Abolish the Police

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!!!!!!!!!