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silence_kit posted:a.k.a. police We can honestly call them whatever, even Police, I don't really care. Immense transformation of the system is needed, not some branding effort of their name. Plus, I do think that getting a lot of the services of the Defund movement under the same roof would be efficient and a good approach to public safety, and then we'd basically have "A police department, but like, gently caress ton better" at some point with four year degrees focused on it and immense training and accountability and what not. However, that's after we smash the current system to pieces, build individual professions up, fix society's hosed up views, and we'll maybe check back into creating the umbrella department like three decades from now. I do have to say that where I disagree with the more recent messaging is the "Police are only a couple hundred year old institution". Yeah well no poo poo, it wans't that long ago where the affairs of the rich and famous were not the business of anyone. The City Guard made sure poor people didn’t fight each other on the streets, or steal poo poo from the market, but they couldn't do poo poo about rich dudes fighting poor people, for example. Even more so, the mere idea that some public service is INVESTIGATING the affairs of the rich, or their crimes, was outright preposterous and almost unspeakable. For all its ill, modern law enforcement will prevent a mass shooter who is rich, and will at least most of the time investigate child porn or serial killers, even if they are the society's cream. That's why the modern concept of Police is pretty fresh. Investigating crimes wasn’t important, and the rich could literally hit peasants with swords and nobody could do anything about it. The first true police department, the Metropolitan Police in Britain, was remarkable in many ways. The founding principles of: "Every police officer should be issued a warrant card with a unique identification number to assure accountability for his actions. Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests but on the deterrence of crime. Above all else, an effective authority figure knows trust and accountability are paramount. Hence, Peel's most often quoted principle that "The police are the public and the public are the police."" These were basically not only unheard of as concepts, but rigidly opposed, and a lot of people resisted the efforts of the Met to investigate crimes connected to the elite, something that largely wasn't done at that scale or efficiency before. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 21:26
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Vahakyla posted:I do have to say that where I disagree with the more recent messaging is the "Police are only a couple hundred year old institution". Yeah well no poo poo, it wans't that long ago where the affairs of the rich and famous were not the business of anyone. The City Guard made sure poor people don't fight on the streets, but they couldn't do poo poo about rich dude fighting poor people, for example. Even more so, the mere idea that some public service is INVESTIGATING the affairs of the rich, or their crimes, was outright preposterous and almost unspeakable. For all its ill, modern law enforcement will prevent a mass shooter who is rich, and will at least most of the time investigate child porn or serial killers, even if they are the society's cream. That's why the modern concept of Police is pretty fresh. Yeah, I wouldn't want to roll the dice on being reincarnated as a random person > 200 years ago. The fact that there were no cops in a time period where life was even more brutal and unfair than it is now doesn't really help the literal 'abolish the police' argument. It would be smarter for them to just not bring that up, IMO. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 21:42
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cheetah7071 posted:if they aren't patrolling the streets, aren't the person doing the active response, and don't have the power to decide to arrest, it's so unrecognizable that calling them police by another name is disingenuous If they are empowered with the State's Police powers then they are the police, though they might not be a cop.
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Jun 8, 2020 22:12
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Main Paineframe posted:Instead of asking the same few questions over and over again, why not try reading the thread so you can see people discussing answers to those questions? If you don't have anything to contribute besides asking the question in the thread title over and over again, it might be best to start lurking the thread instead of continuing to pretend that no one has tried to answer you. ...but people *haven't* answered those questions. That's my entire point. In a community policing model (not one where agencies have authority that used to belong to the police), how do communities deal with these individual problems? Everyone here who supports abolition seems to believe that communities will be totally fine in dealing with these types of incidents themselves. On the other hand, I don't know if you've seen this story, but this guy was falsely accused of being that piece of poo poo cop who assaulted three girls in Maryland: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html In a community policing model, who is to say these types of situations don't happen? What safeguards would be there to prevent the community from taking justice without due process (yes, I know, due process doesn't exist for anyone now). If the approach here is, "community policing will lead to false accusations and injustice, but it will be less injustice the now", then supporters should at least be honest about that. It's why I think the community policing model simply won't work. OTOH, distributing police responsibilities to new agencies, using social workers, unarmed community response groups, traffic enforcement, etc, would be a much better idea.
