Abolish the Police

I mean, I agree with all of this, just show me what the "something better" actually looks like beyond vagaries.

i think addressing this would be a good start:

Given the clear benefits of investing in school mental health resources, it would make sense for school boards, school principals, and government leaders to be using every available resource to increase school-based health professionals. Yet, that has not been the trend. Instead, funding for police in schools has been on the rise, while public schools face a critical shortage of counselors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers. As this report reveals, millions of students are in schools with law enforcement but no support staff:

1.7 million students are in schools with police but no counselors
3 million students are in schools with police but no nurses
6 million students are in schools with police but no school psychologists
10 million students are in schools with police but no social workers
14 million students are in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker

Even schools offering some mental health services are still grossly understaffed. Professional standards recommended at least one counselor and one social worker for every 250 students and at least one nurse and one psychologist for every 750 students and every 700 students respectively. These staffing recommendations reflect a minimum requirement.

Nonetheless, our report shows that 90 percent of students are in public schools that fail to meet these standards. Yet in those schools with a significant lack of health support staff, law enforcement presence is flourishing. Many states reported two to three times as many police officers in schools as social workers. Five states reported more police officers in schools than nurses.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/juvenile-justice/school-prison-pipeline/cops-and-no-counselors

btw i also agree that it's lame when people try to shut down questions about how abolishing the police would work. i get that it's obvious and you've studied the ways, but out here irl a lot of people still raise their eyebrows at the very concept, and it's useful to be able to explain why it's a good idea and how it can actually happen.

So, I 200% agree that we need way more counselors, school psychologists, social workers, nurses, etc. And also that cities need better homeless services, more mental health services, etc. And this gets to a different issue, which is that there isn't actually enough money in police budgets to fund all of these things, even if you 100% abolished police. Alex Vitale himself says so. So if the argument is "abolish the police because then we'll have enough money for all the other stuff that will help to obviate the police," that's demonstrably false. If anything, I think it would make more sense to increase funding for those other things now and then demonstrate that the police become less necessary as a result and gradually defund them.

then demonstrate that the police become less necessary as a result and gradually defund them.

you must know that would never happen, though. any progress made toward that goal would be instantly erased after the next school shooting

but then the problem with that is there are also people saying, with equal conviction, "no, get rid of the social workers and mental health workers too, they're also bad"

In a way it's almost like having an "Abolish Private Insurance" campaign instead of "Medicare For All." Private insurance is shit and everyone knows a million reasons why it's shit and has personal bad experiences with it, but if you just suggest taking it away as the goal in itself instead of making the replacement the focus, that won't be very popular.

you must know that would never happen, though. any progress made toward that goal would be instantly erased after the next school shooting

― our god is a wee lil god (Karl Malone), Sunday, June 14, 2020 12:46 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

But just flat out abolishing the police is even less likely to happen, so

xps
who is advocating getting rid of social and mental health workers? i honestly have never seen that, but is it a hannity thing? if so, fuck that, and conviction doesn't equal coherence or deserve equal footing in a debate

I am advocating that, I might be the only one idk

why on earth do people want to maintain this horrible dystopia

there is a mystical point that is so far left of left, and so far right of right, that it meets up on the other side of the torus, far away from any other point

that point is called the 2016 ford taurus

I’ve seen a lot of people in the left say that social workers etc are all part of the same fucked system.

this kind of gets back to why trying to learn about this is immensely frustrating, anything short of "I understand everything already, even when it is unspoken" is seen as trolling and/or being a shitty person. so what does one do then? just lie and say they understand everything?

tbh I am just ignoring Left's posts -- letting them "pass through like clouds" as I heard a meditation instructor say

i mean, i sympathize with hating social workers at school. when i was in high school, just after columbine, the school counselor took a look at my protoblog (lol 1999) and decided that i was suicidal and possibly homicidal as well. so she called all the parents of my friends and let them know that they their children were in a "ring" of depressive maniacs (led by myself, of course) and called the domain owner (my friend's mom) and had them shut down the website. she was a very, very bad school counselor

however, since i am no longer in high school in 1999, and i have observed other people and situations since then, i now think advocating for removing social and mental workers from schools is a sub-hannity position

but hey, i was totally wrong about ICE a couple years ago

a "ring" of depressive maniacs

Huh. I didn't know ilx existed that far back!

heh, sorry, that was an inside-joke with a post i typed and deleted from about 5 minutes ago that was also about about why it's not good to shut down questions on how it would work, and acknowledging that views can change. and in the middle of that deleted post i brought up how embarrassing it is that a couple years ago when people here were talking about abolishing ICE, i was one of the people going "buuuut how would it work? can we just do that? what about actual border problems? what about breaking bad?" etc. but people can change, as long as they keep open minds!

okeydokey. i'm going to water my plants now.

