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Why do you think that abolishing the police force is a punishment exactly? If they are not violent murderers they will surely be able to easily find new jobs in the not violent murder based social support services.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:59
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People losing their jobs to solve a problem that doesn't exist in their community is definitely a punishment.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:02
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BoldFace posted:There are small counties that have near zero reports of police brutality and deaths caused by police. Why should they be punished? Got any examples?
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Jun 18, 2020 15:03
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BoldFace posted:There are small counties that have near zero reports of police brutality and deaths caused by police. Why should they be punished? Who is being punished? This is Luddite thinking. "Keep bad jobs we don't need because progress is scary" If former cops want strong safety nets they should consider voting for candidates who support that.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:03
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BoldFace posted:People losing their jobs to solve a problem that doesn't exist in their community is definitely a punishment. Post and user combo is hilarious considering you are saying because black people don't exist in these communities that the overall problem doesn't exist. Do these people live in Elysium? I wonder why white enclaves don't give a gently caress about black issues.....
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Jun 18, 2020 15:04
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If there are such virtuous police forces out there one would assume they would welcome the changes as it would give their officers room to become an even more positive influence on their communities. If their officers are indeed such paragons of society then I am sure they could be transferred directly over to their new roles.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:06
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The cultures of other countries are different than here, they do not have the same demographics and the same flavor of racism we grow in the USA. Their policing needs are different and some countries already more or less follow the model we propose. The stuff I talk about applies only the the USA and solutions for other countries would necessarily be different. THAT SAID, most police forces all around the world have similar flaws in that they are also working as intended, by which I mean they are not there to solve crimes, but rather to keep the underclass under. Ask a First Nations person from Canada how they feel about the police there, or an Indigenous individual about their experience with Australian policing. Every culture has an other to keep in their place, even if it is just the poor.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:17
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That was "counties" not "countries" Though I would also say that the cops are sufficiently similar in the UK. Problems with racism, general problems with being used to attack the working class and protect the government, being used as strikebreakers, they are not as bad as the US but we would still be better without them.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:19
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One thing that has always confused me about the abolition movement is do they want to abolish the current incarnation of the cops and replace them with something else while still keeping people who are empowered with the state's police power or are they talking about abolishing the state's police power itself? I can get behind replacement but I can not get behind abolishing the state's police power.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:37
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What do you mean by "the state's police power" because that's kind of what creates the situation of a gang of racist psychopaths going around murdering people with no accountability or recourse for their victims, because the state has the power to do that and also the power to tell anyone who doesn't like to to eat poo poo, absent popular resistance to the state's police power.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:45
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OwlFancier posted:That was "counties" not "countries" Oh poo poo, counties? Yeah gently caress em. I would be incredibly surprised to find a single county in the USA who's police aren't power mad rear end in a top hat, just because they don't have any official complaints on record doesn't mean they haven't buried them, possibly literally. But even if there were, good for them, we are doing something else now, I am sure there were Nazi's in WWII that didn't personally commit genocide and maybe even improved the lives of the people they were in charge of.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:46
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karthun posted:One thing that has always confused me about the abolition movement is do they want to abolish the current incarnation of the cops and replace them with something else while still keeping people who are empowered with the state's police power or are they talking about abolishing the state's police power itself? I can get behind replacement but I can not get behind abolishing the state's police power. It's the former and why abolish is such a confusing term to use. Then one out of ten actually mean removing the states coercive force and confuses the issue totally. It's like if when Lincoln abolished slavery he actually jsut meant chattel slavery and it was going to be replaced with indentured servitude
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Jun 18, 2020 15:47
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karthun posted:One thing that has always confused me about the abolition movement is do they want to abolish the current incarnation of the cops and replace them with something else while still keeping people who are empowered with the state's police power or are they talking about abolishing the state's police power itself? I can get behind replacement but I can not get behind abolishing the state's police power. I mostly lurk this thread but assuming you're not full anarchist and against the very concept of states in general, then you have to concede at some level the state requires the power to enforce its rules, even if only to perpetuate itself. What people are proposing in this thread (from what I've read in between grinding my teeth at Celestial is generally limiting that power to tackling things that are of imminent and grave threat to the people of that state whilst also providing material conditions such that minor crimes that should not be within the police's remit or are overly prosecuted by the police do not occur or can be handled by alternative sources. The degree to which you want any single aspect of that massive past sentence is different per person. I also appreciate that my political/sociological vocab is incredibly bad so I'm ready to get yelled at for this. 
