Abolish the Police

hey

Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

previous thread starts there

Once you abolish them, how do you keep them abolished?

using the military, of course

policing should not be abolished

federal standards of policing should be established and enforced via funding. the department of transportation has done wonders for getting EMTs all to similar levels of competence across the country.

Federal standards would be useful, possibly even great, but totally impossible in the current political climate. Or in any political climate I've seen in my lifetime. Or that I've read about in US history. Or that I can imagine occurring before I die.

i support the concept, but human beings like to persecute each other violently

also it's the end of the world

is human beings persecuting each other violently referring to the police or non-police?

how did everything on my ilx become tinier when i clicked this thread

both, all, etc xp

i'd abolish the motherfucking goddamn US military murder machine first tho

i think the police should be abolished but it should be done in a very slow and secretive manner to stop everyone from doing crimes *because* there are no police

People who carry weapons as a hobby should probably be abolished before we abolish the professions where people sometimes carry guns

Reminds me of a reddit thread where some dude was weighing the pro et contra arguments re: the 2nd amendment and leaning slightly toward more control before suddenly concluding, without the faintest trace of irony, that no matter which side of the fence you're on, the fact that guns are fun is so utterly undeniable that all other considerations are irrelevant, confirming the farseeing wisdom of the Founding Fathers™.

Oh, really

policing involves a lot of activities that don't involve brutal, nay fatal, violence. And policing has been part of civilization since BCE2K and earlier, probably. if we follow Bardach's Eightfold Path, we're hardly into step 3 - "construct some alternatives." If we want to reform the business that is policing, we have to figure out who should do it, and what institutions should define how it is done.

#NoCopAcademy still holding it down at Chicago City Hall pic.twitter.com/45zKClRmdI

— Sarah Lazare (@sarahlazare) March 28, 2018

This is a good piece on Hong Kong protestor efforts:

https://lausan.hk/2019/how-to-abolish-the-hong-kong-police/

Abolish the police.

otm

do it yesterday. i am losing my mind at ppl who think this dumbass eight is enough plan or whatever the fuck it's called is anything. how do i get off the internet.

liberals are convinced that they can turn the police into nice boys who really care for the people they are funneling into the prison industrial complex

but if cops had to announce "i'm going to shoot you" before they shot you, maybe that would be your ticket to heaven. it would CHANGE. EVERYTHING.

i just remembered one time deray mckesson was speaking at a conference i was at, and i knew there was no one i could talk to who would understand why he sucks, so i went to get a pastrami sandwich and came back when it was over

How was the sandwich

it was great, i want another

I prefer the defund/shrink approach to abolish. There is a bad historical meme going around now that policing originated with slave patrols, which is sort of a distorted half-truth. Societies of all kinds have always had some form of policing or other. Ours is clearly bloated, hyper-militarized and racist and needs to be radically reduced and changed.

Abolish the uniform guys, retain parking enforcement and grizzled detectives hiding hearts of gold under their gruff exteriors

Societies of all kinds have always had some form of policing or other.

citation needed

it is not relevant to me whether the origin was in slave patrols. we can keep kurt wallander around to solve violent crimes, and we can keep all the stars of parking wars. everyone else has to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History xp

oh, so you mean "modern civilization" not the hundreds of thousands of years of hunter gatherers, OK.

IMO that history shows the problems that resulted from the "first fence" more than anything:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560830.My_Name_is_Chellis_and_I_m_in_Recovery_from_Western_Civilization

not only is it broadly modern civilization but it's far from a continuous history and most police forces in their modern organization, powers and tactics aren't much older than the mid 19th century

on the other hand even if they were ordained by god in the garden of Eden abolish the fuckers

oh ok so we should build a neoprimitive society with 7 billion people on the planet, that should go well

well the 19th century was when much of the world's population urbanized

this isn't a reformist thread

NV otm

they are agents of capital and should be shown no remorse or mercy

as i said, the police as constituted today are very much a function of the capitalist societies that introduced them, form something else by all means but the police institutions we have were rotten at conception

and they don't keep us safe, either

this seems as good a place as any to vent: my local solidarity rally tomorrow is not allowing anti-police signs. I wish them the best with it but I'm going to pass. Small city in Canada.

there's probably other threads for cautiously liking the police tbf

Without first dismantling capitalism, there's no practical difference between abolishing the police and privatising it.

I don't think short-term commitment to abolition can be used as a gatekeeping device for conversations about how to move forward from where we are now.

it is true that we must first seize the means of production before the withering away of the state can occur

anyway the specific bone of contention was that the police are not a natural offshoot of the state of nature who must always be with us as sinful fallen humans

thank you, yes that is what I was saying

You know that old canard, "It's easy to criticize the police but you'll soon change your tune when you actually need them"? Well, I think I've said it here before but whenever I've actually needed the police - break-ins, muggings etc - they have proved to be completely useless and generally given the impression they couldn't give a flying fuck.

Add laziness and ineptitude to their list of sins.

here here, NV. I will have to work to have this discussion more, locally, soon.

ok just spitballing here but what if we abolished the police

hm interesting expand on that

the first time i got burgled the first 15 minutes of interaction with the cops was persuading them we hadn't done it ourselves cos we lived on a "bad" estate

love to burgle myself

in the US last year, the $ seized by cops in (largely illegal imo) forfeitures was greater than the amount lost in actual burglaries

I’m seeing people ask things like “But if there are no police who will go after RAPISTS???” and well I have some very bad news for those folks

— andi zeisler (@andizeisler) June 5, 2020

the only problem w not having any cops is who will we arrest the cops with

Thank you, sleeve.

I prefer the defund/shrink approach to abolish.

man alive i know you're p well read so i'm surprised to see you attack police abolitionism with...the way most police abolitionist orgs describe the path to abolishing the police

I’m definitely not well read and um, yeah, exactly.

yes, whether you see it as a reform/end in itself or as a step on the path to abolishment it's an excellent set of demands people should be able to get behind

I don't know a single person who has ever had a positive experience with the police

Part of public support for the police is misplaced liking of actors in endless cop shows, the most insidious form of propaganda out there. Abolish TV studios

endless cop shows, the most insidious form of propaganda out there

otm. going all the way back to The Andy Griffith Show and Dragnet.

and Deputy Dawg

anybody want to comment on the abolishment and replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary?

fine idea. I endorse it.

mostly "lol, fuck the RUC"

It was weird to open this thread and not see a gang of yank libs calling abolitionists immature dumb idiots who are probably 11 years old or something but I take that more as a sign of the moment than any kind of indication that this isn’t Chinatown

anybody want to comment on the abolishment and replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary?

This was a Good Thing and ultimately necessary; the RUC as a ‘brand’ was toxic for too many normal people by the GFA

Even American police forces have nothing on those guys.

came up with more ideas for police reform that will be as ineffective as anything proposed by 8 Can't Wait pic.twitter.com/eK9Aj6KpMA

— ben wasserman (@benwassertweet) June 4, 2020

thoughts and prayers is a weak ending, "make guns too big to hold" and "no ice cream before bed" have I Think You Should Leave vibes tho

yeah, i would like to remove thoughts and prayers from the platform

no fuck it abolish the police

anyone wanna give me talking point to use on a friend who thinks that defunding the police and dismantling the unions "sets an anti-labor precedent"

(note: he is a 50-something hippie lifelong bus drive diehard union member who puts labor first)

I have to admit I have a tough time on that point bc it feels like teachers' unions will be next in line

If we abolish the police wouldn’t they just be replaced by private security forces who would not even be *nominally* required to protect the safety of the public (vs private property)?

ask your diehard union friend whether it is more important that unarmed black men die or that effectively addressing their murders "sets an anti-labor precedent", because he has to recognize that these are the choices. it might resonate to ask "which side are you on?"

I think we need to transform how policing works and many of the social problems we see as police issues should be handled by social workers. Military training of cops needs to be banned outright; de-escalation must be required.

I think we should create a model of criminal justice that emphasizes rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Everyone who is released from jail should have a job lined up with a living wage.

I think a lot of things. One thing I don’t think is that we should have a weaker public sector.

btw, I helped to organize my fellow school bus drivers from an non-union shop into a unionized bargaining unit.

Maybe existing police unions should be dismantled because they support a horrific status quo, who knows. Police abolition seems like a meaningless phrase to me because there are rapes and murders in america and we need to have someone address these issues.

the tru pro labor version is that cops are class traitors who suppress other workers.

^ yes

it would probably violate various laws to eliminate police unions but they could be expelled by their affiliates and lose resources. i can't see how that would harm teachers or other public sector unions in any way.

do other unions actually kill people? i mean, not through negligence. like in their day-to-day

yeah and it's not just the fact of killing people it's that the union is used to defend this behavior through paying for lawyers for criminal and trial board cases, bargaining for agreements that help police avoid any other accountability, resisting any positive change in department rules, and making contributions to anti-worker candidates for office. all of the benefits of being labor with none of the solidarity.

benefits to the individual cops, i mean, of being organized

thank u harbl, I quoted you but now the dude is moving goalposts and hairsplitting, good times

I don't know a single person who has ever had a positive experience with the police

― anvil, Friday, June 5, 2020 7:34 PM (yesterday)

same. it is really remarkable how completely shitty and useless and terrible they are in every way.

i'm used to being the boring person in the room who argues for the value of gradualism, blah blah blah, but after the last two weeks, there's no reason to see anything positive in the police as an institution. there's no redeeming what they are. i can't look at them as anything but an instrument of anti-democratic state repression (and i recognize that, for many people, that is all they have ever been). we should get rid of them and assign their essential duties to new institutions, and hold those institutions accountable.

Police abolition seems like a meaningless phrase to me because there are rapes and murders in america and we need to have someone address these issues.

― treeship., Friday, June 5, 2020 7:36 PM (two hours ago)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQ7nir9p5I

Not sure where to put this, but this thread is as good as any - Interview with Portland beat cop on rapid response team

Police abolition seems like a meaningless phrase to me because there are rapes and murders in america and we need to have someone address these issues.

― treeship., Friday, June 5, 2020 9:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

treezy i know you can do your own googling on this

1) what percentage of murders are solved/prosecuted?
2) what percentage of rapes?
3) does research show that policing reduces the incidence of crime?
4) does research suggest that anything else does?

jfc treeship, like these assholes give a shit about solving rapes

https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-discover-1-700-untested-rape-kits-spanning-30-years/564989082/

you even posted that stupid shit AFTER my other link

lol xpost with j.

I’m not super keen on the inevitable rise in vigilante justice we might see in a cop-less world. Neighbourhood Facebook groups and the like would uh... evolve, I think. Is there some way around that problem that I’m not considering?

I think if you're voicing speculative worries about private security forces and vigilantes, you need to first explain how those things would be worse than the current situation--for everyone, not just white people. Yes, those scenarios sound bad (otoh, they are fictional), but worse than +1000 Americans killed by police every year? Worse than the fact that black teens are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white teens? I don't foresee money being spent on private security to patrol poor and/or predominantly black neighborhoods. I don't really see vigilantes doing the same, and the existence of the police didn't stop Trayvon Martin's and Ahmaud Arbery's killers.

In case these haven't been posted yet. Here's a study that analyzed data before, during, and after the NYPD's 2015 work slowdown to show that reduced policing results in reduced crime (meaner fewer reports of crimes from civilians): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

I've only just started this myself, but Verso is giving away the e-book of Alex Vitale's "The End of Policing" if you'd like to read a more detailed argument: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817-the-end-of-policing

"do other unions actually kill people? i mean, not through negligence. like in their day-to-day"

well less lately, but maybe check out that last Scorsese film, or On the Waterfront

treeship why are you like this

“Why dont they just report it to the police?” pic.twitter.com/vrXfgqrBlV

— Sid (@sidsidtoosid) June 6, 2020

dude treeship some ilxers have been posting some really good links in the past few days, it would be really good if you could stop doing whatever you’re doing or just go to Reddit or something

I mean links on police abolition. whatever, go nuts, it’s your world.

Found treeship’s twitter

what is a complete abolition of the police force ? i’m a visual learner btw

— m (@okaishawty) June 6, 2020

Can we not with the pile-ons for once.

^^

people arguing "what could be worse?" than the current state of policing in the U.S. are being a bit disingenuous. ... there are plenty of names on the BLM list that were not killed by cops, but by racist civilians. If you look at the history of the KKK as well ... there is a long, gross history of black people being murdered by cops and by non-cops alike. I am not saying this to defend cops, but just to point out that by abolishing the police you are going to remove racist violence.

*not* going to remove etc., yes?

* you are not going to remove racist violence ... whoever brought up "nextdoor" upthread is otm -- we still have the problem of racism and other bigotry that exists in this country. The one "positive" aspect of professional policing is that there are rules and best practices about how to deal with certain situations that the average freaked out citizen might not know or follow. But, that doesn't have to be done by cops --- but there should be a means to keep people from doing bad things.

there are rules and best practices about how to deal with certain situations

...that aren't followed by the cops either

i guess what i am saying is that we need some equitable form of law enforcement -- but that doesn't have to be cops, but it should be better than just "groups of concerned citizens" because that could be even worse.

there are rules and best practices about how to deal with certain situations

...that aren't followed by the cops either

― sleeve, Saturday, June 6, 2020 12:55 PM (five seconds ago)

yeah, that's the joke ...

oops sorry

don't apologize! i was hoping someone would point that out!

like one of the most cogent arguments in favor of a professional police force is they are specially trained, that they have rules governing their behavior, and there is accountability if they don't follow those rules -- but, as you and others have pointed out -- in practice, this argument is ridiculous because it is far from the truth.

In case these haven't been posted yet. Here's a study that analyzed data before, during, and after the NYPD's 2015 work slowdown to show that reduced policing results in reduced crime (meaner fewer reports of crimes from civilians): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

Couldn't that be because the lack of police presence made people less likely to report a crime, rather than made it less likely to happen?

imo the problem with ‘abolish all cops’ as a rhetorical tool is that a bunch of the interim steps you’d likely want to take (cutting police budgets, investing in harm reduction, better mental health resources, decriminalisation of drugs, ADR, a focus on mediation and restitution over incarceration, etc) stand alone as excellent policies without asking anyone to buy into the extremely contentious end goal of removing the whole judicial system. Sticking them under an absolutist banner the majority of people, at present, don’t take seriously, obscures them. You can build a framework that makes ‘abolishing the police’ more tangible without it.

