Abolish the Police

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.