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Jun 8, 2020 22:24
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Can anyone furnish me with links to studies about systemic racism in the justice system? As and example, a study on how black people are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, receive harsher sentences, wrongfully convicted, have their civil rights violated and etc? I have this one about how school arrests have gone up due to police presence and zero tolerance policies that disproportionately affect black students: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=njlsp I have specific and prominent examples out of the news, obviously, plus the more crazy ones like the Chicago PD black site (but I am unsure if Kids For Cash scandal disproportionately affected black kids). Anyway, I have a friend obsessed with arguing online and he no longer has access to resources to easily search this stuff besides google scholar so it would be nice to have studies to give him.
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Jun 8, 2020 22:25
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Cranappleberry posted:Can anyone furnish me with links to studies about systemic racism in the justice system? The Penology of Racial Innocence: The Erasure of Racism in the Study and Practice of Punishment The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves: Racial Disparities and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Justice System Beyond School-to-Prison Pipeline and Toward an Educational and Penal Realism Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers The Color of Mass Incarceration I would recommend that your friend read The New Jim Crow and the First Civil Right - even if he doesn't have access to academic resources it's a safe bet that his local library will have at least one of those books and they are very good starting points for reading about the deliberate disparities in policing. Another good read would be The Condemnation of Blackness, which puts a lot of the criminalization rhetoric around Black people into a historical context. cheetah7071 posted:Yeah I think most of the abolish crowd is okay with having government employee bodyguards for social workers No, they aren't. silence_kit posted:Haha so the social worker is a cop then, since they can arrest and detain people (just not directly, I guess, they have their 'armed bodyguards' do it) for breaking laws. Yeah I want to push back against this fixation on social workers a little bit. If you have had any exposure to social work and/or child welfare systems, you should be well aware that while they are intended to be a softer, gentler way for the state to facilitate healthy, safe homes, they can nonetheless be extremely carceral and onerous in their methods. Black, indigenous, immigrant AND poor white communities in particular have a very valid distrust of social workers, albeit not as pronounced as with police, because those institutions are often disproportionate focused on them and have been the cause of a lot of harm and pain and disruption of families. Edit: Very timely example I happened to come across tonight showing the intersection of draconian policing, social work, and mass incarceration: https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1270066217945006085 All of that to say that yes, there is a place for social workers in the abolitionist framework. However, if the assumption is that they will be empowered to harm people much in the same way that police are, except under a more beneficent guise, that's not actually changing anything. It's not more moral or ethical or gentler to take the imperative of violence as justice from the police and just move it under social welfare orgs - something that is already happening and already causing harm to people who interact with the government in order to attain benefits, or just function in society. https://twitter.com/noname/status/1270033897468751872 This sort of thing is why it's important to maintain clarity about the purpose of abolition - it's not "replace the police with something nicer and leave everything else the same". This is deliberately a project of changing the world. As abolition enters the mainstream political discourse, there are going to be a lot of attempts to conflate it with things it isn't, or water it down to make it more palatable. Case in point: https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1270002734570319872 Reformists are already misconstruing ideas about abolition in order to get people on board with their agenda. This is not a matter of them being "inspired" to adjust their platform, especially not if you know the history of Deray and other people involved in the org pushing 8CantWait. It is a deliberate and strategic move to shift public perception and belief about abolition into reformist frameworks, rather than moving to where the people and the energy of the movement are. I would suggest reading through this thread: https://twitter.com/survivepunishNY/status/1269671576557027330 https://twitter.com/survivepunishNY/status/1269672080599142401 Some other good resources: https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1270048527616561152 https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1270049571809439755 https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1269748027864072201 https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1269769455263010816 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 01:49
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Mat Cauthon posted:No, they aren't. Apologies. I was repeating what appeared to be the most common voices using the word abolition in this thread. Thanks for explaining further that that isn't the same as the broader abolition movement tbh I have a lot of reading to do once I'm not using all my energy protesting
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Jun 9, 2020 02:48
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This was a really good piece written by a former cop who has realized that the system is fundamentally broken: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 I particularly like how he answers the favorite question of people opposed to abolition: quote:You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?” And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence.
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Jun 9, 2020 06:18
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cheetah7071 posted:Apologies. I was repeating what appeared to be the most common voices using the word abolition in this thread. Thanks for explaining further that that isn't the same as the broader abolition movement Social Work in its current punitive, carceral form also really needs be dramatically reformed as well. Social workers for the state are currently part and parcel with the criminal justice system unfortunately. The difference though is that social workers as a whole wouldn't go to war to resist those reforms.