Abolishing the police isn’t necessarily the same as abolishing the judicial system.

You don’t need a standing army in every city to arrest the occasional violent criminal.

Anyway, nuanced policy programs are easier to water down, sell out, and lose support for than three word slogans that capture the imagination. Black lives matter. Abolish the police.

Seems like the best available plan would include disarming most police and reserving the potential use of lethal force to a much smaller force, increasing monitoring and oversight of police activities, imposing strict accountability, forging better policies and giving better training, and increasing social services to increase social stability and provide alternatives to policing.

Couldn't that be because the lack of police presence made people less likely to report a crime, rather than made it less likely to happen?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, June 6, 2020 8:06 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No. The cops stop people for things that aren't crimes, or under false/lying pretenses, and then arrest and criminalize them. They literally CREATE crimes, and criminals, based on who they stop and how they escalate interactions.

FWIW my wife, who teaches in a high school, says there have been fights that only police were able to break up, including one where a school security guard had her collarbone broken trying. She also says that restorative justice approaches have often been ineffective between high school kids who get into these kinds of fights. I don't think they have a police officer stationed in the school nor do I think she is advocating that, but she is glad to have the police as a last resort.

also in spite of the school to prison pipeline, which is a real thing, the involved kids were not charged or jailed.

xxp ie "looking suspicious" or "fits the description" or "empty your pockets" for no reason (which is against the law btw but who's going to stop them?) and then arrest you for something they find during an illegal search of your person. Or your vehicle.

Or quite frankly just plant fucking evidence on people.

Abolishing police doesn't mean your wife goes to work one day and there's no one who can intervene in a physically dangerous situation. It means that those kids getting in fights are also coming from over-policed communities where people are brutalized by police and broken systems, suffering injustices, having a worse quality of life and widespread PTSD, and it's creating the environment in which they choose violence/conflict. Abolishing the police and the carceral system is about a network of alternatives that are based on completely different assumptions, because they start from the point of view of wanting a different world.

It just seems a little bit like a spend too much time behind the computer hot take to imagine that the police have no legitimate public safety role whatsoever, even if that role should be radically reduced and reshaped.

I just gotta say it's genuinely amazing to see how fast public opinion has turned on this. It didn't even take 2 weeks. Prison abolition is now a tangible, long term political possibility, and defunding the police will be a major issue this election, and probably a "purity test" (ugh) for future candidates.

I think it's great, in all sincerity--reform just doesn't work, and the cops will be empowered by any concessions made.

You want to accuse the thousands on the street for the past week of spending too much time behind the computer?

The “data” supporting that idea always seems to come from very limited studies. Is there any “data” on what happens when you just don’t have a police force in a major city?

flappy it didn’t change in two week! 2014 and BLM happened and when a moment came again it turned out many, many more people were ready to hear the message

“Data-driven decision-making” is a crock of shit anyway.

Maybe you could try reading what people from affected communities have to say, who actually built this framework.

http://mariamekaba.com/

Not everyone from “affected communities” supports abolishing the police. I doubt even a majority do. Which people are the right ones to listen to?

Prison abolition is now a tangible, long term political possibility, and defunding the police will be a major issue this election, and probably a "purity test" (ugh) for future candidates.

Everyone thought this about the progressive wing of the Democrats re: Medicare For All and a wealth tax and stuff a few months ago and now there's like a 60% chance Joe Biden's gonna be President with Jamie Dimon in his cabinet.

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/police-abolition-george-floyd/
https://www.autostraddle.com/police-and-prison-abolition-101-a-syllabus-and-faq/

FWIW my wife, who teaches in a high school, says there have been fights that only police were able to break up,

yeah, I've witnessed situations like this -- not in a school setting, but involving angry people under the influence or people suffering from several mental health problems and/or homelessness. Sometimes the cop actually dealt with these things effectively, and sometimes they made them worse.

thank you, in orbit

to J.D.'s point, reducing what we mean by a "police force" to enforcing a couple constitutional issues (perhaps making these forces federal instead of local?) may address this point.

Why are you being pointlessly difficult? "Who are the right ones to listen to" is a dumb question. Why don't you start looking into it and figure out what people are saying and take the time to consider it?

the occasions the cop dealt with the situation effectively and compassionately were definitely nowhere near most of the time

Which people are the right ones to listen to?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, June 6, 2020 1:26 PM (three minutes ago)

that's true -- where I live there is a lot of conflict about this, within the black community (as well as other communities of color).

like the other day there was a discussion about undercover cops and cops who aren't from the community vs. those who did grow up here and are straightforward and open about "being a cop" and when they are aligning themselves with their job vs. with their communities. This especially applies to black cops.

“Why don’t you listen to black people” is a cheap rhetorical move that doesn’t address the question. Black people believe many different things.

there is something else wrong with using restorative justice approaches in schools, which is that when it's done the kids go back to the same shit. which is also what happens when you put the kid on probation, so idk. it's like neither available remedy is the problem.

“Abolish the police,” even if you don’t think it’s actually feasible for some reason is a useful starting point for negotiation. That’s how you get to, perhaps, disarmed police.

it also is a semiotic issue in re what does "the police" represent.

Caity Johnstone:

There is not enough gold in the earth’s crust to make the number of olympic medals these people deserve for all the mental gymnastics they are performing to excuse unprovoked, completely unnecessary acts of violence from public employees whose job isn’t even statistically all that dangerous.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/police-and-their-apologists-have-already-lost-the-argument-92b62f353c58

Idk if you'll be able to see all of these, but this was a good explainer of what it might look like not to depend on police for things that they're not trained or prepared or suited for, and which they actively make worse:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CA_CzIZpzZ0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

“Abolish the police,” even if you don’t think it’s actually feasible for some reason is a useful starting point for negotiation. That’s how you get to, perhaps, disarmed police.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Saturday, June 6, 2020 3:35 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

FWIW I am closer to “abolish the police” than “eight can’t wait.” I’m not all the way there though. I think you need some kind of last resort, monopoly on force system even if it needs to be dramatically reduced in size, funding and role.

“Why don’t you listen to black people” is a cheap rhetorical move that doesn’t address the question. Black people believe many different things.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, June 6, 2020 8:34 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

So first it's, "I don't want to listen to people who sit behind computers" and then it's "Black people aren't monolithic" (I never said they were though)--is there anyone you actually do trust on this subject or do you just want a potted answer that you can dismiss?

there is something else wrong with using restorative justice approaches in schools, which is that when it's done the kids go back to the same shit. which is also what happens when you put the kid on probation, so idk. it's like neither available remedy is the problem.

― contorted filbert (harbl), Saturday, June 6, 2020 8:35 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes.

oh hey a free book

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817-the-end-of-policing

re duties/responsibilities given to cops that could be better assigned -- where I live the police are in charge of issuing special event permits for parties / concerts / festivals etc. If you want a one-day alcohol license for a charitable event, you have to get permission from the local PD. This was something the City of Oakland had created a "task force" about after the Ghost Ship Fire and it never went anywhere.

Re police from within the community: I've felt VASTLY different ways about being in rooms full of police officers of different races. At my school, my principal was extremely close with the local police and they were almost uniformly white and bro-y and Blue Lives Matter-y and seemed like EXACTLY that guy that knocks ppl around and believes in "law and order" above all.

But in the majority Black neighborhood where I live, when we have meetings with the local precinct and we serve potluck dinners to a room of cops who are mostly Black or POC, it's genuinely pleasant. Totally different atmosphere.

It's still a broken system. The people sitting down together having dinner are still going to end up unfairly treated if they enter the system for any reason.

still going to end up unfairly treated if they enter the system for any reason.

The judicial/penal system is a whole 'nother level of fucked-up that needs addressing, too. But the more you expand the focus of the discussion, the more overwhelming it gets to fix and the more the current leverage generated by protest gets diffused over an enormous area of grievance.

Vitale is not really an abolitionist, he’s more of a reformer to the more radical end of reform. I am probably not that far off from him - I haven’t read his book but I have heard him speak.

xp It's all the same thing.

That’s how you get to, perhaps, disarmed police.

So the police are the only people in the US not allowed to be armed?

Clowns iirc

Idk if you'll be able to see all of these, but this was a good explainer of what it might look like not to depend on police for things that they're not trained or prepared or suited for, and which they actively make worse:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CA_CzIZpzZ0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Saturday, June 6, 2020 3:38 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Some of these are good but some strike me as vague and/or fantastical. For example, the idea of "neighbors who are trained in self-defense and deescalation" -- this idea of being "trained in self-defense" is a fantasy from movies and martial arts hucksters. It would take years of very intensive training to get to the level where you could confidently approach someone who might be prepared to attack you and/or might be armed, and you'd still be putting yourself at substantial risk of bodily harm. Not to mention that there's a pretty fine line between that and just vigilante justice. Or the idea that "trauma-informed crisis intervention teams" will always be sufficient to deescalate armed conflicts, for example, seems extremely naive and pie-in-the-sky. Or the idea that a "crisis intervention team" will be able to stop a fight without physically restraining people, like it nearly always takes physical restraint to get people to stop fighting, unless by "crisis intervention team" you just mean, like, municipal bouncers?

So the police are the only people in the US not allowed to be armed?

Beats the current situation.

yep

People who don’t carry guns can also physically restrain people. And there’s a lot less physical restraining that needs to happen on a regular basis than there are police wandering around looking to start shit. We can even let them use the cars with sirens!

I’m not saying I’ve got the right answers just like allow yourself to brainstorm

man alive I think you really need to take a step back and look at why you are so resistant to even discussing the thread topic as a general concept. it's really pretty weird how argumentative you're being.

here's what that those ideas io linked to look like on the ground:

https://www.registerguard.com/news/20191020/in-cahoots-how-unlikely-pairing-of-cops-and-hippies-became-national-model

also, read the Caity Johnstone link upthread

Municipal bouncers sounds way better than the police to me, nice thinking!

otm, bouncers generally know how to actually de-escalate shit

Friendlier demeanor. More likely to live near to where they work. Supportive of the scene.

Easily bribed - is that a positive or a negative?

a key failing they unfortunately share w cops

https://i.imgur.com/PCXZTBs.jpg

sorry 4 size

hmm yeah maybe I have actually backed into a good idea here. Although it seems like what that would really boil down to is just less-armed and very physically strong police? A bouncer can also throw someone out of the club. What recourse does the "municipal bouncer" have if a person just continues to be physical and dangerous?

call for backup just like the police do, each time you call you get a successively larger bouncer

Each larger bouncer envelops the smaller bouncer, like russian nesting bouncers

yup, exactly like the system Cahoots uses in that link above, send in a nonviolent trained street medic team with backup if needed, take it from there

these are harbl ideas guys

/joek

Do you or somebody you know think that #AbolishThePolice is unrealistic? It might be because you haven’t taken the time to understand what it means, the reasons for it, and why it actually makes a lot of sense. [Thread]

— Bridget Eileen (@TravelingNun) June 4, 2020

This is an interesting thread on what a major strand of ‘abolish the police’ thinking means, in line with Vitale’s suggestions, proposing that it’s not about literally getting rid of all policing / hating all cops, it’s about removing functions the police should never have been handed in the first place until policing, as it exists today, is unrecognisable.

The responses broadly break down into ‘why do u hate all cops and want to get rid of all policing?’ and ‘why do u not hate all cops and want to get rid of all policing?’.

this argument could be moot if the police abdicate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/citizen-patrols-make-statement-in-minneapolis/2020/06/06/cc1844d4-a78c-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html

There seems to be a real split on whether abolish the police actually means abolish the police or not.

This is maybe more of a #DefundThePolice train of thought but I like it:

I always had this vague idea that we could find money to provide real social services in this country if we cared, but now that I’m looking up city and county and state budgets, it is 10,000% clear that the money was always there.

— Courtney Milan 🦖 (@courtneymilan) June 7, 2020

ppl who want to abolish the police vs ppl who want to abolish the police eventually vs ppl who don't

if the former sentiment gets more popular the latter group can easily pass as those in the middle

i know this is off topic but i think it's important people stop saying things like this

Drugs are destroying people’s lives in this country. So instead of providing access to treatment and recovery support and helping people escape addiction, we criminalize and send the police. Unless they’re white... in that case, they need treatment and recovery.

this is really, really not how it works ime

I was going to point that out as well. It’s kind of a canned woke person thing to say that just doesn’t reflect reality.

this is very much in line with the thread SV posted:

But so long as we’re talking about what the “defund the police” movement could mean in practice – in addition to cutting budgets – here are some ideas.

— David Menschel (@davidminpdx) June 7, 2020

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/06/01/police-reform-america-poll?fbclid=IwAR1zSeSHV_MpelKniX2DApwavH-iz5qMQW49qmVfg0GG0oKriHWDQCKKxG0

reducing funding for police has 15% support among republicans and 16% support among democrats. I genuinely don't know the answer to this, and it's something I struggle with: as a coms strategy, do you think a catchy hashtag with an ostensibly wildly unpopular policy idea does more good or more harm -- the good I could see is drawing people in to look into the idea more, the harm is just shutting people down entirely.

Catchy slogans is the only thing in my young life I’ve observed to be capable of (slowly) reshaping reality and public support around them.

Medicare for All certainly seems to work that way. But it also describes what it is pretty accurately, there's not much explanation needed. Give everyone access to the system we already know and mostly like known as Medicare as a means of delivering universal healthcare. Abolish ICE otoh (which I think also accurately describes what it is) seems like it kind of fizzled out.

OTOH, wonky bullshit like Eight Can't Wait is almost unquestionably dead on arrival.

my company once used "mind the gap" to explain budget cuts

that's because too many people remember Eight is Enough

reminds me of that one scene in Community

"For Green week, we're changing our name to Enviro-dale"
"We're ALREADY CALLED GREENDALE!"

Like let's devise a slogan that (1) has no inherent content or relationship to its subject matter and (2) requires people to remember eight different policy items, none of which are referred to in any way by the slogan, and also to remember the complex relationship of each of them to each other and to data.

"Campaign Zero" = same thing. Zero what? I keep hearing that and mixing it up with Vision Zero, the NYC program to end traffic deaths.

But even "zero" tells you SOMETHING, like we are trying to achieve zero instances of something, you can at least glean that much.