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Jun 18, 2020 15:49
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The Deleter posted:I mostly lurk this thread but assuming you're not full anarchist and against the very concept of states in general, then you have to concede at some level the state requires the power to enforce its rules, even if only to perpetuate itself. What people are proposing in this thread (from what I've read in between grinding my teeth at Celestial is generally limiting that power to tackling things that are of imminent and grave threat to the people of that state whilst also providing material conditions such that minor crimes that should not be within the police's remit or are overly prosecuted by the police do not occur or can be handled by alternative sources. You got it right pretty much yeah, karthun could have you know, read the thread and gotten the idea themselves, but that's a pretty concise definition.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:54
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You could also pretty easily take the position that since the state's monopoly on force is bad because it leads to all the problems with the cops, the act of attempting to get rid of it is desirable even if it doesn't succeed, because the longer it is removed, the more its remit shrinks. It may be the case that society will reach a stable state with the reintroduction of some form of state enforcement authority (and even being quite fond of anarchism I think that's more likely than the actual abolition of capital and the state) but it will be much weaker. Because by necessity we will have to find other solutions to a lot of problems, solutions that would have their own inertia and would continue to function if and when people try to reintroduce a police force. And I think that would be a good thing.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:55
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I'm not sure you will find many leftists to agree that the states monopoly on force is bad lol
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Jun 18, 2020 15:57
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That's literally the central tenet of the bottom left square of the political compass. Anarchists, left libertarians, libcoms, ancoms, libsocs, syndicalists, whatever they want to call themselves. It's hardly obscure within the left.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:59
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OwlFancier posted:That's literally the central tenet of the bottom left square of the political compass. Yes, otherwise known as almost no one
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Jun 18, 2020 16:01
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Just because you have very dull friends doesn't mean everyone does.
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Jun 18, 2020 16:02
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flashman posted:I'm not sure you will find many leftists to agree that the states monopoly on force is bad lol It pretty ubiquitous among left-anarchists. There's a difference between acknowledging that state force is overused and asserting that there should be no state force at all.
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Jun 18, 2020 16:02
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Also recognizing that it's bad doesn't mean you have to make getting rid of it your only and immediate goal. You can recognize it's simply one facet of a problem that manifests in a lot of ways and is heavily exacerbated by the entrenched hierarchy which controls the state and which intersects with capital. But in the context of policing, yes the government having exclusive right to say who does violence and for what reason is exactly why the police are the way they are. Unaccountability is built in. Illegitimacy of resistance for any reason is built in. Like, the concept that the government having a monopoly on force is dangerous isn't even an exclusively left idea. It's all over the US constitution as poo poo as that document is. Literally everyone outside of absolute monarchists and fascists recognizes that it is dangerous and is capable of overreach. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 16:04
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Yes, if you accept the niche anarchist viewpoint that the states monopoly on force is bad, which an overwhelming number of American leftists do not..
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Jun 18, 2020 16:15
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It's maybe worth noting that due to the nature of gun distribution in the United States, reduction or removal of the state's monopoly on violence may not be super desirable considering the kind of people who have the majority of guns in the US, or at least the image of them, and that it may be necessary to address this imbalance as well, but that can fall under critique of capital and how guns are sold, I guess. But this is only vaguely a gun control thread only by dint of the police murdering people with guns.
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Jun 18, 2020 17:16
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Pustulio posted:Maybe they should actually read the thread then? It isn't that long and we clarify what we mean by abolish on virtually every page? This sounds like law enforcement reform to me. I understand that you and others don't want to call it that so you can distinguish yourselves from people who propose milder reforms, but this is just reform. It certainly isn't abolishing law enforcement.
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Jun 18, 2020 17:18
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Holy poo poo I'm going to lose my mind at the next person who spends an extended amount of time going 'well technically you aren't for abolishment!!'. It's tedious and unless you want to argue for the total abandonment of state monopoly on force it's just pointless nitpicking. Stop.