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Jun 9, 2020 06:50
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I think we do need a reform initiative in addition to abolishing ideas. Simply because I don't think abolishing is in the near future, and incremental change serves a purpose, too.
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Jun 9, 2020 07:03
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Vahakyla posted:I think we do need a reform initiative in addition to abolishing ideas. Simply because I don't think abolishing is in the near future, and incremental change serves a purpose, too. I mean, I don't even believe we are going to get meaningful reforms which is why I feel comfortable saying 'abolish' and trying to shift the window a bit. Realistically, and this is what the council people in MLPS are saying right now too, there is zero chance in hell of 'abolition' as in Police Department Disbanded and we'll figure out the next step after is going to happen. The police don't exist in a vacuum, they are a part of a larger political economic order. To meaningfully abolish the police the social order who requires them to function must also be transformed. 'Reform' is the only thing on the table period so thats what we are fighting for. Luckily, the distinction between 'reform' and 'changes in service of moving towards abolition' are not at all mutually exclusive. You can argue that this is 'diluting' the message of abolition in much the same way you can argue that advocating any kind of social order at all is 'diluting' anarchism or allowing markets of some kind during transitionary socialism is 'diluting' communism I guess, but we are nowhere near (in my opinion but I guess we'll see) the kind of rupture that would allow for that kind of revolution. In order to actually abolish the police we'd have to also be abolishing the wealthy and the white whose interests they maintain (which we should do but doesn't seem likely any time soon). But, if we know we want abolition it can give us clearer eyes when evaluating proposals for reform, like noticing that consent decrees have repeatedly proved useless and that deescalation and racial bias training and poo poo like that doesn't do anything either, etc. So when we see a proposal that says, for example, actually police need more money so they can get more training (probably going to need it for all the trick shooting) we can dismiss that out of hand.
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Jun 9, 2020 07:23
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Crumbskull posted:I mean, I don't even believe we are going to get meaningful reforms which is why I feel comfortable saying 'abolish' and trying to shift the window a bit. Realistically, and this is what the council people in MLPS are saying right now too, there is zero chance in hell of 'abolition' as in Police Department Disbanded and we'll figure out the next step after is going to happen. The police don't exist in a vacuum, they are a part of a larger political economic order. To meaningfully abolish the police the social order who requires them to function must also be transformed. The police need a substantial amount of their power stripped away.
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Jun 9, 2020 08:03
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Would youTurtle Sandbox posted:The police need a substantial amount of their power stripped away. Thanks for your input. Where does someone disagree? Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 09:15
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WampaLord posted:This was a really good piece written by a former cop who has realized that the system is fundamentally broken: I'm repeating myself, but I think this is reductive, and there's a whole host of serious crimes that have little to do with living in a capitalist society, and probably need some solution that's more comprehensive than "eh, it's an edge case": - Rape - Child abductions - Human trafficking (I could see a socialist society having an effect here, i can't see it eliminating it entirely) - A not insignificant amount of homicides (anything where the motive can't be explained by poverty or hunger) Do we need police forces with anything approaching the budget that we have today? Of course not. But I think there's always a role for some sort of professional group to deal with these, and probably some ability to employ force if needed for these situations. Of course, there's a good argument that the police aren't really doing a great job, or much of a job at all, in dealing with a lot of the above items (with the obvious exceptions of things like child abductions if you're relatively well off and white), but that's an argument for trying to better, not to throw up our hands and call them unsolvable problems. enki42 fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 12:17
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enki42 posted:
Abolishing the police and moving away from capitalism is doing better. Saying these are too much is throwing your hands up in defeat. So, uh
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Jun 9, 2020 12:53
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Vahakyla posted:I think we do need a reform initiative in addition to abolishing ideas. Simply because I don't think abolishing is in the near future, and incremental change serves a purpose, too. If you look at some of the resources I've posted you can see that abolition is not mutually exclusive from reform, so long as those reforms explicitly work towards as an end goal. This is a work of decades, if not centuries. enki42 posted:I'm repeating myself, but I think this is reductive, and there's a whole host of serious crimes that have little to do with living in a capitalist society, and probably need some solution that's more comprehensive than "eh, it's an edge case": Do you suggestions on how to improve their ability to solve those crimes without giving them more resources and/or that is more specific than "more training, more education, etc"? Abolitionists have provided an idea of what their ideal looks like and how we get there. Can y'all attempt