Eight Can't Wait reminds me of the "It Can Wait" campaign to reduce traffic deaths due to texting/mobile phone use while driving.

Also, I think 8 is too large a number for lowest common denominator messaging which is where we're at in US society -- I feel like 5 is the absolute maximum.

This is why “abolish the police” and even “defund the police” are winners, that’s just one thing.

How about the older and more venerable 'fuck the police'?

yes -- i think abolish is more exciting than defund. Defund sounds kinda blah ... like "lowfat" ... or a 40 degree day

"fuck the police" implies the continued existence of the police ...

Also, I think 8 is too large a number for lowest common denominator messaging which is where we're at in US society -- I feel like 5 is the absolute maximum.

― sarahell, Sunday, June 7, 2020 11:31 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Five for Fighting

“Fuck the police” is kind of just a phatic construction, it’s not a policy prescription. “Cuck the police” otoh is a policy I’ve seen gaining in popularity.

Abolish is more like "fat free" -- the Coke Zero of leftist slogans

Police Zero Sugar

Crop the Cops

Vanilla Cops

Eat the Pigs?

Throw the police into the sea without liferaft or donut

Disarm the police

can't shoot if you have no arms

Again, I think the slogan needs to clearly refer to what the movement wants -- I feel like "fuck the" "cuck the" and "eat the" all presume that police continue to exist. If the goal is an absence of police, as we currently view the concept or symbol of police, then Abolish is quite good. The language should clearly state that the value "police" is going to be reduced to zero. Otherwise it implies a reformist strategy, which the abolitionists seem to be against.

yeah it's not like people in the 1800s rallied behind "defund slavery" or "reform slavery"

8 ways to make slavery less awful for slaves

Is the police slavery?

there was probably an 8-point plan out there to reform slavery that said you can have a slave you just need to submit the proper reports, and your overseers must make attempts to deescalate each day before beginning work XPPPPP

harbl otm -- i think it covered topics like the appropriateness of beatings and sexual relations

it is not a good comparison but now that i think about it in relation to cory booker's crappy new police reform bill it's like, you guys just don't think this is all that bad

and another thing: i find it humorous that one of the points is body cameras and another is "end private policing." i do not know what they mean by private policing. but many people are not aware that a big part of the infrastructure of body cameras is data collection and storage by axon formerly known as taser international. not good, folks, not good.

I think independent surveillance of police, i.e. ordinary citizens filming police with their cell phone cameras as much as possible, is way more effective and important than body cams.

xp thank you for that, also any links that anyone has about the ineffectiveness of said cameras w/r/t stopping police abuse would be most welcome

and yes agreed about citizens using cell phones

fuck the police" implies the continued existence of the police ...

Media tactics: Scaring WHITE citizens to believe that BLACK PEOPLE want less police or no police. STOP IT. How about good police? DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE.

— Ice Cube (@icecube) June 6, 2020

BTW, I do want to just momentarily turn back to this though, bc I think it's a dodge:

there is something else wrong with using restorative justice approaches in schools, which is that when it's done the kids go back to the same shit. which is also what happens when you put the kid on probation, so idk. it's like neither available remedy is the problem.

― contorted filbert (harbl), Saturday, June 6, 2020 3:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Like that is not the point I was making at all. H (my wife) is not saying "nothing works, let's throw up our hands" she's saying "I'm glad we can call the police as a last resort to break up violence that otherwise threatens and harms bystander students and school employees who try to break it up." So you need an answer to that, because that is the lived experience of a lot of people, that, in fact, there are situations where the police handle violence that others are not capable of handling. It's not *all* just perception and propaganda.

What about people who don’t have guns and badges but are nevertheless larger than high school students

We don’t need every municipality to have a single clearinghouse for on-demand muscle for all purposes. How many people do you really need to staff the department of student-grabbing? Why do they have to be cops?

thx again harbl

https://theappeal.org/body-cameras-and-tasers-rake-in-billions-for-axon-but-theyre-no-panacea-for-police-violence/

a lot of high school students are pretty large, like people tend to be pretty close to full-grown at 17

IDK why they "have to be cops" except that the "school security officers" are apparently ineffective in these situations

moms imo

i wasn't dodging, i didn't think! you seemed to bring those up as two separate points (1) the presence of police to solve the immediate problem and protect the physical safety of teachers (who i am very sympathetic to--they shouldn't be at risk like that!), and (2) "also" restorative justice didn't work.

what if they went back to the practice of corporal punishment in schools? would that make disorderly students more respectful of school staff?

lots of countries don't have any sort of security let alone police presence in school

High schools as cauldrons of violence waiting to erupt (and not in a school shooting way) seems uniquely American (and British) - while we're talking about radical social change (ie abolish the police) maybe we're also talking about the changes to society that don't make high school SWAT teams necessary in Germany.

and there are plenty of schools in the US that don't really have this either -- a lot of it seems to come down to the schools having to take on managing the results of general social problems and injustices in that they are responsible for taking care of kids

which brings us right back to "there are better things we can do with this money than give it to cops"

we had a deputy officer in middle school but he wasn't a constant, threatening presence, he chilled in his car most of the day.

It's easy to speak in generalities. I am talking about the school my wife teaches in and what happens there. And btw this is an extremely well-funded public school that is majority well-off kids and tends to be on the cutting edge with progressive policies etc.

if I was a high schooler today and constantly saw metal detectors and armed cops walking up and down the hall, I'd probably freak the fuck out

How do we feel about Norwegian cops? Geir?

he prefers cops that are off the beat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country

i am so glad i am middle-aged and don't have kids

if I was a high schooler today and constantly saw metal detectors and armed cops walking up and down the hall, I'd probably freak the fuck out

― I am a free. I am not man. A number. (Neanderthal), Sunday, June 7, 2020 12:18 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

My wife's school has neither metal detectors nor armed cops walking the hall

oh i wasn't referring to your wife's school, just the different nature of high schools nowadays in general.

back in my day, we had no cops, an open campus, and two pseudo-guards in golf carts who were mostly concerned with kids cutting class, not parking in spaces assigned to faculty and staff, not drinking alcohol or doing drugs on school grounds, and presumably making sure that no one was actively engaged in worshipping Satan on school grounds because the town was very concerned with drugs and Satan worshipping at the time.

some things can't be (cruci)fixed

As much as the 80s sucked, some aspects of the era seem not-so-bad comparatively

since then, the school has: erected a fence around campus and no longer allows students to leave campus for lunch, banned the wearing of colors/clothing that could signify gang membership, and has at least one cop

I guess I don't think talking about one specific school only one person knows anything about is very instructive

i disagree tbh -- if we are going to come up with an alternative to police, we should consider specific circumstances to better formulate it and come up with examples of how it would work based on specific circumstances to better argue the feasibility of this alternative system. Otherwise, people on the other side are just gonna bring things like this up to discredit the proposal.

Yeah, I think it actually is very important, because it isn't just about the school my wife works in (she has taught in several others as well fwiw), it's about the lived experience of everyone who works in a school where such things happen, or who has a cop in their family, or who *hasn't* had a negative run-in with the police, or who even has had a positive experience with the police. Because people are going to say "well what about x?". That's why right now even REDUCING funding to the police has about 15% support in both parties.

Apparently, according to some Reuter's infographic, my city has the largest % of police spending (in terms of overall budget) in the U.S. ... I wouldn't be shocked if this was true, but ... it does make me wonder what it would be like to live somewhere else.

xp hmm yet 54% support burning the station down... mind giving a citation for that 15% number?

What does your wife think about the fact that police in schools disproportionately target black and latinx students? Or the other problems one could cite, like handcuffing & arresting very young children, using physical force to control students with disabilities, etc.? I'm not saying her concern is illegitimate or should just be ignored, but if she's opposed to removing police from schools, what would she do about these problems? I apologize if you already addressed this, there are a lot of threads hopping right now!

Sleeve: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/06/01/police-reform-america-poll?fbclid=IwAR2pIExytvI4sf0oY3r92pWFbJBOhc6s09cIOWGZ_MiML5oI-4WUe3jt3U0

having someone teachers can call to deal with violent situations is essential to teachers' workplace safety and the safety of students in school. it's sad that the only answer we have now is cops. in baltimore we have school police and there are multiple documented examples of them beating students in the hallways. it has been debated every year in the legislature whether the cops should be there and whether they should be armed. the objective of people who want to remove cops from school is to improve the safety of students, not just the elimination of police for the sake of it.

would national polling be immediately relevant anyway? this is going to be won municipality by municipality, in places where intense and organized public pressure forces the hand of city council members like minneapolis's, until all of a sudden a number of cities have defunded to varying degrees, and there's an abundance of published studies and slideshows circulating at mayors' conferences that show they saved X dollars, were able to spend it on A, B, and C, and crime stats actually improved by Y amount.

obv a big national criminal-justice reform bill - one with teeth - is badly overdue, but activism and policy experiment are not going to just sit around waiting for that, or for thousands of affluent white suburban governments to catch up to the movement.

iow i think polling of minneapolis or NYC or LA or Detroit or ATL or etc. would be a lot more helpful at gauging how "close" we are to a shift

People aren’t generally on board with progressive change immediately, you have to educate them and counter the prevailing narratives. 15% for defunding is huge given that it’s never had a national stage before.

xp fwiw my wife's school does not have police stationed *in* the school, they just have protocols that they can call the police and the police respond very quickly is my understanding, and if that works then I don't see a need to have the physical presence of police in the school at all times

if you want to address the specific issue of dealing with violent students i think it would be absolutely worth looking at the non-police approaches used when working with adults with mental health issues or learning disabilities who can also become physically dangerous to themselves or people around them. not all of those approaches are good or admirably but there are definitely people working in those sectors in various settings around the world who are capable of dealing with this without resorting to police

I do think the images of militarized goon squads beating people up and gassing them that are circulating everywhere now may help to shift long term public opinion fwiw. I have seen a lot of otherwise pretty politically center people express shock at the bloated and overly aggressive paramilitary forces that we have created.

thread

Do you or somebody you know think that #AbolishThePolice is unrealistic? It might be because you haven’t taken the time to understand what it means, the reasons for it, and why it actually makes a lot of sense. [Thread]

— Bridget Eileen (@TravelingNun) June 4, 2020

moms imo

― sarahell, Sunday, June 7, 2020 7:07 PM (fifty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

where I live the moms really do beat the fuck out of kids, my kids' friends are terrified of bringing home their grades or report cards because it usually means the belt comes out.

we don't have cops in schools here, though, just social workers. despite living in a "no go zone" according to fox news the kids, almost all ethnic minorities, don't escape past normal low level violent adolescent threats. moms on the other hand...

besides the violence aspect re cops, there is also the fact that once the cops get involved, a lot of the time, the person in question gets tossed into the criminal justice system because that's the structure, even when the individual cop doesn't think that's appropriate, that's the structure ... so you have mentally ill people and especially mentally ill homeless people being criminalized because the cops were called to deal with a conflict.

despite living in a "no go zone" according to fox news

/r/france, the French subreddit, had a couple of excellent ripostes to this a few days ago:

https://i.redd.it/2ezbjiv6nf251.png

https://i.redd.it/aqee3sugyh251.png

where I live the moms really do beat the fuck out of kids

i just remember my mom telling me about being a 1st year teacher in East Baltimore in 1968 and one of her students had acted out enough so that the parents were called, and the kid's mom told my mom that if the kid kept behaving that way, she had the mom's permission to hit the kid.

besides the violence aspect re cops, there is also the fact that once the cops get involved, a lot of the time, the person in question gets tossed into the criminal justice system because that's the structure, even when the individual cop doesn't think that's appropriate, that's the structure ... so you have mentally ill people and especially mentally ill homeless people being criminalized because the cops were called to deal with a conflict.

exactly, and there's no reason why in institutional settings like schools and hospitals you can't have non-police who are trained and insured and paid appropriately to deal with and de-escalate physical threats. i realise the US's gun fandom makes this issue a bit different to lots of other countries but still.

to solve a specific school's problems wld require a lot of knowledge of the communities, the history of schooling & law enforcement in that area and the relationship between the two, and all the other exceptional circs that explain how while millions of schools in all sorts of communities manage to handle violence with just their teaching staff, these particular schools ended up in this situation in which you have some combination of fear and a failure of imagination that leaves teachers thinking that only police can handle violence in their school. you can ask "what about x?" questions that are hard to answer about all manner of existing, successful systems, it's concern-trolling

xp fwiw my wife's school does not have police stationed *in* the school, they just have protocols that they can call the police and the police respond very quickly is my understanding, and if that works then I don't see a need to have the physical presence of police in the school at all times

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Sunday, June 7, 2020 2:05 PM (eight minutes ago)

Ah ok, got it. FWIW my thinking on this is strongly informed by the time my sister worked for the NYCLU on a class action suit against the NYPD's School Safety division--she told me some sickening examples of abuse and misconduct.

Much (much, much) more broadly, I feel like some of the tactical political gaming & how-to pragmatic critique of the idea of abolition obscures the moral imperative to answer the question: what do we do about the police being a fundamentally racist institution. IMO it behooves non-abolitionists to explain how to address that (while acknowledging the failure to fix it with programs like bias training).

to solve a specific school's problems wld require a lot of knowledge of the communities, the history of schooling & law enforcement in that area and the relationship between the two, and all the other exceptional circs that explain how while millions of schools in all sorts of communities manage to handle violence with just their teaching staff, these particular schools ended up in this situation in which you have some combination of fear and a failure of imagination that leaves teachers thinking that only police can handle violence in their school.

This is really overcomplicating things. Sometimes fights happen and you have to stop them so someone doesn't get hurt or killed.