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Jun 18, 2020 17:26
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The Deleter posted:It's maybe worth noting that due to the nature of gun distribution in the United States, reduction or removal of the state's monopoly on violence may not be super desirable considering the kind of people who have the majority of guns in the US, or at least the image of them, and that it may be necessary to address this imbalance as well, but that can fall under critique of capital and how guns are sold, I guess. The state's monopoly on violence in this instance is only happening in certain communities, and part of the problem is not that people are armed but with the fact that those who would seek to arm themselves have to add the state's enforcement arm as a general threat to their health and well being. Philando showed us that. Everyone, especially Black people should exercise their right to be armed, and the other smaller set of the population who owns most of the guns are a problem for different reasons and a discussion for a different thread. silence_kit posted:This sounds like law enforcement reform to me. I understand that you and others don't want to call it that so you can distinguish yourselves from people who propose milder reforms, but this is just reform. It certainly isn't abolishing law enforcement. Yes and no. Reform as an ideal does not get to any sort of ideals of disbanding any parts, functions, or systems within the Police, just changing them. Calling it abolish is important because it establishes that these are requirements prior to any "reforms". Verbiage is important because softening of language is something we do constantly to take the air out of politically charged ideas and movements (Carlin had a great bit on it, iirc). Reform is a term people want so they can return to status quo ASAP and act like something was done and not shake up any of the underlying power, corruption or money intertwined at the root of all of the various and blatantly obvious problems with the Police. Protests have not gotten weaker since this movement caught fire, but a bunch of black people have still been knelt on (in front of George Floyd murals) killed (some in some of the blackest cities in the nation) and even worse (going out on a limb about these hangings kinda but I would not be surprised if the Police were at least covering them up if not fully complicit). Piecemeal concessions just do not go far enough, it's all or nothing here people are fighting for their lives.
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Jun 18, 2020 17:58
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enki42 posted:Right, but you'd say "Cut down that tree", not "Abolish forests", just like people are saying "Abolish the police", not "Abolish the (specific city) Police department". Policing, definitionally, is using state violence to control the population and maintain a racialised class system in service of capital. That needs to be abolished. It would be innacurate to say 'abolish all state functions for maintaining and promotiny public health and safety', sure, but no one is saying that. If you are trying to make the case that the police exist to maintain and promote public health and safety then you are wrong, or lying.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:19
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karthun posted:One thing that has always confused me about the abolition movement is do they want to abolish the current incarnation of the cops and replace them with something else while still keeping people who are empowered with the state's police power or are they talking about abolishing the state's police power itself? I can get behind replacement but I can not get behind abolishing the state's police power. Abotionists, like pretty much every group, do not all agree on a specific platform. The vast majority however are arguing the former, though there are some who argue for the latter. I don't know anyone in that group that doesn't understand crystal clear that in order to achieve thay almost every aspect of our existing social order would need to be radically transformed. Since that obviously isn't about to happen, you can happily throw your lot in with the entire abolitionist movement in order to achieve the goals of the former, without any niggling worry that some of them want to go 'too far'.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:23
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If you understand 'policing' to mean an arm of the state authorized to use force to maintain and support public health and safety then you don't understand 'policing'. Its all the people saying 'so you DO want to keep police you just want them to not proactively and oppressively create crime.and disfunction in poor and minority communities' then you're the one using sloppy terms and being innacurate. Words mean something after all.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:26
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Goons like thought experiments right? Imagine we had a federal agency and they went door to door pulling people out of their homes and extrajudicially slaying them or illegally imprisoning them purely because of their identity, and we call this agency The Doctors. And then I say, I want to abolish The Doctors, would you start worrying about who is going to work in the hospitals?
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Jun 18, 2020 18:30
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Yuzenn posted:The state's monopoly on violence in this instance is only happening in certain communities, and part of the problem is not that people are armed but with the fact that those who would seek to arm themselves have to add the state's enforcement arm as a general threat to their health and well being. Philando showed us that. Everyone, especially Black people should exercise their right to be armed, and the other smaller set of the population who owns most of the guns are a problem for different reasons and a discussion for a different thread.