the same? Because I feel like this particular take is a circular argument. One side says that we don't need police, the other side says well what about x,y,z violent crime, so on and so forth. Stating that in the future abolitionist socialist utopia with fully automated luxury queer space communism we won't have to worry about violent crime (for examine, trafficking) because the underlying problem with have been resolved (open borders, eliminating poverty, etc) is obviously not the answer you're looking for and we need to avoid coming back to this same juncture every other page. It also feels like some of the arguments around reducing specific crimes (murder, rape, etc) come down to philosophical arguments that have little to do with a justification for the existence of police. Do you believe that eliminating patriarchy and sexism and gender essentialism along with expanding ideas about consent and bodily autonomy will drastically reduce the occurrence of rape? Do you believe that providing for the well being of all people, creating the conditions for everyone to live peaceful, plentiful, and safe lives free from exploitation and degradation along with elevating different ideas about conflict resolution will reduce murders? Or do you believe that all humans, or even a non insignificant minority, are just incorrigible rape murder machines that cannot be allowed to exist in society without a threat of violence to reign them in? Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 13:17
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enki42 posted:- Rape Abolishing the police would significantly reduce all of these things. Also, the cops have a poo poo record in finding missing white women and children.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:21
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Polyseme posted:Abolishing the police and moving away from capitalism is doing better. Saying these are too much is throwing your hands up in defeat. So, uh My point is, there's a significant amount of crime that moving away from capitalism does little to nothing to solve, and in my opinion requires something that looks at least a little like a police force (even if just in an investigatory capacity) to solve. I'm not saying that police abolition or eliminating capitalism is "too much", I'm saying it's not sufficient. Do you think that anything on the list I posted above would either disappear in a non-capitalist society, or could be investigated and prosecuted by something other than something that looks like a police force? If your answer to both is no, I don't know how full, 100% abolition (in the sense of 'nothing that looks or operates even close to what we call police exists') seems to accept these as an inevitability that we can do nothing about.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:21
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Abolishing the police would significantly reduce all of these things. How? I don't see a good argument for those being reduced, but I'm willing to listen. Certainly things like homicides are partially explained by both police existing and capitalism, but some aren't (spousal homicide, school shootings, lots of things where poverty, class, or race aren't significant parts of a motive). The others, I'm genuinely not seeing how the presence of police changes how often these crimes occur.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:23
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enki42 posted:How? I don't see a good argument for those being reduced, but I'm willing to listen. First, establish that the police - or whatever you're thinking is necessary - need to exist. Based on whatever criteria you have, we might look for other schemes that might better serve those. If you're asking for good faith argument, then put up one for what you're arguing for.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:32
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The largest human trafficking ring in human history is colloquially known as 'The US prison system'.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:37
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enki42 posted:My point is, there's a significant amount of crime that moving away from capitalism does little to nothing to solve, and in my opinion requires something that looks at least a little like a police force (even if just in an investigatory capacity) to solve. I'm not saying that police abolition or eliminating capitalism is "too much", I'm saying it's not sufficient. What amount of reduction in those crimes would make 100% abolition worthwhile to you? Not as something that is going to happen tomorrow, mind you, but as an eventual goal that we might reach in a century if we start working towards it now. 50%? 75%? 90%? I just want to know where the goalposts are for proving the validity of abolition, as far as this thread is concerned. enki42 posted:How? I don't see a good argument for those being reduced, but I'm willing to listen. "lots of things where poverty, class, or race aren't significant parts of a motive" Such a crime does not exist. You can't divorce the context of crime or criminality from the society we live in, as if crime is an objective fact of the physical universe we live in. Something like 40-50% of police have domestic abuse complaints against them. Removing police won't make them not abusers but we can't pretend like there isn't a relation between the power dynamics and violent nature of policing and the crimes they are ostensibly supposed to stop. School shootings is maybe the worst example you could use here, because we have immense amounts of data showing that 1) the police are bad at preventing or disrupting shootings and 2) the US is the only country that has the problem of school shootings being a regular occurrence. So obviously the fix is not more cops, but addressing underlying factors - gun culture in America, our fixation on violence as the mechanism for justice or retribution, the lack of mental health resources for children, etc. School shootings are a perfect example of why police are useless. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 13:37
