Abolish the Police

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.