Abolish the Police

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".