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Mat Cauthon posted:If you look at some of the resources I've posted you can see that abolition is not mutually exclusive from reform, so long as those reforms explicitly work towards as an end goal. I 100% get that, and please don't interpret anything I'm saying as me opposing the work that people pursuing abolition are pursuing. Similar to how some people here have said that they support reform if it moves towards abolition, I support the current abolition movement since it will result in reforms that I want to see - it's not really realistic or possible that an abolition movement is going to eliminate all professional homicide investigation tomorrow, and what they will achieve are 100% in line with reforms I support (disarming police, massively reducing the size of the police force, etc.) For the purposes of this thread though, it seems like it's interesting enough to discuss the limits of abolition, since 100% of people are on board with what should happen in the near to mid term future. quote:Do you suggestions on how to improve their ability to solve those crimes without giving them more resources and/or that is more specific than "more training, more education, etc"? Abolitionists have provided an idea of what their ideal looks like and how we get there. Can y'all attempt the same? Sure, I feel like I've talked about this but I can definitely summarize again: - We should maintain the ability for the police force to investigate crimes. Continue to have detectives, and eliminate uniformed officers for the most part (with maybe the exception of a very special purpose tactical squad for extreme situations like school shootings). We need detectives to investigate rape cases, but they don't necessarily need to be armed. - Independent, community oversight needs to be established where it doesn't currently exist, and given teeth where it does. IA should not be part of the police, they should be wholly independent. Police should have standards in terms of how and when they apply force dictated to them rather than decide it internally. - Limiting the power of police unions. I think they should exist, but they should operate like other unions, where they bargain for working conditions of workers, not to protect police from prosecution. Disband the unions and reform them if they don't want to play ball. It hasn't been all that long that police have been allowed to be unionized anyway. - Increased ability to hold individual officers accountable through civil court. This avenue isn't available to everyone and isn't perfect, but if the threat of being sued exists for at least some encounters, it can have an influence on the culture. quote:Because I feel like this particular take is a circular argument. One side says that we don't need police, the other side says well what about x,y,z violent crime, so on and so forth. Stating that in the future abolitionist socialist utopia with fully automated luxury queer space communism we won't have to worry about violent crime (for examine, trafficking) because the underlying problem with have been resolved (open borders, eliminating poverty, etc) is obviously not the answer you're looking for and we need to avoid coming back to this same juncture every other page. Yes, for sure it's definitely circular. I don't think anyone has explained why certain crimes will disappear or even be reduced in a non-capitalist society. I'll half give you trafficking - my gut says that some amount of it would still exist in a socialist society, mostly because it has in every instance we've seen so far, but I could absolutely see it being reduced, but rape and homicides without economic motives don't seem as clear to me, and I don't think anyone has made an argument as to why there would be less of these.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:39
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Mat Cauthon posted:Such a crime does not exist. You can't divorce the context of crime or criminality from the society we live in, as if crime is an objective fact of the physical universe we live in. This might be something that we might have to disagree on. I think that rape and murder are to some degree a constant given a large enough population. Sure, we can work to reduce them, but I think the fact that they appear to be a constant throughout human history demonstrates they're not completely reducible, and any solution whose solution to it is "eh, you're going to have some rape (shrugs)", isn't something I can 100% get behind, and I suspect I'm not alone on that. That doesn't mean I don't think the goals of an abolition movement and a non-BS reform movement aren't aligned. quote:School shootings is maybe the worst example you could use here, because we have immense amounts of data showing that 1) the police are bad at preventing or disrupting shootings and 2) the US is the only country that has the problem of school shootings being a regular occurrence. So obviously the fix is not more cops, but addressing underlying factors - gun culture in America, our fixation on violence as the mechanism for justice or retribution, the lack of mental health resources for children, etc. School shootings are a perfect example of why police are useless. The fact that police don't do a good job of dealing with school shootings doesn't mean they're the cause of it. There should absolutely be efforts to reduce it, but similarly, at some level, these things seem like there's some baseline that we will never be able to completely eliminate, and not having a response to that doesn't seem workable to me. This may all be a pointlessly theoretical argument, the more I think about it - if you at least agree that we should try to reduce these crimes first before we stop policing them, then it really comes down to how reducible these things are. If you're right, and we can reduce these crimes to minimal amounts, then yeah, by all means we don't need police investigating them. If they aren't reducible, and there's a significant amount that we can't get rid of, I hope you'd agree that we shouldn't eliminate the police first and just hope that we'll be able to eliminate rape afterwards.