Sure. Why the cops?

xp this is that failure of imagination. there are doubtless lots of things that are unique about the situation in america that require particular solutions but "dangerous fights between pupils that need to be stopped" is not one of them

xp Because ordinary teachers and administrators do not have the physical strength or training to be able to restrain two very strong seventeen year olds without getting hurt themselves, and have no adequate consequence with which to threaten the students if they do not stop fighting.

xp How about instead of "imagination" you give me a concrete example of how to stop a dangerous fight? You're not going to reinvent the wheel through "imagination."

so you ensure that schools do have members of staff who are capable of doing this without calling the police

xp ogmor's right, you're just concern trolling at this point and arguing in bad faith

I don't think I'm arguing in bad faith, I'm explaining why I believe in the existence of a last-resort option with a monopoly on force and therefore don't truly believe in abolishing the police. But I do think it's become circular at this point, so I'm going to stop commenting ITT.

what do we do about the police being a fundamentally racist institution.

not to play both sides of the fence, but the police are fundamentally racist in that they are the repressive arm of a racist society. What replaces the police has to be structured such that we are not just re-creating that relationship. I'm not saying we have to "solve racism" before we can abolish the police, but removing the police is not going to solve racism, and it is likely that some of these alternatives could have similar problems (minus the murder). ... there are things like the "stand your ground" laws that allow racist murder by civilians, there are private security forces and neighborhood groups that are like the KKK-lite.

p sure no jujitsu is taught as part of your pgce and yet somehow teachers across europe somehow manage to restrain fighting kids all the time. mental health hospitals do have specially trained staff, but afaik not police per se

maybe the US just needs to import teachers from Europe then ...

if kids are uniquely violent in america then police in schools is a way down your list of things to address

man alive why is the existence of a job role with the training and authorization to bodily break up a fight but not toss teenagers in lockup and charge them with assault so hard to conceive of

You could probably even hire and train some ex-cops to do it, the ones who can pass a background check anyway.

I agree with all that sarahell. To throw it back to man alive: how do you imagine a racist society can maintain a "last-resort option with a monopoly on force" in a manner that won't result in racist injustice?

maybe American kids need to learn to respect teachers more ... idk ... but man alive is right, in that abolishing police is not going to magically eliminate violence that requires some sort of repressive force. I get that plenty of posters on this thread are not saying that it will magically do this. However, some ppl on this thread are coming across like that. I, personally, feel like it would definitely reduce violence and racist violence and oppression, and thus is a worthwhile cause.

there will always be some level of violence/criminality/contrary behavior. but the vast majority of cases are best handled by not cops.

I’ll even let you keep the SWAT team as long as you can keep them sitting on their asses 99% of the time

At least until we round up all the guns

you seem to have a very pleasant life in a very pleasant place, silby

Bro if I still lived in my old apartment I’d have had tear gas wafting in last week

No argument otherwise tho.

congrats! I had flash bang grenades, sirens, police helicopters and looting in my neighborhood for 5 days straight!

Whose fault is that

okay -- there were only 2 days of looting.

Admirable restraint on the part of the looters, I daresay

freedom's just another word for nothing left to loot

. so you have mentally ill people and especially mentally ill homeless people being criminalized because the cops were called to deal with a conflict.

― sarahell

This. The story of a Down syndrome boy who was murdered by police for "refusing to leave a movie theatre" several years ago was one of the more distressing stories i had read.

Naturally, they cleared themselves

I've seen bouncers at clubs effectively break up fights many times without causing bodily harm or escalating

man alive already invented municipal bouncers yesterday!!

Friendly reminder that nurses have to restrain violent, confused, intoxicated, and belligerent people all the time.

And we make it happen without crushing anyone’s windpipe. #BlackLivesMatter

— Mama Curry (@Nurse_Curry) June 2, 2020

Xpost Any type of resolution that doesn't involve shooting an unarmed person for failing to comply with commands in 0.02 seconds is an upgrade.

I have also seen bouncers make shit worse and be racist af -- and then people call out the club/bar and sometimes the bad bouncer gets fired and sometimes the owner/management double down and defend the behavior

but there are other clubs/bars people can go to, so it isn't the end of the world

Hey I'm doing housework (finally) but popping in to address the idea that when ppl advocate to abolish the police they might not have an answer to every hypothetical--and I am extremely NOT well informed about the underlying work, I'm just going off what little I've read. But I have seen this question addressed, that the new structures currently being posited are not "complete" or "perfect"--and it's urgently important to remember that WHAT WE HAVE NOW IS TERRIBLE AND NOT PERFECT EITHER. We've just mostly accepted it, as a society, and decided that the losses and suffering of certain parties, who have those imperfections displaced onto them and away from "us," are an acceptable trade off.

Or as someone already said, why is it more "radical" to fund support services and reduce human suffering than it is to accept militarized thugs killing us and our neighbors right in plain sight?

Xpost And at least usually nobody is dead afterwards

* racist, homophobic, transphobic -- just to be thorough in terms of community complaints re bouncers I am aware of

congrats! I had flash bang grenades, sirens, police helicopters and looting in my neighborhood for 5 days straight!

the system works!

my point being, if we replace cops with municipal bouncers, we need to have a way to get rid of the shitty ones

xp Simon H -- seriously, after 5 days of that, i was like, abolish the police, please!

What if we had a way to get rid of shitty cops?

lol yeah -- one that was paid for out of the police budget, that didn't get increased in order to pay for the damages awarded to plaintiffs who were victims of shitty cops???? ...

sarahell at 2:05 7 Jun 20

I have also seen bouncers make shit worse and be racist af -- and then people call out the club/bar and sometimes the bad bouncer gets fired and sometimes the owner/management double down and defend the behavior moving


totally, should have added more detail. First Avenue after they reopened changed over a lot of security staff and just made safer, less confrontational bouncing a priority. the people running security now don't have those big hulking dudes that wanted to kick ass and they now tend to deescalate and concentrate on moving them towards the door

club feels much safer now

The Riders scandal seems like forever ago .... but we are still paying for it.

xp matt -- yeah!! like, even the Whole Foods (lol i know) replaced their contracted security company after one of the previous company's guards decided that a black guy arguing that his EBT card should work was such a threat he deserved to be severely beaten ... new guards are way more chill and look less like actual cops (whereas the previous company looked like cops)

anyway abolish the police

The worst bouncers I ever worked with were off-duty cops that the PD blackmailed my then-girlfriend into hiring.

one reason that clubs are more likely to control their bouncers - at least in the UK - is because they can lose their licence if shit gets out of hand on their premises

doesn't seem to apply to cities and cops for some reason

i found the actual worst blobby pic.twitter.com/vMsBRPLvPd

— Karl Remain Indoors Barx 🚦 (@JohnMcMarx) June 7, 2020

seems pretty good idk

https://i.postimg.cc/CwChXbkj/image.png

HELLO, SOME NEWS: Minneapolis is going to disband its police department. This is not a drill. https://t.co/VsxTp1JYVI

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis) June 7, 2020

just coming here to post that

Minneapolis City Council Members Announce Intent To Disband The Police Department, Invest In Proven Community-Led Public Safety

xxp thank you, unintelligible symbols, for that chart. I couldn't find it earlier re body cameras.

Intrigued by the idea that teachers/schools are unable to break up physical fights given that I've been physically assaulted by teachers more times than I have the police ( 3-0). Perhaps there are less violent teachers now than in the 80's.

well...depends how bad of a fight and the age/size of the kids, really. there was a middle school in my area where teachers getting severely beaten by students was a regular occurrence.

BUT...definitely doesn't require law enforcement, no. half the time...they aren't the ones who wind up breaking them up.

pvmic, i am a HS teacher and i have broken up a lot of fights. we have two full-time armed officers and surveillance cams almost everywhere that are monitored by said officers. occasionally we get more officers if there have been a number of fights in a short amount of time.

abolish the police btw

Time to find out if u can do capitalism without cops I guess!

no abolish that too

Yer preaching to the choir!

there was only one time in my entire life I was very appreciative for a police presence in my area. Which was when my autistic son went on a walkabout and I was in such a fucked up and distressed state when they found him I was hugging a couple of them and saying you people have done such a fucking good job here I'll never slag you off again! But the same ones that found him and took him to safety when he was 13 or 14 yrs old could be the same ones kneeling on his neck or violently manhandling him at some future point in his life because he is non-verbal and having a meltdown or misusing their power to have him sectioned just because they are ignorant of autism and can't be arsed.

I can't stand them tbh and personally have bad experiences with them and especially when they got me to sign a bullshit caution for theft while I was tired, hungry and being kept in a cell after a hard day at work. A caution that haunted me every time an employer did an enhanced background check for years to come, but tbf the d+d charges didn't help either! But it strikes me there are a hell of lot of people who can barely count on one hand how many times the police have helped them and the column of them being complete thuggish wankers is usually a few hands worth.

https://truthout.org/articles/breaking-with-afl-cio-affiliated-labor-council-may-vote-to-expel-police-union/

"The executive board of MLK Labor, the central body of labor groups which represents more than 150 unions and 100,000 workers in the Seattle, Washington, area approved a resolution Thursday giving an ultimatum to the Seattle Police Officers Guild: Address Seattle Police Department’s systemic racism or face potential expulsion."

https://www.8toabolition.com/

i am listening to the majority report on my lunch break and alex vitale is on. he mentioned a book called decriminalizing domestic violence by leigh goodmark, which i had heard about but have not read. (dv in the criminal justice system is a topic that became v frustrating to me in my old job and i was so burned out i would never have been able to read it--i think that it is one of the top problems, next to drug criminalization, that police/prosecutors actively make worse). i was looking for it and found an interesting thread she posted today.

As questions come up about responding to #domesticviolence in a #DefundThePolice world, people are recommending my book. I really appreciate that. But I have to warn you--I wasn't an abolitionist when I wrote the book. I am now.

— Leigh Goodmark (@LeighGoodmark) June 8, 2020

thanks for that! this nyt oped she wrote last year is good: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/domestic-violence-criminal-justice-reform-too.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

One unanswered question I have about police abolition that leaves me a little uneasy: where do the cops go? Once they're out of a job, those guys are going to take their agenda and their energy somewhere else, and I feel like a lot of them are the types who will join fringe right-wing militias, where there is no means even in theory to hold them accountable. In a weird and awful way, it seems like keeping them where they are is the only way to guarantee the people maintain a modicum of control over them. Can anyone point me to some abolitionist thinkers/activists who have thought that question through?

they're out of control already and they probably already belong to fringe right-wing militias.

Right and right, but if they're part of the state, then there is at least the chance we can *gain* control over them is what I mean. You can point toward existing reforms and say "we've tried," but I would say we (meaning the state, not the activists who have been fighting for this for decades) haven't tried hard enough.

stripping them of all institutional power is the only way forward, they cannot be reformed or controlled through the state

this has been abundantly demonstrated over decades

Fair enough!

I agree that your concern is valid and will probably have to be addressed on some level, btw

give em all jobs like

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9o7Ad5hBWeU/TtOol9h2gaI/AAAAAAAAX5w/SsnYYiiXAAY/s1600/shield-desk.jpg

if they're part of the state, then there is at least the chance we can *gain* control over them is what I mean

let's not try leninism again plz

yall know that "abolish the police" includes the fbi, cia, atf, the judges, the courts, the prisons, ice, the military, liberal peace police, and the state right?

— white anarchist collars 💣💥🌳🌲 (@Chlxr1n3) June 8, 2020

One unanswered question I have about police abolition that leaves me a little uneasy: where do the cops go? Once they're out of a job, those guys are going to take their agenda and their energy somewhere else, and I feel like a lot of them are the types who will join fringe right-wing militias, where there is no means even in theory to hold them accountable. In a weird and awful way, it seems like keeping them where they are is the only way to guarantee the people maintain a modicum of control over them. Can anyone point me to some abolitionist thinkers/activists who have thought that question through?

― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Monday, June 8, 2020 3:58 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

admittedly there are certain things I have yet to see totally explained, but this one seems pretty easy:

1. The recruiting into right-wing militias is already happening, both on the job (those stories about Border Patrol Facebook groups, etc.) and off it. I guess theoretically there might be somebody driven to join the local KKK because they're mad they lost their job, but usually the seeds for that were planted ages ago.
2. The question seems to imply that 100% of these guys' violence is committed on the clock, which just isn't true.

abolish planet

xxp eyes on the prize

my home state at it again. don't live near Brevard, but just about the entire city lit up their FB thread yesterday when they posted this shit.

their comeback this morning was a GIF meme with doctored crime stats proving there was no systemic racism

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/us/brevard-county-florida-police-union-misconduct-trnd/index.html

XPs to Left; I definitely don't want to see anything like Leninism. "Control" maybe not the best word...I just want to see real honest-to-god accountability.

ok but surely trying to achieve that through the police or state is just self defeating

yall know that "abolish the police" includes the fbi, cia, atf, the judges, the courts, the prisons, ice, the military, liberal peace police, and the state right?

no, it doesn't

it does actually

weird radical v reformist push pull under the same banner going on atm

I like the state actually and I don’t know what “liberal peace police” are but the rest of those things definitely on the abolition table just my imho

it's cute how anarchists see demonstrations against racist institutions and assume that everyone has suddenly become an anarchist

i'm pretty sure abolishing "the state" would not get rid of racist violence, quite the opposite in fact

abolish all matter

who is assuming everyone is an anarchist (whatever that means)?

how is the state currently preventing racist violence? how/why would you abolish police while maintaining the state? how would the state then prevent racist violence in this scenario?

Man, liberals are getting spicy in their negative takes on human nature.

I don't understand the conceptual separation of police & state at all tbh

also hobbes can eat a fat one

anarchists really "getting out over their skis" rn, to use a phrase that has suddenly been everywhere

"Don't you think that if we did away with the people committing the racist violence being protested that the masses would just erupt in an orgy of racist violence?"

liberals are getting spicy in their negative takes on human nature.

