Abolish the Police

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.