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Jun 9, 2020 13:48
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enki42 posted:Sure, I feel like I've talked about this but I can definitely summarize again: Okay, so let's proceed from these suggestions. I have three questions: - If implemented, how much would these changes improve the ability of police to deal with the crimes that you cited (rape, murder, trafficking, abduction, etc)? I would like a number or a percentage if you have it. - If implemented, how much would these changes reduce the occurrence of said violent crimes? - How do these changes address the underlying structural and institutional conditions (poverty, lack of healthcare, etc) that contribute to incidences of crime? enki42 posted:Yes, for sure it's definitely circular. I don't think anyone has explained why certain crimes will disappear or even be reduced in a non-capitalist society. I'll half give you trafficking - my gut says that some amount of it would still exist in a socialist society, mostly because it has in every instance we've seen so far, but I could absolutely see it being reduced, but rape and homicides without economic motives don't seem as clear to me, and I don't think anyone has made an argument as to why there would be less of these. The argument is that we have lots of evidence from abolitionist policies and/or low crime and low incarceration communities. posted:Trends in the well-being of Swedish youth were examined to determine whether they have shown improvement or deterioration since the passage of the 1979 corporal punishment ban. Rates of youth involvement in crime, alcohol and drug use, rape, and suicide have decreased. Trends in rates of nonsexual assault are equivocal due to shifts in enforcement. Legal sanctioning of corporal punishment appears to be unnecessary to improve youth well-being. From here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242260887_Trends_in_Youth_Crime_and_Well-Being_Since_the_Abolition_of_Corporal_Punishment_in_Sweden posted:Nations that abolish the death penalty then tend to see their murder rates decline, according to a December 2018 report by the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a Washington, DC-based organization that promotes human rights and democracy in Iran. The report examined murder rates in 11 countries that have abolished capital punishment, finding that ten of those countries experienced a decline in murder rates in the decade following abolition. Countries were included if they met the following criteria: they had formally abolished the death penalty at least ten years ago, at least one death sentence had been imposed or carried out in the decade prior to abolition, and murder rate data was available from the World Trade Organization. The countries that met the study’s criteria were Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Albania. (Click image to enlarge.) From here: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/study-international-data-shows-declining-murder-rates-after-abolition-of-death-penalty posted:The truth is that we don’t know the degree to which crime can be controlled by addressing social causes. We don’t know it, because we’ve never seriously tried it. But we do know that there are cities in the United States that have incredibly low crime rates, where violent crime hardly ever occurs and property crime is incredibly infrequent. We are far from understanding why that’s the case. Since we know that it is the case, though, we know that it’s possible to create places in which crime is almost nonexistent. Violent crime has consistently been dropping in the United States despite the public perception otherwise (not helped by Donald Trump’s demagogic attempts to terrify people). It is impossible to know how much further it could be made to drop. (Nor is that because we’ve been locking up all of the criminals. States with low crime rates can also have very low incarceration rates, whereas states like, for example, Louisiana have both incredibly high crime rates and incredibly high incarceration rates.) Since very low-crime societies are possible already, even when they consist entirely of perfectly ordinary human beings, it does not actually seem especially naďve to believe that both crime and prisons can essentially be eliminated from the world. I refuse to see Anders Breiviks as an inevitability; I believe he is the product of a perverse racist ideology, one that can be countered and eradicated. From here: https://transformharm.org/can-prison-abolition-ever-be-pragmatic/ I highly recommend reading that entire piece. enki42 posted:This might be something that we might have to disagree on. I think that rape and murder are to some degree a constant given a large enough population. Sure, we can work to reduce them, but I think the fact that they appear to be a constant throughout human history demonstrates they're not completely reducible, and any solution whose solution to it is "eh, you're going to have some rape (shrugs)", isn't something I can 100% get behind, and I suspect I'm not alone on that. That doesn't mean I don't think the goals of an abolition movement and a non-BS reform movement aren't aligned. That's not the argument I made and I would appreciate you not insinuating that anything in what I've said equates to gross loving sentiments like "eh, you're going to have some rape (shrugs)". Beyond that, I ask again: What amount of reduction in those crimes would make 100% abolition worthwhile to you? Not as something that is going to happen tomorrow, mind you, but as an eventual goal that we might reach in a century if we start working towards it now. 50%? 75%? 90%? I just want to know where the goalposts are for proving the validity of abolition, as far as this thread is concerned. The project of abolition is about remaking the world. I am not going to assume that crime will never occur again even if we have equality on all axes (gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc) and a perfect communist society of solidarity and plenty for all. But we've never lived in that world, so it seems a bit reductive to assume that the problem of violent crime is some intractable attribute inherent to human nature before we make a good faith attempt to materialize it. Personally I think it's worth trying anyway. enki42 posted:The fact that police don't do a good job of dealing with school shootings doesn't mean they're the cause of it. There should absolutely be efforts to reduce it, but similarly, at some level, these things seem like there's some baseline that we will never be able to completely eliminate, and not having a response to that doesn't seem workable to me. I didn't say police were the cause of