I hope you change your mind again

now i'm feeling bad about things. maybe lots of people have been fucked up by school-appointed psychologists or counselors. sorry if anyone out there reading this went through something like that too, it sucks. maybe it is me who has the *tim rogers voice* sub-hannity opinion

gotcha left

xp - ICE is a bit different because we had border and customs police before ICE existed, so abolishing ICE wouldn't actually mean no border control.

wait it wouldn’t? dammit

if there's a troll here it's me because that's how I'm perceived, if at all. I am actually trying to be genuine here but I know nothing I say will be taken seriously, even if I was good at expressing my positions articulately the positions automatically exclude me from seriousness. I'm not claiming any specialised knowledge, my position is subjective and emotional and based the personal experience of me and people I've known. it's frustrating not being able to get through but it doesn't only go one way and I'm pretty used to it by now

xp
yeah ICE is egregious in its recent superfluity, much like DHS

Left, my problem with your posts is you seem to have a great deal of contempt for the posters here and I generally get tired of frequent posters who go on and on about how much ilx sucks. In this thread in particular I can't really tell what you're advocating...something about workers shooting people? I guess you're in favor of completely dismantling the state, which is fine but what do you expect people to say back to that really?

xp -- abolishing ICE is also different because ICE was "abolished" for the entirety of US history until 2003

Right, like I actually remember when there was no ICE/Dept of Homeland Security. I thought it was a bad idea even at the time.

I mean, I agree with all of this, just show me what the "something better" actually looks like beyond vagaries. Does each school have full-time bouncer-sized guys who are also trained in deescalation on site? Is there some kind of "physical security and deescalation agency but definitely not cops" that you can call that will be there in 5 minutes the way the cops are?

Serious answer here: I agree it's not a hypothetical or unimportant question. Students can be violent under the best of circumstances; some are dealing with violence or abuse at home, some have severe emotional or mental disorders, some are coping with puberty or overtired or hyped up on sugar or adderall. These aren't rarities! It doesn't take a 180 pound kid; any six year old with leverage can put a pencil in you before you understand what's going on.

That said, I think if you have a hammer all problems look like nails. Having a "bouncer" or a cop on site leads to treating your students like prisoners, which is to say that public education as it stands almost necessarily involves the dehumanization of children.

What's almost certainly needed is an unarmed, well-vetted, well-paid, certified, unionized, regularly reviewed paraprofessional therapist in every public classroom who has been trained to cope with the immediate needs of the school they're working in and who is disallowed from physically interacting with kids unless they are armed or immediately harming another student or teacher.

This all comes down to funding education; adding that level of quality support bumps the budget by probably 80k per classroom annually. The issue is that people have been politically conned into preferring arresting eight year olds and allowing weekly school shootings over defunding the PD... but it could change fast if the money is there for schools! Right now, with COVID compounding the issue, I can't believe it will be and that is something we should all be deeply ashamed of.

fwiw: my engagement with education is a few years working adjacent to arts ed, a sister who has worked as a librarian in public education in underfunded Memphis TN schools and megafunded private Bay Area schools, a partner who has worked in arts ed all over NYC for over a decade

and now i see that KM said more or less the same thing before i got around to typing up this post.

who is advocating getting rid of social and mental health workers? i honestly have never seen that, but is it a hannity thing? if so, fuck that, and conviction doesn't equal coherence or deserve equal footing in a debate

― Karl Malone, Sunday, June 14, 2020 5:51 PM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

From what I've seen on the twitter, we are being asked to understand/remember that social workers have been a part of the state that penalizes poverty and criminalizes trauma. Something about the history of sw making room for white women to be adjacent to men in medical & political power, which I can't remember enough to be more specific about.