We are speaking of that same sunny, reliable human nature that turns out racists and death cultists by the bushel basketful, right?

ideology

my memory is not very good, was ‘abolish the police’ always a central BLM message or was that just something that got going in the last 2 weeks during snowballing success off the current round of protests? seems to be part of the discourse in a way it wasn’t before at least

i read about camden NJ disbanding their police dept. they actually increased funding and increased the number of cops, and crime fell. i expect BLM people to stop using it as an example of what mpls should do once people catch on

it was definitely part of The Discourse preivously

What is the #abolishthepolice case against the Camden model?

i don’t support abolishing or fully defunding. im not sure what would even entail, and it obviously won’t happen, so it seems like a distraction to argue about it. saw a thread on twitter with someone responding to the good question “what about rapists?” and they said that when the cops put a rapist father in jail the kids grow up without a father. that doesn’t seem like a satisfying rebuttal, and the rest of the thread was similar whataboutery.

i feel like “abolish“ is the overton window shifting signal for “radically circumscribe police as currently designed”, which i do support, and that’s what ive spent most of my energy arguing for. the one “real” encounter i had with the cops was when we called 911 after my roommate got roofied and OD’d; they came in and beat the shit out of him (he was spastic and totally unaware of what was happening) then they beat the shit out of his girlfriend for freaking out at them while they beat her partner, and then arrested her and now she has a criminal record. it was a confusing and terrible situation but i feel like as a society someone else should have been the first responder to that kind of call. reading social media the last 2 weeks, it seems that everyone has stories like this.

the number and function of cops seems like it’s chosen by an unholy alliance between real estate developers, business groups and police unions, all of whom have selfish reasons for wanting police depts to be inefficiently large and powerful. and of course police unions want cops to be unaccountable, which the other 2 are happy to oblige. i hope this moment creates a countervailing popular movement that can permanently change the political economy and create some democratic accountability and smaller police depts

What is the #abolishthepolice case against the Camden model?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, June 8, 2020 9:56 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

just that they didn’t abolish the police. they disbanded, immediately reinstated, and then hired many more cops

flopson, I know, I mean what is the critique of the tear down/rebuild differently approach in Camden - obviously you can find plenty of people claiming it "worked." Are there good critiques of it out there?

o Left, ye idiot still speaketh

saw a thread on twitter with someone responding to the good question “what about rapists?” and they said that when the cops put a rapist father in jail the kids grow up without a father.

You probably should have looked for the responses to that from women talking about how police ignored, harassed or blamed them for their sexual assault instead of that dipshit.

the people i know who are most interested in restorative justice are also victims' advocates who have had to deal most with the shortcomings of the criminal justice system when it handles sex crimes and domestic abuse

xp actually "what about rapists" is not a good question see lost rape kit links upthread

mostly agree with yr last 2 paras tho, yes it is an Overton Window slogan but also legit orgs have been working for this for years

morbs still reactionary creep

i'm a weirdo

xp - You should meet him sometime before you assign him a label and dismiss him.

You probably should have looked for the responses to that from women talking about how police ignored, harassed or blamed them for their sexual assault instead of that dipshit.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Monday, June 8, 2020 10:14 PM (forty-two seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was the thread:

For people who ask "what about the rapists?" during abolition conversations:

— Wagatwe Wanjuki 🇰🇪 🇧🇸 (@wagatwe) June 8, 2020

i don’t think the person who wrote it is a dipshit. it’s a decent attempt to answer a hard question, it just didn’t convince me. cops ignore and blame women for sexual assault, but they also do put some rapists in jail. imo they put too few in jail; i don’t know the source but the stat you often see is 0.5%. depressingly low but higher than 0 which is what it would be under abolition. a good friend of mine is very happy that her rapist is in jail. it’s hard to say whether or how an alternative system without a state monopoly on violence would be able to deliver her that peace of mind

changing how sexual assault is dealt with should be part of “radically circumscribing police” but i’m not yet convinced that switching to largely untested restorative justice and community based methods is the way to go

imo these debates are kind of troll-ey word games and largely besides the point

Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patten who said, "If you label me, you negate me?"

Either/Or is Enough

i don’t think the person who wrote it is a dipshit.

Even under the most radical non-incarceral abolish prisons and police worldview, "rapists need to be able to raise their kids" isn't in the top 1000 reasons for that worldview

depressingly low but higher than 0 which is what it would be under abolition

this is just simply not true, c'mon dude

abolishing the police still leaves social workers, medical system, legal system, all kinds of accountability

ya it’s a bad point. her broader argument is basically that the “multiplier” from jailing a rapist is bigger than 1. jailing a rapist begets more rape through perpetuating a cycle of trauma and violence.

that was xp to milo

# of better slogans proposed so far: 0

flopson do you simply not believe in restorative justice? is that the disconnect here? is jail the only blunt instrument in your imagination?

Abolish the United States

depressingly low but higher than 0 which is what it would be under abolition

this is just simply not true, c'mon dude

abolishing the police still leaves social workers, medical system, legal system, all kinds of accountability

― sleeve, Monday, June 8, 2020 10:42 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is what i mean about word games though. abolish the police but rapists still get put in jail... so under the counterfactual social workers put rapists in prison? (prison still exists?) im fine with that, but it’s just a relabeling

see my jail comment above

pretty fucking rich for a dude who's concern trolling about rapists to be talking about word games

I personally support the use of cybernetic panopticon control systems to enforce the behavior of antisocial elements

We’ll build a humongous mainframe under the Sierra Nevada and staff it with 2 million people.

flopson do you simply not believe in restorative justice? is that the disconnect here? is jail the only blunt instrument in your imagination?

― sleeve, Monday, June 8, 2020 10:44 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i definitely find RJ insufficient in terms of deterrence or retribution. i certainly wished a fate worse than RJ on the rapists i’ve known

pretty fucking rich for a dude who's concern trolling about rapists to be talking about word games

― sleeve, Monday, June 8, 2020 10:47 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

what would the social workers and legal people do to enforce accountability though? RJ doesn’t seem sufficient to me. you think it would be sufficient in all cases? what if someone repeatedly reoffends? isn’t there some jail-like final level of RJ that would eventually be reached for someone bad enough? it seems inevitable to me

restorative justice in NYC schools' track record is a bit unclear so far. I noted above my wife's experience that sometimes it works but sometimes there are just kids who don't respond to it and keep doing what they were doing. One of the "success" metrics often cited is a bit circular -- that it reduces suspensions (obviously if you change suspension policy to allow for fewer suspensions, it's going to reduce suspensions). NYC Principals have complained that student safety worsened with these policy changes (increased restorative justice and reduced suspensions), albeit they say they also support moving away from zero tolerance policies https://thechiefleader.com/news/news_of_the_week/csa-tells-carranza-of-members-fears-on-school-discipline/article_a0779eb4-33bb-11ea-b697-734ce0ec56e5.html and also complain that their staffs weren't given sufficient training in restorative practices (so I suppose you could argue that better training might create better outcomes?).

i agree were trolling and am happy to end the convo here but imo that’s wired into how discussions about ‘abolish the police’ unfold. there’s an unspoken acknowledgment that there is some counterfactual good alternative that everyone agrees upon. but that’s not true. we even agreed that it’s a “shift the overton window” signal slogan, yet we disagree on how literally to take certain parts of it. most abolitionists will describe what ultimately amount to reforms when pressed, “abolish” is a way to coordinate the movement without resolving all the debates and without conceding anything. it makes sense, is probably even smart strategically, but it still is a word game imo

(xp to sleeve)

I don’t think retribution (as I understand the word) should be a “thing” when it comes to making laws and shit... but I’m open to being wrong.

more on restorative practices: https://hechingerreport.org/the-promise-of-restorative-justice-starts-to-falter-under-rigorous-research/

multiple xp- i'm not trying to ingratiate myself with this community so i don't need to be nice to certain beloved regulars who i find gross

prob not worth me trying to be serious bc i seem to come off trolly here the more i try. but way too much confusion comes from treating all these oppressive systems/relations/apparatuses as discrete things that can be manipulated separately. if we're not abolishing patriarchy and white supremacy ("too") then what's the point

not a fan of a lot of versions of RJ in theory or implementation. my preferred solutions are also v problematic. none of that means we must perpetuate system of locking ppl in cages. and whoever is seizing on some random twitter post as representative of the anti-prison/anti-police position is just not being serious

i guess what i meant by retribution was keeping the person away from their victims and other potential victims. i don’t care about like, their salvation or wtv

xps brimstead

ah gotcha

xp staff buy-in and training is huge for school-based RJ. there are a bunch of teachers/counselors/admins i know who would get it in a second, and there are a bunch who are basically cops who'd look for ways to circumvent RJ to use punitive measures. or, if theyre stifled there, theyd not carry out RJ in any meaningful way.

i think relationship building is essential to making this kind of thing work which is why abolitionists stress community-based responses. it can sound like a dodge, like we're proposing this as a panacea to avoid answering to the extreme cases (which policing and incarceration generally do a bad job of addressing but have existing institutions in place to handle them so ppl feel more comfortable with it). but this is precisely why abolitionism is necessary, not just as rhetorical flourish, but as a fundamentally different way of organizing society based on an ethic of mutual care and not on domination. it is dedicating funds and creating work to build up our collective capacity to care for one another which is antithetical to the policing and carceral model.

lol man alive, i hadnt read the hechinger report article before i posted just now, but that hints at a lot of what i was saying. education is full of trends that come and go, so a lot of teachers are liable to tune the latest thing out. the subhed of that article is telling: "...trendy alternative to traditional discipline"

ok not to derail just to talk about my pet issue, but whatever

i rly hate how every educational policy is framed by its effects on standardized tests. like, RJ is worthwhile if kids fucking feel better afterwards and have ways of handling conflicts healthily in the future regardless if it helps their math skills!!!!! theres a huge missing gap of qualitative data that i'd want to know more abt here, but instead its easy but noisy shit like suspension rates and test scores, fuck.

and theyre reducing everything down to "dont punish, and get fighting kids to talk in a circle" which is reductive as all hell, i hate this shit.

I don't understand the conceptual separation of police & state at all tbh

― 1312 (Left), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 1:35 AM (two hours ago)

the police are an institution that can be legally defunded, reduced, or even abolished through democratic means. abolishing the state means abolishing, among other things, civil rights laws (along with workers' protection, food safety regulations, and about a million other good things). it's fine if anarchists want to make "abolish the state" their personal goal but it is not something that the overwhelming majority of americans want, and ppl who insist that we can't focus on ending one bad institution without tearing it all down are not really being helpful.

xp Working in a school for the first time this year... I don't see why any school wouldn't try RJ. We've all seen it - the same kids get into trouble again and again and punishment doesn't act as a deterrent of any kind. It's often emotional disturbance, psychological or home issues. I know one or two teachers who might be tiffed that they won't be able to "properly discipline" kids, but usually those are those the ones who are toxic and barely able to keep control. The teachers that communicate compassionately seem to be more successful, in my experience - but I'm also in a very young school, elementary level.

It is important to notice that whatever the next steps taken to improve justice and security in all segments of society, we will be taking those steps within the damaged, imbalanced, often ignorant and angry, selfish grasping society that exists out there right now. Even if we were to tear down all our present institutions to bare rock and start to rebuild, it would not be rebuilding from scratch, because the people doing the rebuilding would be the very same people who inhabit this society this minute, and they will be just as damaged, privileged, often ignorant and angry, selfish and grasping as they are today.

There are limits to what one can do immediately with such materials to work with. It shouldn't stop us from trying to move as rapidly as possible in a better direction, but do not expect miracles to fall gently out of the sky.

the hope would be different relations might do more towards healing from damage inflicted by current system than perpetuating that system would, not expecting miracles

the police are an institution that can be legally defunded, reduced, or even abolished through democratic means. abolishing the state means abolishing, among other things, civil rights laws (along with workers' protection, food safety regulations, and about a million other good things). it's fine if anarchists want to make "abolish the state" their personal goal but it is not something that the overwhelming majority of americans want, and ppl who insist that we can't focus on ending one bad institution without tearing it all down are not really being helpful.

wrt specific genocidal settler state idc what majority of its residents think, fuck democracy

if the consensus definition of this slogan becomes "abolish specific police forces within specific borders, distribute their functions between other agencies not officially called police" then fuck everything

but I'm also in a very young school, elementary level. um, well yeah, that's kind of the whole thing. This is way, way less of an issue at the elementary school level, much moreso at the middle and high school level.

I think when we talk about what "works" we also have to ask what "works" means. There are times when unfortunately a school does not have *any* sufficiently effective tools at its disposal to help a persistently violent kid stop being violent, but it still has a responsibility to protect other students, teachers, staff etc.

wrt specific genocidal settler state idc what majority of its residents think, fuck democracy

― 1312 (Left), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 4:31 AM (eight minutes ago)

curious how you would change the status quo if not through democratic means (however defined), but maybe i don't want to know

idk you can call strikes, riots, appropriation of resources democratic if you want

through three men sack races

Or sock races

It’ll be interesting to see whether pressure to defund / abolish police departments is picked up by people completely opposed to its fundamental aims to accelerate the shift towards a Smart City approach, which tbh, I think is reasonably likely to be the next incarnation of policing anyway. Rather than paying billions of dollars for a bunch of oafs to cruise around looking for lawbreaking, you use surveillance drones, cellphone tracking, private military technology and an army of quasi-civilians sitting behind computers to have eyes on everything, all the time, and deploy rapid response units where needed. The parallel fight to end surveillance and predictive intervention strategies is also going to be important.

"civil rights laws (along with workers' protection, food safety regulations, and about a million other good things)"

I think people advocating for the state have to come up with something more than inadequate worker protection laws (all of which was hard won through struggle anyway) and civil rights laws (cops and the media will make life a misery for a lot of these protestors, for a start) if they want to keep their precious state.

imo these debates are kind of troll-ey word games and largely besides the point

― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

*Watching ppl risk their life for a better world* is like Scrabble to me.

oh woody..

This is 100% accurate.

Defund the police, and we will take matters into our own hands! 🤣 pic.twitter.com/Vj9EFgcYpb

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) June 7, 2020

fuck off, xyzzzz

That's what I thought you'd say

Games and songs:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/juliareinstein/lose-yo-job-viral-video-woman-johnniqua-charles?

This interview and discussion below.

Watch this super interesting conversation with the former police chief of Camden, NJ.

In Camden, city leaders dissolved the entire police department in 2012 and fully rebuilt it to focus on community policing.

After this reform:
- murders ⬇️ 70%
- violent crime ⬇️ 46% pic.twitter.com/ZrZ3ESmT4A

— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) June 8, 2020

As SV put it it's part of a package to salvage/re-make thrash but defunding, taking out the worst in terms of weapons and people is the absolute minimum. Anything to save a few lives from the murderous state is laying another stone.