school shootings - only that if you want to present that as an example of why police are necessary, it's a poor choice that harms your argument. In Sandy Hook, Parkland, El Paso, and many other school shootings or mass shootings the police were warned, in some cases multiple times, that the assailant was planning something and dangerous. IIRC in Parkland the school resource officer ran and hid rather than respond to the shooter. Exactly what good are police in the framework of preventing or even mitigating school shootings? If your answer is that they need better training and more resources in order to be "reformed" into a more effective force in this regard, that's not actually changing anything about the structure of policing. enki42 posted:This may all be a pointlessly theoretical argument, the more I think about it - if you at least agree that we should try to reduce these crimes first before we stop policing them, then it really comes down to how reducible these things are. If you're right, and we can reduce these crimes to minimal amounts, then yeah, by all means we don't need police investigating them. If they aren't reducible, and there's a significant amount that we can't get rid of, I hope you'd agree that we shouldn't eliminate the police first and just hope that we'll be able to eliminate rape afterwards. We can and should reduce those crimes. It is possible to do so without prioritizing or expanding the role of police and often efficacious to do so while minimizing their role - the police don't exist to reduce crime, they exist to enforce the law. So why do they need to be central to a discussion of crime reduction? Shouldn't the first priority be providing robust resources and social welfare, as well as expanding decriminalization of certain nonviolent offences and addressing structural and institutional bias in the law? Why do we need to reform the police to do any of that, beyond reallocating their funding to better ends? Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 15:06
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enki42 posted:Yes, for sure it's definitely circular. I don't think anyone has explained why certain crimes will disappear or even be reduced in a non-capitalist society. I'll half give you trafficking - my gut says that some amount of it would still exist in a socialist society, mostly because it has in every instance we've seen so far, but I could absolutely see it being reduced, but rape and homicides without economic motives don't seem as clear to me, and I don't think anyone has made an argument as to why there would be less of these. This is presupposing that police actually affect the instances of the committing of these crimes vs responding to them. No one has suggested that there is absolutely no response to serious crimes, but everyone is suggesting that the entity that would do so is not the "Police Force" you see today. The Police are pretty much beyond reform for many reasons but one of the biggest reason is because the state requires people to only be shoved into a few categories - innocent or guilty, criminal or non criminal. These categories are too reductive and allows police to react mostly in terms of incarceration and punishment, since the Police are under no legal obligation to protect you from harm. The police are the state's physical manifestation to protect capital and property, and it's always been that way. Since the larger public also has a similar warped idea that everyone can be put into those reductive categories (through indoctrination and frankly, an obsession with cop and law and order shows), people have largely supported the police being the unit that responds to EVERY issue that a citizen may deal with. It's very easy for most people to just think in every situation, call the cops to sort it out and they take the "bad guy" to jail but unfortunately the majority of the things they respond to don't even have a clear good or bad guy, and most times there is someone in need of help that can be performed under a social service lens - not incarceration and punishment. Police don't prevent rapes, and they largely don't prevent homicides or school shootings. Deterrence is mostly a fallacy, we are a much less violent society for many more reasons other than police existing, anyone who tries to connect those two things is confusing correlation with causation. Broken Windows theory looks like it reduces crime but only because you are vastly widening the net on who you punish and incarcerate and that "reduces crime" by throwing many more people into custody of the state. I could also claim that i'm making my neighborhood safer if I arrest and jail everyone who goes 5 miles over the speed limit, but in reality all i'm doing is utilizing the prison industrial complex to prove my hypothesis that people who speed are criminals. Again as Mat has pointed out, abolishment as an idea does not mean any responding to serious crimes, it just means that the police are already not preventing serious crimes so dismantling them and creating something else would not have an effect on the commission of those crimes. How to respond to those crimes I think is the better question, and Mat has posted some good links about ways we can do that. Yuzenn fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 15:39
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WampaLord posted:This was a really good piece written by a former cop who has realized that the system is fundamentally broken: Finally found a minute to read this. It's long but a great piece. Thorough and well-researched, but written from a perspective that will get people to listen. If you needed a piece to introduce someone to abolition and lay out the framework, especially in contrast with reform, this would do the job nearly perfectly. Might be a worthwhile addition to the OP, Yuzenn, along with the pull quote from Wampa's post. Edit: But if you want more reading...I came across these today and they're both pretty solid assessments of the current political landscape around abolition and reform. https://twitter.com/newrepublic/status/1270406554970447872 https://twitter.com/autotheoryqueen/status/1269778111727636480 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 18:33
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Mat Cauthon posted:Finally found a minute to read this. It's long but a great piece. Thorough and well-researched, but written from a perspective that will get people to listen. Good call, done and done. Everything added to the OP. Jaxyon posted:Hey a friend of mine got a fairly detailed LAPD budget from the city council and it doesn't look like it's something easily found elsewhere. As long as it's not considered  , absolutely.