At a minimum, I think it's important to remember that a "mental health worker" isn't a panacea if we still hold the same beliefs and values as a society; they will just be called to enforce the values of the society that credentials & hires & evaluates them. (Not all social workers obv but the system is stronger than individuals and anyway we need a radically better system, that's why we're even discussing it.)

Yeah, I wasn’t initially going to open that can of worms but “mental health” has taken on a bit of a magic phrase quality in this discussion. A lot of mental health services are actively harmful and even when they aren’t there often isn’t an easy treatment solution.

xp this is the thing, better than I could put it

xxxxxxp "cool" would be my preferred response but wcyd
the workers thing was a semi-flippant response although I would't be opposed

I have a lot of contempt for a few specific posters who have a pattern of horrible posts, I think I'm allowed that however beloved they are in these circles. none of them are regularly posting on this thread afaict

as with any online space I dislike some things about the culture of these boards but I wouldn't be here if there weren't tendencies I could relate to, even if/when they've been counter to the dominant voices at times. might not last much longer as a poster much to everyone's relief

Re some of the underpinnings of this circular conversation: Yes, it is true that we shouldn't be expecting teachers to put themselves in "danger," that's not what they're trained or hired for (leaving aside for the moment what "danger" actually consists of). It is concurrently true that criminalizing children, which MASSIVELY disproportionately affects Black and brown children for the rest of their lives, is a hollow, craven solution to "teachers shouldn't be in danger," but societally we have ALWAYS preferred to put the outrage on the teacher's risk or the child's behavior. We need to entertain the same level of affront for the conditions of those children's lives (and their communities'), and yet we keep centering the person with the most privilege in this situation.

Man alive, you've never said WHAT it was that made the police more able to respond to students' physical outbursts than the school staff--what quality or ability did they have that you believe made the difference?

stout hearts

WHAT it was that made the police more able to respond to students' physical outbursts than the school staff

In the crudest terms, teachers are not authorized to use force or to impose active restraint against students and are subject to discipline if they do, whereas police have such authorization. That about sums up the one critical 'ability' police have teachers do not.

I will not express an opinion about the advisability of using force or active restraint against students, because I have insufficient breadth of experience there.

Other posters suggested that schools could employ people who were allowed and trained to safely physically restrain students but man alive rejected that idea and said no, it had to be police, but iirc he never said WHY it had to be police?

Left what was your username before you made this account two months ago

b/c afaicr you appeared sometime in the recent past to immediately be antagonistic towards everyone which is a weird way of getting your rocks off!

xxxxxxp "cool" would be my preferred response but wcyd

same for my posts too of course!

Terrific posts, in orbit.

silby I can't remember what it was c2007-9 I mostly just lurked. maybe I can blame the state of ILM back then, I'm bitter I was too intimidated by certain elements to post much. I know a healthy person wouldn't care about that now. twitter phase in between didn't help matters either

I've only been intentionally antagonistic here to people defending abusers, I'm not sorry about that. I'm sorry I come across like that in general. how do people not be angry all the time

we're all angry all the time. imo this forum is here to give us a place to talk and not yell at each other, it's a good exercise.

Ty, Alfred! It's been an outlet for my generalized rage.

it's important to remember that a "mental health worker" isn't a panacea if we still hold the same beliefs and values as a society; they will just be called to enforce the values of the society that credentials & hires & evaluates them.

In a way it's almost like having an "Abolish Private Insurance" campaign instead of "Medicare For All." Private insurance is shit and everyone knows a million reasons why it's shit and has personal bad experiences with it, but if you just suggest taking it away as the goal in itself instead of making the replacement the focus, that won't be very popular.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Sunday, June 14, 2020 1:49 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

same with capitalism *ducks*

one of the alternatives that is consistent with “abolish the police” is the libertarian dystopia where everyone buys their own private security force. approximately zero people want that, but it’s not even obvious whether, for example, a moderate amount of defunding will just be compensated for with higher private alternatives

Terrific posts, in orbit.

^^

man alive needs to explain to me how the immediate improvement to the lives of millions of POC (including students) by abolishing the police is outweighed by the few thousand annual school encounters that necessitate calling the police. I don't get it.

Especially given that policing in schools is part of the problem. It's not like the way police operate in the public school system is some kind of exception to the way they operate in the rest of society.