I think when we talk about what "works" we also have to ask what "works" means. There are times when unfortunately a school does not have *any* sufficiently effective tools at its disposal to help a persistently violent kid stop being violent, but it still has a responsibility to protect other students, teachers, staff etc.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, June 8, 2020 11:34 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

if a kid is irrepressibly violent, we are probably looking at an sped referral for emotional disturbance, and a more restrictive environment might be more appropriate, but that entails a need for more sped staff, not cops

My wife is sped staff and no

this may sound naive or obvious, but i also think, call me crazy, that in a world where what's currently spent on high-tech, over-armed, and over-staffed policing is instead spent on a wide range of social services, is a world with way fewer kids growing into teens who present extreme difficulties in terms of classroom function and safety. and such kids would likely also have preexisting relationships with social workers or counselors which could be mobilized as part of a response in order to get a constructive conversation going where the *primary* topic isn't "how can we punish you and derail your future enough to reflect the severity of this misconduct."

i can also imagine something where the "bouncer" is available to subdue anyone who's being actively, physically dangerous, but *isn't* there to send them into the court and prison system. just cool them down and let's get into a meeting about it. in a room with windows and growing plants and comfy couches, not a windowless cinder-block cell in the middle of a building from 1962. because we've done the math and realized just how big those police budgets were, and we're using the money to rebuild our schools, shrink classroom sizes, and otherwise redress the horrific inequities in our schools... right?

I am no expert but I assume RJ is going to be harder and cost more money than what we are currently doing. It definitely will take more skill than beating and locking up kids/people. So if the goal is the most efficient use of resources so that we can meet our budget and keep taxes low (i.e. same old capitalism), I think RJ is going to lose every time. This is without even taking into account the difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of social science measures in the real world with nearly infinite variables. I assume the things RJ would help with would take generations to appear in the data and be so removed from the inputs as to be difficult to connect at the end of the day. NB this is not an argument against RJ.

Left do you really think ridding the world of cops overnight is desirable vs gradually transitioning to a different model of community support? Maybe it's my lack of imagination but I can't see the former going well anywhere.

I'm all for abolishing police as an end goal but I'm not gonna get mad at meaningful reforms that will save lives.

Wow y'all were busy last night.

xp staff buy-in and training is huge for school-based RJ. there are a bunch of teachers/counselors/admins i know who would get it in a second, and there are a bunch who are basically cops who'd look for ways to circumvent RJ to use punitive measures. or, if theyre stifled there, theyd not carry out RJ in any meaningful way.

i think relationship building is essential to making this kind of thing work which is why abolitionists stress community-based responses. it can sound like a dodge, like we're proposing this as a panacea to avoid answering to the extreme cases (which policing and incarceration generally do a bad job of addressing but have existing institutions in place to handle them so ppl feel more comfortable with it). but this is precisely why abolitionism is necessary, not just as rhetorical flourish, but as a fundamentally different way of organizing society based on an ethic of mutual care and not on domination. it is dedicating funds and creating work to build up our collective capacity to care for one another which is antithetical to the policing and carceral model.

― methinks dababy doth bop shit too much (m bison)

Same 100%. My experience in schools was that 1. The DOE made schools pay out of their budgets to get trained in RJ. There was some optional funding from different grants and stuff but it was very piecemeal. This forced schools to train only selected staff that they either a) Thought needed it most (ie were the worst at handling de-escalation and even escalated conflicts in their classes) or b) Were the most enthusiastic & committed, meaning, they were already trying to use RJ and were already on board and maybe needed the training the *least*.

2. Even if RJ were the be-all-end-all of a police & carceral abolition, which it isn't, you have to go a lot deeper than "sitting in circles talking." In terms of the "restorative" part: At their root, crimes are forbidden/penalized because they cause harm. They damage people physically, emotionally, economically, and this hurts individuals, selected groups, and the collective community all on different levels. A restorative approach asks, "What would go some way toward mending the harm that you caused? How can you labor to re-weave our individual and communal health in order to heal where you harmed, remembering that YOU are ALSO part of the collective and your actions clearly show that you also are not well, but are still accountable?" And that is kind of mind-blowing!!!! Ifaict we really don't have anything like that!

lol school are in no way doing that second thing. They can't. They don't have access to the relationships or the trust or the communal fabric, except maybe in rare cases. But they can stop calling the police on their kids for a start.

Like I'm not saying that school staff SHOULDN'T be trained in whatever curriculum the for-profit educational space vendors have packaged up as "training" in order to get those sweet DOE dollars. It's not where we should stop, though.

And, speaking of DOE dollars, we're down here fighting over pocket change because of the manufactured scarcity of educational funding, so let's go back to how the NYPD has a six billion dollar budget THAT WE KNOW OF just from what's provided by the city from our taxes, not including the profits they make on lots of other deals they have going.

I want m bison to get back on your "mental health isn't linear/this isn't test scores" soapbox bc I have something to say about that too.

arresting, processing, and locking people up is massively, massively expensive and imho the money would go a lot farther than PBKR suggests. yes, restorative justice would require more skills, but it also doesn't require police cruisers, military-grade hardware, an enormous court infrastructure and an enormous prison infrastructure. even if some of that expenditure gets redirected to the RJ bureaucracy, i just can't imagine that the leftover cash is just crumbs.

there's a lot of ways of trying to get a grip on this... which for me is all impressionistic since i'm not in policy, don't understand budgeting, and my armchair sense of how much things cost could be way off. but i think a lot about the Million Dollar Blocks project, which geographically links the prison population back to their home neighborhoods to look at the cost of imprisoning people. in some cases the state is annually spending a million dollar per city block on incarcerating people. pretty easy to imagine how much a million dollars per block could do to transform underlying conditions. to be fair it's also easy to imagine a million dollars getting eaten up pretty fast by the range of necessary initiatives! i don't think defunding the police by itself is all you need but it would be a game-changer. the NYC Budget Justice campaign also has some good breakdowns altho oddly their great bar graph showing what gets spent on the NYPD versus other things is ridiculously low-res so you can't read some of the text. but it's still revealing!

yeah the amounts going to policing are unbelievable; the sheer scale of what could be done with that money is hard for me to really get a grip on

xp YES!!! TO ALL OF THAT!

the camden model is really interesting. i don't think "abolish the police" is a good way to describe it.

It's not abolish the police.

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=brooklyn%20movement%20center&epa=SEARCH_BOX

Some drill down on the NYPD's budget from a great teach-in the other day. And this edit doesn't even include Leo talking about what the NYPD spends on underwater bomb sniffing robots and x-ray trucks that can drive around and see through buildings!

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-whats-real-nypd-budget-nobody-knows-20200529-6vbqldjwfbghthepqnjr3teeky-story.html

the NYPD obtains untold millions through contracts with the federal government and its own private foundation, purchasing invasive spy tools without any review by the City Council that New Yorkers elect to oversee our agencies. In some cases, the NYPD even gets a commission for helping private firms develop tools that are bought up by other cities.

In one of the rare publicly disclosed deals, Microsoft agreed that whenever they sell their pricey Domain Awareness System software to other police departments, the NYPD gets a 30% cut. That’s right, our police department helped develop new surveillance software, and they get to keep the profits.

Cut funding for police departments:
Favor 16%
Oppose 65%@YouGovAmerica/@YahooNews 5/29-30https://t.co/QlvYGpg0uP

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) June 9, 2020

20% after just over a week of protests is good.

oh yeah apologies for my post up thread, the "oh Woody", I actually thought that was really Woody Harrelson when it's not. You can remove it if you want.

FWIW, the NYC schools budget is $24 billion, i.e. 4x the NYPD budget (which isn't to say it shouldn't be 6x). This is very NYC-specific, but I don't think underfunding is the #1 problem in NYC schools. And funding is also not as disparate between rich and poor schools as in other parts of the country because schools are not funded based on differing property tax systems, and schools in poorer districts get additional federal aid per student. (BTW yes, I am familiar with the PTA funding issue, but that gets exaggerated in the media due to the way it's calculated by the DOE - for example at my daughter's school what is basically just a paid aftercare program run on school grounds got rolled into the PTA budget because the PTA runs the program, but poorer schools have free aftercare programs).

Something admittedly does seem off about the fact that every year parents get called on to buy basic shit like tissues for the classroom (even in my daughter's school in a middle-to-upper-middle-class neighborhood), so I don't know if there's some kind of inefficiency in the system (administrative bloat) or what, but my wife has taught in poor schools in brooklyn and the bronx and unlike in a lot of places in the country they actually were decently funded. Concentrated poverty is a problem and gives the school a lot more to deal with meaning they probably need significantly more funding per student than a wealthier school.

My own pet pie-in-the-sky reform is actually abolish private schools -- a lot of the concentrated poverty in schools is a result of many well-off kids not attending public school at all.

thats cool, this is the abolish the police thread tho, we have some education threads where we can abolish private schools, too

My wife is sped staff and no

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:55 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

im sure im not telling you anything you dont already know, but sped staffs vary in their roles by definition! some people are inclusion support and they're pretty good academic generalists and develop good relationships with kids who need additional one-on-one support every day. some are life skills teachers who work with kids with severe and profound disabilities. some are good with the behavior units for kids with more disruptive behaviors. these 3 people are all sped certified, but are not necessarily well suited for each others' work. and then there's co-teaching, resource rooms, autism units, etc.

i mean if we're playing credential flash, im sped certified and taught my first 2 years there and have had inclusion support/co-teaching as a general ed teacher every year since then. and ive had kids who receive behavioral unit support who've been in violent confrontations with campus officers! yay i win!!!!!!!!!

we have some education threads where we can abolish private schools, too

these issues are all intricately connected!

yes!

im sure im not telling you anything you dont already know, but sped staffs vary in their roles by definition! some people are inclusion support and they're pretty good academic generalists and develop good relationships with kids who need additional one-on-one support every day. some are life skills teachers who work with kids with severe and profound disabilities. some are good with the behavior units for kids with more disruptive behaviors. these 3 people are all sped certified, but are not necessarily well suited for each others' work. and then there's co-teaching, resource rooms, autism units, etc.

i mean if we're playing credential flash, im sped certified and taught my first 2 years there and have had inclusion support/co-teaching as a general ed teacher every year since then. and ive had kids who receive behavioral unit support who've been in violent confrontations with campus officers! yay i win!!!!!!!!!

― methinks dababy doth bop shit too much (m bison), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54 AM (fifty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, as far as certifications, it's also a rapidly expanding field which means two things that aren't great:

1. heavy recruitment from teach for america and the like -- most of which don't require any particular degree going into the program, unlike math which requires a math degree, science which requires a science degree, etc. it is very much presented as a fallback/"well, I don't qualify for anything else" option. and while the risk of a poorly trained teacher teaching math is not being able to explain exactly what infinity is, the risk of a poorly trained special ed teacher being around kids is permanently traumatizing a possibly already traumatized child

2. since they need so many people, the shitty and abusive ones hold onto their jobs longer. obviously I'm not saying that's you or your wife, but there is stuff out there that makes Matilda look like a spa resort

(this isn't an argument that the police should do it and make everything 100 times worse as they tend to, just that the current system is, while better than it was a few decades ago, not remotely up to the task yet)

i feel you. thats part of the work i described above, putting resources into expanding capacity for care. that means paying teachers more, hiring more of them (particularly from the communities that they serve), preparing them better beforehand, etc.

(fill disclosure: i was in tfa and it sucks and i contributed a chapter to a book about why it sucks; also that's not how certification works in every state bc alt cert/TFAers teach every content area in tx and this the case more often than not in other states as well)

(weird, that's how it works in new york, at least, which is why the past several years of my life have been spent taking various forms of upper-level math; I think it works the same way in california as well)

(er, for regular certification that is, although all the similar programs here also require it)

yeah, in more liberal states theres generally stiffer requirements. in tx as long as you have a bachelor's you can take any certification test, pass it, and you're good to go (i have like 6 or 7)

also

we should abolish the police

Same 100%. My experience in schools was that 1. The DOE made schools pay out of their budgets to get trained in RJ. There was some optional funding from different grants and stuff but it was very piecemeal. This forced schools to train only selected staff that they either a) Thought needed it most (ie were the worst at handling de-escalation and even escalated conflicts in their classes) or b) Were the most enthusiastic & committed, meaning, they were already trying to use RJ and were already on board and maybe needed the training the *least*.

2. Even if RJ were the be-all-end-all of a police & carceral abolition, which it isn't, you have to go a lot deeper than "sitting in circles talking." In terms of the "restorative" part: At their root, crimes are forbidden/penalized because they cause harm. They damage people physically, emotionally, economically, and this hurts individuals, selected groups, and the collective community all on different levels. A restorative approach asks, "What would go some way toward mending the harm that you caused? How can you labor to re-weave our individual and communal health in order to heal where you harmed, remembering that YOU are ALSO part of the collective and your actions clearly show that you also are not well, but are still accountable?" And that is kind of mind-blowing!!!! Ifaict we really don't have anything like that!

lol school are in no way doing that second thing. They can't. They don't have access to the relationships or the trust or the communal fabric, except maybe in rare cases. But they can stop calling the police on their kids for a start.

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:17 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

What I don't understand is what are schools supposed to do when a 180-lb high school student (or multiple high school students) are beating the shit out of another student, or attacking a teacher or staffer, or worse when a student is threatening others with a weapon. Why should schools not "call the police on their kids" in that situation? There is no restorative approach that protects the safety of others in that moment, even if you assume that a long-term, intensive restorative approach might eventually cause the aggressor student to no longer be an aggressor. Like I think there is a bit of magical thinking or avoidant thinking going on here that says "Well we'll divert the funding to all these other things that prevent the violence from happening in the first place." But you're never going to get to zero violence.

fwiw my wife has worked in SPED for 14 years, including 11 at the elementary and three at the high school level, has taught both 12-1-1 and ICT classes as well as worked one-on-one/in small groups as an interventionist, has taught in poor schools in the bronx and brooklyn as well as a part-G&T school that has increasingly admitted low income kids and kids with IEPs. She has seen and been through A LOT. That doesn't make her word the be-all-end-all, but if she says there are situations where you need to be able to call police as a last resort, I believe her.

What are they supposed to do when it's the police officer beating the shit out of a student? Maybe I keep asking this in the wrong thread, but what is your plan/ideas/slogans for addressing police brutality, including the violence cops do within schools?

What's crazy is that multiple people have proposed in this thread multiple times that there could be people whose job is to physically intervene in those situations who are not the police and you're still pretending that you actually want to resolve this and not just be an obstacle.

Because there ARE people in the school whose job that is, and they aren't capable of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

tbc man alive who exactly are you talking about that can only do their jobs by invoking the police?