Yuzenn fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 18:57
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Hey a friend of mine got a fairly detailed LAPD budget from the city council and it doesn't look like it's something easily found elsewhere. Anyone have any interest in it?
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Jun 9, 2020 19:01
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Yuzenn posted:Again as Mat has pointed out, abolishment as an idea does not mean any responding to serious crimes, it just means that the police are already not preventing serious crimes so dismantling them and creating something else would not have an effect on the commission of those crimes. How to respond to those crimes I think is the better question, and Mat has posted some good links about ways we can do that. Sure, and honestly I think we're arguing in circles. I've been trying to be careful to say that what I'm arguing for is not the current incarnation of the police, and I think "destroy and rebuild" is a fine way to go about things. I have zero qualms with something like what was tried in Camden, or even something further where the group responsible for responding to crimes isn't easily recognizable as something we'd call "police". But I do think there are two distinct arguments happening in this thread and elsewhere. There's a group who's arguing for abolishing the police and rebuilding it from scratch, but still fundamentally having a government body that has some limited capability and authorization to employ force (I think outside this thread, that tends to be the dominant perspective when people say "defund the police"), and there's a distinct thread which argues that the government should have no monopoly on force whatsoever, and while there should still be mechanisms for responding to crimes and violence, they should arise from the community and not be something that the government is involved with. Maybe I'm off base? I do think there's absolutely a sentiment in this thread that some people would view a rebuilt professional group for investigating crimes and the ability to sometimes use force as not part of what they're aiming for.
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Jun 9, 2020 19:36
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Jaxyon posted:Hey a friend of mine got a fairly detailed LAPD budget from the city council and it doesn't look like it's something easily found elsewhere. I'd like to see it.
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Jun 9, 2020 19:45
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I'd like to see it. Edit: Here: http://ge.tt/85pGuW43 Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 19:46
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So somebody was posting links suggesting that having no police led to a reduction in crime;quote:While Chicago was roiled by another day of protests and looting in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, 18 people were killed Sunday, May 31, making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. The lab’s data doesn’t go back further than 1961. https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime
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Jun 9, 2020 20:13
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Rapulum_Dei posted:So somebody was posting links suggesting that having no police led to a reduction in crime; I think the last two weeks are somewhat exceptional times and there's way too many confounding factors to assume that any rise in looting or any crimes is due to the fact that the police are busy elsewhere.
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Jun 9, 2020 20:21
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"What about gun violence in Chicago?" is basically the Free Space on the Cop Lover Argument Bingo Card but thanks for your contribution.
Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 20:53
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Jaxyon posted:Edit: Here: http://ge.tt/85pGuW43 This link isn't working for me.
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Jun 9, 2020 21:03
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Angela Davis time. https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1270434723064696835 https://twitter.com/abhiprofen/status/1268768193297952773
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Jun 10, 2020 04:40
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Sorry if it's already been posted, but I saw this recently. https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 (Also apologies in advance if Medium is poo poo, I haven't really vetted the site)
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Jun 10, 2020 09:34
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Mat Cauthon posted:"What about gun violence in Chicago?" is basically the Free Space on the Cop Lover Argument Bingo Card but thanks for your contribution. ah yeah the gun violence that chicago cops solve less than 5%
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Jun 10, 2020 09:45
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Chicago pays their lovely officers 1.5 billion dollars a year and they can't even solve 1 in 20 shootings
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Jun 10, 2020 09:46
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