defunding the police. I never said otherwise.
I was addressing the obviously wrong idea that objecting to the most extreme, and patently absurd, ideas about abolishing the police means someone is not a team player and that doing so is why the bad ideas will fail.
Easy. All of them. I never said anything about polite. Stop moving the goal post. It would be easier if you could name one that didn’t involve detailed policy proposal. How do laws get made?
“Abolish the police” is meant to be propaganda. It’s messaging meant to stir emotions. Not everything is supposed to be an objective policy discussion.
If you want to pontificate, try pontificating on how to shift public opinion so people are more anti-police so that some significant change is a viable political option.