America's savior speaks:

A bit of skepticism from @BernieSanders in a @NewYorker interview published this morning, when asked about the Defund the Police movement, but he does say "we want to redefine what police departments do." https://t.co/dahxN8l8L3 pic.twitter.com/WiSxVHP1rP

— Adam Kelsey (@adamkelsey) June 9, 2020

poorly trained and poorly educated - check
poorly paid - hol up

unperson no one cares about bernie sanders anymore, you can stop now

trying to get that cabinet job

"Why should schools not 'call the police on their kids'" --- I can think of a few reasons but fyi we have a whole thread on police brutality and corruption, and information on the school-to-prison pipeline is p widely available. imo the onus should be on those who want teens (or anybody else) winding up in the judicial/carceral system to explain why that benefits them or anybody else. there's a big gap between "i don't want teachers and students to be defenseless" and "i want these kids to have criminal records" which is what happens when you call the cops.

otm

Because there ARE people in the school whose job that is, and they aren't capable of it.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 10:39 AM (forty-two minutes ago)

how the heck did they get the job then?

definitely abolish private school tho btw

abolish carceral logic in public school too

imo these debates are kind of troll-ey word games and largely besides the point

― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

*Watching ppl risk their life for a better world* is like Scrabble to me.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 3:35 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

just because people are risking there lives doesn’t mean that everything is conceptually coherent and consensus exists. word games serve a function to paper over differences until the common enemy is defeated. if it’s rude to point those out, im sorry. i don’t risk my life but i support the movement financially and by attending protests and through social media, i just also like to talk about these things with friends and on anonymous message boards. imo it’s probably a necessary condition for any revolutionary movement to be paradoxical in this way, it’s not like a burn im abolish the police

*on

if you're attending protests you are risking yr life to some extent imo

moreso than usual

actually had a confrontation w some local alt right media freaks, so im probably on some neonazi antifa list lol

were you wearing a mask? the only good thing about this happening during a pandemic is that most are

or at least I hope most are

Yeah mask on the whole time

People love to try to poke holes in the prison abolition movement by saying “what about rapists, do you want them just wandering around?” But the reality is, they do wander around. Between unreported rapes, and rapes that never go to trial, and trials lost, and plea bargains accepted, fewer than 6% are arrested and fewer than 1% are convicted. Beyond that, though, placing people in environments in which sexual violence is the currency of survival is not making anyone safer.

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/surviving-rape-prison-abolitionist/

Prison abolitionists acknowledge that in some cases societal separation (over various time lengths with various parameters) is necessary but disagree that a prison system can adequately address the ultimate causes of rape. Pilot programs have long been established across the country that have provided an alternative to the prison model of justice, forcing abusers to reckon with the consequences of their actions, feel the pain they have inflicted keenly, and pay their newfound knowledge forward, all without the use of prisons and jails. Is that not the goal of a restorative justice system?

walking away from this thread now for my mental health

https://people.com/crime/breonna-taylor-sex-assault/?fbclid=IwAR096SNoTje8Gw-GfaCiG8ihmxbUliv75NyOH9XR0OzO92H3PKumZ9aImdw

awful url

Sorry, I don't know anything about urls or how to fix them.

Allegations of sexual assault have surfaced against one of three white officers accused in the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old unarmed black EMT and aspiring nurse in Louisville, Ky., who was fatally shot March 13 by police while they carried out a search warrant on the wrong apartment.

The allegations against Officer Brett Hankison -- raised last week by two women on social media -- attracted the attention of Louisville Metro Police, which has reached out to the women so the department's Public Integrity Unit "can initiate and conduct an investigation," police spokesman Dwight Mitchell tells PEOPLE.

everyone should look up the Toronto clown versus firefighter riot imo

It's good they are feeling villified.

WATCH 🚨 New York police boss Mike O'Meara went off on the media today:

"Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect ... Our legislators abandoned us. The press is vilifying us. It's disgusting." pic.twitter.com/CXOPARKff7

— August Takala (@AugustTakala) June 9, 2020

How can you vilify someone if they are already a villain? All you can do is describe how they act.

"just because people are risking there lives doesn’t mean that everything is conceptually coherent and consensus exists. word games serve a function to paper over differences until the common enemy is defeated"

Many people have been working on the question of restorative justice and/or other approaches to this question and you've chosen to pick up on a not very mature twitter thread and basically dismiss the whole thing as a word game. This is in the middle of protests where it's quite likely that many of the activists could be either hounded, jailed or killed. A lot of the activists aren't waiting to get a coherent argument so you can pick on it and end up being happy with 0.5% conviction rate.

Well Cops is canceled at least: https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/cops-canceled-paramount-network-1234629637

The official car of "defund the police" is this LAPD Lamborghini parked in a disabled spot pic.twitter.com/Jsr5Tyzdz2

— Peter Miller (@peter_miller) June 9, 2020

I had no idea Cops was still a show

Running From Cops is a great podcast (about the show)

Cops was only good when the police looked dumb

I have only seen the clip of dumbness from an episode many years ago from my home city where some guy in a dirt bike took off down railroad tracks in an industrial area. The cop chased in his car, got it stuck on the tracks, and the segment ends with a slow-moving train blowing its horn a lot trying to get the cop to move off the route

zing

Nice.

"I don't know if we have ever experienced this kind of global challenge to racism and to the consequences of slavery."

Angela Davis says anti-racism protests around the world are "a very exciting moment". pic.twitter.com/MIqZ8fFtfN

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 9, 2020

"treating us like animals and thugs" is an interesting choice of language

from the cop I mean ofc

Running From Cops is a great podcast (about the show)

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Cops was only good when the police looked dumb

I have only seen the clip of dumbness from an episode many years ago from my home city where some guy in a dirt bike took off down railroad tracks in an industrial area. The cop chased in his car, got it stuck on the tracks, and the segment ends with a slow-moving train blowing its horn a lot trying to get the cop to move off the route

― mh, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 9:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It's worth listening to that podcast to learn more about A&E's Live PD, a literally evil show--exponentially worse than Cops--that is also the #1 show on cable. They're currently in the news due to erasing their footage of police officers killing Javier Ambler in Texas in March 2019: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200609/lsquolive-pdrsquo-says-video-of-in-custody-death-of-javier-ambler-has-been-destroyed

so many shows in the UK about how great cops and immigration and other pigs are, would be great if they all tanked

Interesting times for the burgeoning tru-crime podcast market too. The joke in circulation is that white women with podcasts will solve murders instead of the police but there's a huge amount of cop fetishisation bound up in most of the popular ones.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html?smid=tw-share

A Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent of Americans consider racism and discrimination a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. The poll found that 57 percent of voters thought the anger behind the demonstrations was fully justified, while a further 21 percent called it somewhat justified. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against African-Americans, and that there’s a lot of discrimination against black Americans in society. Back in 2013, when Black Lives Matter began, a majority of voters disagreed with all of these statements.

probably too much to hope this discredits the "they're just going to turn people off their cause" civility crowd forever

total non-sequitur so yeah i'd say that's too much to hope for

Interesting times for the burgeoning tru-crime podcast market too. The joke in circulation is that white women with podcasts will solve murders instead of the police but there's a huge amount of cop fetishisation bound up in most of the popular ones.

― ShariVari, Wednesday, June 10, 2020 7:37 AM (two hours ago)

listened to My Favorite Murder for a little bit before I got sick of how much they apparently loved cops

https://medium.com/@seattleblmanon3/the-demands-of-the-collective-black-voices-at-free-capitol-hill-to-the-government-of-seattle-ddaee51d3e47

I don't really listen to very many of those true crime podcasts, but I gotta imagine a portion of the apparent cop loving is no doubt down to their sources often being current and/or retired cops, no? I mean, from the true crime books I've read a lot of the info comes from cops, so I have to imagine some of that is not wanting to piss off their sources. Not saying that excuses it, just thinking that's tied into how those podcasts treat police.

More than anything else, I think there is a tendency (echoed across most crime-focused media) to focus on the idea that you are constantly at risk from psychopaths and the only things standing between them and you are your wits, the police and the prison system. It goes back to the issue that violent crime is consistently falling but the perceived risk of violent crime is either stable or increasing.

that ACAB article is incredible. is it getting traction in the outside world? this is probably my favourite sentence. a mic drop moment.

There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment’s notice to write down your name and birthday after you’ve been robbed and beaten.

some of the stories in there sounded familiar

then I realized they were things that Chris Dorner had put in his manifesto

yikes

the teevee discussions have universally turned back to "A FEW BAD APPLES"

Time to push back, all summer and fall

Yesterday, my parents were stopped and questioned in their own driveway for “driving a motor vehicle on the road”, and “because they can”.
It’s suspicious to walk from your car to your house, while black. The UK is not innocent. pic.twitter.com/Ym4DrN0hLT

— baby (@maobxby) June 10, 2020

FWIW I just had a conversation with a friend who is sort of politically mixed, left on some things but more reactionary on others and who was having a lot of mixed feelings herself about the defund the police concept. I very non didactically brought up Alex Vitale. Five minutes later she was watching a video interview with him, an hour later she was sharing it on her own social media.

it sells itself!

In a letter sent this week to the House Judiciary Committee, a coalition of national advocacy and local grassroots organizations have called on representatives to “permanently end and cease any funding to local law enforcement in any form.”

Specifically, the group called on Congress to defund the COPS Program — which stands for “Community Oriented Policing Services” — a federal initiative that critics have long accused of hiding behind the sweet-sounding notion of police developing relationships with communities while de facto flooding those communities with more officers. “The COPS Program has helped precipitate the policing crisis that we find ourselves in today,” the group wrote. “This is money that should have gone directly to people instead of policing.”

The COPS Program was established as part of the 1994 Crime Bill and to date has granted more than $14 billion to state and local governments, much of it used to hire more police. In the first few years of its existence, it contributed to the swelling of local law enforcement agencies by some 100,000 officers. The program has also funded new equipment and technology for police across the country and has resulted in the escalation of militarized SWAT teams even in small-town departments.

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/defund-the-police-joe-biden-cops/

Los Angeles Unified school police officials said Tuesday that the department will relinquish some of the military weaponry it acquired through a federal program that furnishes local law enforcement with surplus equipment. The move comes as education and civil rights groups have called on the U.S. Department of Defense to halt the practice for schools.

The Los Angeles School Police Department, which serves the nation’s second-largest school system, will return three grenade launchers but intends to keep 61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle it received through the program.

L.A. Unified is one of at least 22 school systems in eight states that participate in the program, which provides law enforcement agencies with the extra military-grade gear at no charge.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-schools-weapons-20140917-story.htm

WHAT the FUCK

url doesn't work fwiw and I can't find the story

also from url that looks like it's from 2014

ah, you're right about the date (pulled it off twitter and didn't notice):

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-schools-weapons-20140917-story.html

Okay I'm glad I messed that up as it turns out the students forced them to return all their DoD equipment in 2016: https://www.alternet.org/2016/05/how-teenagers-and-activists-got-police-back-down-demilitarize-their-own-school/

It's interesting how police abolition became mainstream so quickly while prison abolition still seems fringe, even as the pandemic provides the strongest and most broadly understood evidence yet that incarceration is a multiplier of social harm.

— Aarón Cantú (@aaron_con_choco) June 11, 2020

FWIW I just had a conversation with a friend who is sort of politically mixed, left on some things but more reactionary on others and who was having a lot of mixed feelings herself about the defund the police concept. I very non didactically brought up Alex Vitale. Five minutes later she was watching a video interview with him, an hour later she was sharing it on her own social media.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, June 10, 2020 10:39 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

this has also been my anecdotal experience

like the hand-wringing about the "branding problem" seems to be premature given the actual reception to/polling about it

yep

anecdotally I have been seeing more "defund" than "abolish" messaging quite suddenly

also xxp -- the "awful url" comment wasn't criticizing you, just the website

I think "defund" is better messaging than "abolish" because defund arguably has gradations (people can get behind "well what if we at least took *some* money from police budgets and gave it to x).

all social media has been on my wall for the past fuckin 24 hours is the battle of the DEFUND memes, where one half is saying STOP SAYING DEFUND, IT HURTS OUR MOVEMENT, and the other half saying STOP WHINING ABOUT "DEFUND".

I saw this headline and thought for a second "holy shit there's a structural critique of capitalism in The American Conservative" but turns out not quite:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/?fbclid=IwAR0OUSKWCGTdm6SKsp5VWF5WWKoGAsIwR4-8lzi4fshc6coeO4VMgC2iJYM

REDIRECT COP CASH still hasn’t caught on like I thought it would

fbclid=IwAR0OUSKWCGTdm6SKsp5VWF5WWKoGAsIwR4-8lzi4fshc6coeO4VMgC2iJYM?

in be4 sic

I don't really listen to very many of those true crime podcasts, but I gotta imagine a portion of the apparent cop loving is no doubt down to their sources often being current and/or retired cops, no?

it's interesting -- I think some of the appeal of true crime and cop shows is about solving a puzzle and detective-work, and less about celebrating the punishment aspect of police? Like I feel that they are two separate functions narratively, and wonder if they can actually be separate in reality.

In my own (limited) experience with American cops there a there is a vast gulf of experience and understanding between the detectives, who have to figure shit out, and the beat cops

Not that detectives aren't raging assholes too, of course. They came up through the system too.

and going back and responding to stuff upthread -- can we please not use "what about rapists?" as an example here? ... esp. considering, at least among _my_ friends, most of them who have been raped were raped by friends (now ex-friends), relatives, friends of family members, or teachers/coaches and many of those rapes weren't reported. Maybe the Police-defenders (or people on the fence about this issue) should use murderers as an example instead.

esp. since the majority of posters in this thread are cis-men?

otm

like abolishing the police and discussing restorative justice and other alternatives is already a big issue, and a complex issue ... getting into the politics of rape or turning this into a discussion about how to deal with/punish rapists ... like, no, that's another thread, and for me, I really don't want to get into it. Though, the one parallel I see is that currently on my FB feed there's a lot of divisiveness in terms of degree of anti-cop sentiment and how to resolve it ... and some of the same people who are "fuck the pigs, anyone not posting #abolishthepolice is a bootlicker" are also still friends with dudes who have raped/sexually assaulted women I know.

not all of them, though. Some of the cops-aren't-all-bad people also are still friends with rapists. Basically abolishing the police and dealing with rape/sexual assault that occurs within "the scene" are both seriously fraught and divisive.

to say nothing of where those points intersect
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/us/police-sexual-assaults-maryland-scope/index.html

No one interviewed for this story could give an estimate, even ballpark, on how underreported these types of crimes might be.

so like, in regards to "what about murderers/rapists/serial killers/jeffrey epstein," I guess what I find intensely frustrating, as someone who is like maybe 90% on board, is that nobody has actually answered the question. they have brought up good points, like the fact that a lot of those shitheads are cops, and a lot of these cases don't get solved but those good points don't actually answer the question. they contextualize the question, they dodge the question, they illuminate the fact that the question needs asking, but there's this hole where the answer is supposed to be.

and I want there to be an answer! I just want somebody, anybody, to actually attempt to answer the question, but The Discourse has moved on to "well we already did answer it, so fuck you if you're still asking, you're basically a cop yourself." the closest thing to an answer I have ever found, and I've read everything I've been told to read, is "well, we'll still have investigators/social workers/psychiatrists/lawyers/teachers and then... you know what, answer over" (and then others reply "no, we also want to get rid of investigators/social workers/psychiatrists/lawyers/teachers," so not even that answer feels OK to accept).

tbf, that's exactly how I feel when I ask "What should schools do when there is violence that they can't contain?" -- no one can actually answer the question, there are just a lot of dodges and clever remarks. And someone asked "well why can't school resource officers do it?" And I thought about that, and I realized the answer is: "For the same reason that NYPD can't be mental health counselors" DOE is not a security agency, it's an education agency.

well, yeah, let me walk back "anybody" because I guess "just give all the schools grenade launcher" technically qualifies as an answer, just an awful one

Legalization of drugs is the secret sauce complementary policy that unlocks massive amount of defunding of police

an other one that’s more low hanging fruit is to make a ‘traffic patrol’ who give people speeding tickets but don’t have guns and can’t search your car or do anything else

the answer to "what about..." is destruction of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.

that's not a dodge, the point is to destroy as much as possible the conditions that turn people into rapists and murderers, of which cops and prisons are a major part of worldwide. it's hard to imagine at the moment from within, it feels almost impossible but I know how stifled my imagination is

tbh my preferred solution would be to shoot them but I know that's dodgy and based more on feelings than anything else. still the notion that we need pigs to keep people in cages because some of them are dangerous, that the state is necessary because it kills and imprisons bad guys sometimes as well as loads of good people is way more horrific to me

I could ask the defenders of the state "what about murderers/rapists/serial killers...?" why do they exist? some of them are presidents, cops, CEOs, popular celebrities... so why are they not being taken care of?

I want to despair when people talk about how different carceral institutions will deal with things in the absence of police. fuck them all

I mean, I guess "just shoot them" is closer to an answer than I've seen (one I hate, but that is also dodgy and based more on feelings), but even then: who does the shooting?

there was an article in N+1 several years ago that argued that the movement to abolish the death penalty was a waste of time, and that the real goal to pursue was abolishing prisons -- which, the article contended, could best be achieved by simply executing every murderer. i found this ridiculous and kind of horrifying but i guess it has a certain logic to it.

i guess it has a certain logic to it.

First objection: in reality there is a marked difference between "every murderer" and "everyone convicted of murder". Innocent people can be and are convicted of murder.

Second objection: in reality the law recognizes many kinds of murder, including first degree, second degree, manslaughter, and negligent homicide. Where is the cut off point to be drawn among these? And if some lead to automatic execution, while others do not, won't this lead to even more egregious abuses of prosecutorial power when determining the charges that will be pursued, especially racial disparities?

Sometimes logic supplies really stupid conclusions.

i'm guessing that ppl who want to throw out the entire judicial system are not terribly concerned about the nuances of what happens afterward. tbh i've always been skeptical of the prison abolition arguments because i suspect that they inevitably lead toward conclusions like "just shoot them all."

I mean I am one of those mythical nonexistent people who wants to repeal the second amendment and get rid of everyone's guns, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to argue here

I'm sorry but the number of lives saved each year by abolishing police so grossly outnumbers the lives that would be lost if school personnel couldn't call militarily armed police on school age children that it renders this point infuriating.

180 lb 17 year old = “school age child”.

ikr superpredators

Jesus fucking Christ guys. I am talking about actual situations my wife has been in where she has been in danger and her colleagues have been seriously injured. But keep it up with the cool guy radical twitter rhetoric so you don’t have to face reality.

It’s not going to matter anyway because six months from now everything in NYC including police, schools and social services are all going to be facing severe budget cuts. There isn’t going to be money to take from the police and put into other things.

We can at least make sure the police get as many cuts as our schools do, if not more.

Police will be the only thing to take money from.

who does the shooting?

the workers

seriously though I know it's a bad solution and possible recipe for new proto cop forms of organisation. I don't have a better idea, some people probably do. otoh I don't think we need to have this all figured out theoretically, I don't know if we even can under current conditions

cool guy radical twitter rhetoric so you don’t have to face reality

why specifically have these radical demands (which are not new and certainly not a product of twitter) become amplified now, to the extent that people are arguing about it on a half-dead liberal music forum? who is responsible for making this conversation (such as it is) possible? not whatever hip stereotype you're trying to imply. have you tried facing reality lately it's terrifying, people who have been forced to face reality for too long have had enough

*looks at the vast numbers on people out protesting for days* wow I didn't rad twitter was the real world.

Love how some people here can't wait for things to get back to a normal of budget cuts, voting for a half dead candidate, etc.

oh I see you want trump to win too

Is he the one legalizing drugs? I hear that's the easiest way to cut a police budget.

"The idea that residents and local organizations can play a central role in creating safe and strong communities is not new, and it is not particularly controversial. And yet we have never made the same commitment to these groups that we make to law enforcement..." https://t.co/VLPifIrSp1

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) June 14, 2020

people are arguing about it on a half-dead liberal music forum

CETERUM AUTEM CENSEO ILXINEM ESSE DELENDAM

How is relying on community organizations any different than libertarian wet dreams/vigilante justice/racist neighborhood watches, etc? (note: article is paywalled so I didn't read it). I mean isn't "communities being responsible for safety" why Ahmaud Arbery is dead?

buddy just start a “don’t abolish the police” thread and sort your feelings out there

isn't this the thread where it was meant to be debated?

idk the thread title is pretty unambiguously not a question

I mean I'm fine starting another thread if you just want this to be the left fantasy league police-free autonomous zone thread. ITT, consider the police abolished. You will never have to convince anyone, America agrees with you.

ignore the trolls

So is this good or bad?

https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-police-will-no-longer-respond-non-criminal-calls-2020-6

xxpost given your evident disinterest in engaging with the substance of counterrarguments to your endlessly reworked "180-pound 17-year-old" scenario, reading anything about the subject, or otherwise demonstrating a good faith engagement with the issues at stake, i'm not sure who here is living in a fantasy world and not trying to convince anyone.

idk the thread title is pretty unambiguously not a question

― methinks dababy doth bop shit too much (m bison), Sunday, June 14, 2020 11:35 AM bookmarkflaglink

since when do we allow police threads to only allow posts in support of the thread topic

oh no am...am i the police?????

nah but dr casino said it

man alive is completely right that there will still be scenarios where force is needed. And you guys jumping all over him when he asks a good-faith question about how it might work when cops have been “abolished” is completely fair. My wife worked in an elementary school and had a kid pull a knife in her, and THAT was scary (but not so scary that it required a cop). There are legitimate questions about violent high school kids to be asked. Sure, the “answer” could be “dismantle capitalism” (btw I love this answer!), but barring that, there is a constant flow of traumatized kids coming into schools that isn’t going to magically go away after they’ve had a restorative justice session or two.

It sucks that it seems like even gentle disagreements or questions about this concept are met with a wish to just completely shut down the conversation by some of you.

Is completely unfair

What I don’t understand is why man alive is unable to imagine a service of rapid response tough guys who are not The Cops

"(but not so scary that it required a cop)" xp

Cops are (forgive me) pussies btw they shoot anything vaguely threatening

xxpost given your evident disinterest in engaging with the substance of counterrarguments to your endlessly reworked "180-pound 17-year-old" scenario, reading anything about the subject, or otherwise demonstrating a good faith engagement with the issues at stake, i'm not sure who here is living in a fantasy world and not trying to convince anyone.

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, June 14, 2020 10:42 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm reading The End of Policing. I feel like no one wants to engage with the substance of my counterarguments though -- the answer always seems to be magical thinking along the lines of "Well we'll just address the underlying problem and there won't be violence anymore," or else "we'll just have other people do that who aren't police (but I guess are armed and otherwise have the same training as police but better?)?" Like in practice the "people who aren't police" who handle these situations are usually shitty rent-a-cops who are worse than police, so I'm just trying to understand what that actually looks like. And will they be non-union? And how will they not effectively just wind up being the same as police?

Oh you want an ARMED tough guy to tackle a teenager ffs you didn’t specify!!

I had no idea this scenario requires pointing a gun at a child

Maybe when Capitalism is dismantled we won't be required to work for rent, or even go to school as it is or take an exam anymore let me have me this dream!

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21289495/trump-fox-news-chokehold-lincoln

On Friday, Fox News released an interview with President Trump by journalist Harris Faulkner. The interview was a disaster, a case study in why Donald Trump is not and cannot be the person to handle this moment in time.

When asked about police use of chokeholds on suspects like George Floyd, who was killed after a Minneapolis officer pinned him by the neck with his knee for nearly nine minutes, Trump initially told Faulkner, “I don’t like chokeholds,” even saying that “generally speaking, they should be ended.” But he contradicted that pretty quickly, saying when you’ve got someone who is “a real bad person ... what are you gonna do now — let go?”

He even went further, saying that “the concept of chokehold sounds so innocent, so perfect,” if a lone police officer is attempting to detain someone.

His position, as far as I can tell, seems to be that maybe sometimes individual officers need to use chokeholds,

man alive's position

just delurking momentarily to say that as a high school teacher who works in 100% low income school that is 99% students of color these anecdotes about violent kids sound completely absurd to me. we don't have cops on campus and we've never had a fight in the five years i've been there. we've called the cops a few times on kids that were dealing drugs at school but that didn't require anyone armed, just someone legally empowered to grab and hold on to drugs.

you want to protect your helpless white women from 180 lb 17 y.o. teenage superpredators? try making a school that isn't like a prison, try building a strong school culture. that's what restorative justice is for. in the meantime i'm a lot more worried about teenagers of color being victims of over-reactive state violence than teachers getting hurt.

also if an elementary school student feels the need to draw a knife on you maybe it is because you are a scary person who shouldn't be allowed near children?

i know that sounds absurd but so does an elementary school child threatening someone with a knife

yeah that sounds dumb as shit sorry

Blessings upon you, tlg. For the work you do all the time.

the school is all the things you are saying and more, violence still happens

full disclosure - i actually had a sheriff take a student who took a swing at me out of my classroom in my second year of teaching. you know whose fault it was? mine. because i was improperly trained and had no idea how to deescalate a bad situation. this is a deep source of shame i carry around with me, and it's why i have no sympathy for poorly-trained, insensitive teachers who feel threatened by their students.

fuck you dude

fuck you too

hey you two don't make me call the resource officer

lol

xp Who provides 0 resources iirc or if you don't agree let me know when that person can provide me with paper, markers, a chalkboard, some laptops, or any other resources my school doesn't fund.

I mean the name is just the dumbest obfuscation.

in a way is not violence the most essential resource

also if an elementary school student feels the need to draw a knife on you maybe it is because you are a scary person who shouldn't be allowed near children?

That seems unfair. I know a very good, not-at-all-scary middle-school teacher who had a kid pull a knife on her. Nothing to do with her teaching, the kid was having a bad day. She's pretty fearless and had a good relationship with the kid so she just talked them into giving her the knife, no harm done, no cops called. But these things do happen, even to good teachers.

sorry i've been teaching for 15 years and i don't know a single person who's ever had a knife drawn on them, it still sounds absurd

anyway it sounds like that teacher was well trained and did the right thing so good for them and more proof cops in schools are unnecessary

maybe you should try teaching as a 5'2" pregnant woman before you mock "poorly trained, insensitive white women" or w/e

the problem with so many of the objections here is they're assuming the part about the police keeping us safe and then demanding alternatives to fit this imaginary role. people are being accused of dismissing reasonable objections for calling into question the premises the objections are based on. then being called stupid children who don't understand the real world, the standard response to any suggestion of changing it

weird seeing people talking as if standard mainstream opinions you can probably read today in the new york times are embattled or even being silenced here

is it a bad time to point out the education system is also part of the carceral apparatus

no it's absolutely time to bring up the school to prison pipeline

i could have ruined that kids' life

also if an elementary school student feels the need to draw a knife on you maybe it is because you are a scary person who shouldn't be allowed near children?

xpost My friend Megan. Teaches middle school math in California.

I'm not arguing that cops in school are necessary, not at all. But I do think teachers will at times need someone to call, and who that is and how they're trained should should be part of the discussion.

Would also add, the late great, as a fellow teacher, that being improperly trained is not your fault, it is the fault of a training system that provides very little guidance in handling difficult situations and then expects teachers to learn on the job while working more than full time. Blaming teachers in their first years of teaching for not being trained to adequately de-escalate every violent situation seems like a recipe for burnout.

Sorry guys I realize I’m arguing about what we should be allowed to argue about.

I would rather not have schools

not unrelated to the subject of this thread or the current discussion

Look, here's what I think. Given the way public schools operate:

Schools will always have some number of kids who are carrying around a lot of trauma, anger and/or mental illness, and who will at times be violent toward others, whether that's students or teachers.

Schools will always have teachers who are relatively new at their jobs and don't know how to de-escalate a situation.

Sometimes de-escalation isn't possible.

So there will inevitably be some cases where someone needs to be called in to help. That being so, it's absurd that teachers are currently forced to choose between putting themselves and their students at risk and calling in a bunch of armed goons to start a kid on the school-to-prison pipeline. This isn't a reason not to abolish the police, it's a reason TO abolish them and replace them with something better.

agree 100%

Show me a "something better" that doesn't look like underpaid, undertrained rent-a-cops and I'm on board

I've seen the gap between ideal and implementation in schools enough times to have that concern

try anarchy

not “anarchism”, mind

xp

Cops aren’t exactly the cream of America’s youth as it is

people keep conceiving of this as “what we have now, but there are no cops” and then pointing to all the things that would still be shit