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Jun 18, 2020 19:08
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Crumbskull posted:Policing, definitionally, is using state violence to control the population and maintain a racialised class system in service of capital. That needs to be abolished. This is a weird and I guess US centric definition to me. Socialist countries had police forces policing their population after all. So whatever definition you want to assign to the police being abolished, this doesnt work.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:13
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Yuzenn posted:The state's monopoly on violence in this instance is only happening in certain communities, and part of the problem is not that people are armed but with the fact that those who would seek to arm themselves have to add the state's enforcement arm as a general threat to their health and well being. Philando showed us that. Everyone, especially Black people should exercise their right to be armed, and the other smaller set of the population who owns most of the guns are a problem for different reasons and a discussion for a different thread. quote:Yes and no. Reform as an ideal does not get to any sort of ideals of disbanding any parts, functions, or systems within the Police, just changing them. Calling it abolish is important because it establishes that these are requirements prior to any "reforms". Verbiage is important because softening of language is something we do constantly to take the air out of politically charged ideas and movements (Carlin had a great bit on it, iirc). Reform is a term people want so they can return to status quo ASAP and act like something was done and not shake up any of the underlying power, corruption or money intertwined at the root of all of the various and blatantly obvious problems with the Police. Protests have not gotten weaker since this movement caught fire, but a bunch of black people have still been knelt on (in front of George Floyd murals) killed (some in some of the blackest cities in the nation) and even worse (going out on a limb about these hangings kinda but I would not be surprised if the Police were at least covering them up if not fully complicit). Piecemeal concessions just do not go far enough, it's all or nothing here people are fighting for their lives. Words matter and softening is bad, but IMO "Abolish" causes real confusion and allows for any movement to be undermined from within due to attracting elements that may not be desired - some allies will lead a movement to hosed up conclusions. My experience with various government entities is that you get the change you want not through reforms or abolition but by removing/transferring key powers, duties and functions which ultimately Dismantles them. And what most people seem to be revolving around is a dismantling: some elements of the existing police structure may remain with few changes (e.g. laboratory services, some sort of SWAT for edge cases, specific bodyguard duties, I dunno) while most of the rest of their functions are discarded or given to new/existing entities. It'll also let people fill in their own versions of what bits stay in place, which is pretty crucial given that the word "community" seems to get bandied about in a lot of the linked articles, and with limited at best definitions of what a "community" entails, and my strong impression is that the word is being used by people who can barely envision anything more spread out than a closely-packed suburbia. Zachack fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 20:24
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AlexanderCA posted:This is a weird and I guess US centric definition to me. Socialist countries had police forces policing their population after all. So whatever definition you want to assign to the police being abolished, this doesnt work. Please share with me your universally coherent definition of policing that holds for all societies throughout history and lets go from there. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 20:27
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Zachack posted:I guess I disagree to an extent that it's a different discussion because a monopoly of force existing (or not) fundamentally determines the outcome. That said, I do agree that gun control discussion will result in Abolish This Thread, much as that eventual discussion may destroy an Abolish movement, so I agree that it should be passed for now. Completely agree that 'community' is basically an incoherent idea and that progressive activists and organizers should stop using it because it appeals to a completely fictive idea of social relations as they exist in the US.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:29
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And once again, irrespective of wether Abolish is tactically less ideal than Dismantle or whatever, there is no Abolition HQ you can request change it and thats the term that has been used in the movement for decades and your breath is better used explaining what it means to the confused than telling the movement it is confusing.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:31
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Crumbskull posted:Please share with me your universally coherent definition of policing that holds for all societies throughout history and lets go from there. Police maintain and enforce social order and provide a general (not specific) deterrent to lawlessness. That may result in enforcing a racialized class system in support of capital, sure, but that's not a definitional function of what police are, just a reflection of which society they are functioning in. When police exist in a socialist state, they maintain that social order. I'll definitely agree that so long as a police force exists in an overall system that's systemically racist and supports capital above all else, the police are going to reflect that, although I'd be completely shocked if whatever the police are replaced with doesn't reflect society in the exact same way if societal changes don't come hand in hand.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:52
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enki42 posted:
This is 100% backwards, and we know it because there's plenty of documented history about sheriff offices starting out as 1) slave catching armed patrols in the south or 2) racially exclusionary armed patrols in the PNW and other white only enclaves around the country. Those institutions provided the basic structure that was adopted as a default policing model and many have gone basically unchanged in ~200 years. That's partly why the sheriff is basically the most powerful person in your county. Police didn't just fall into the role of violent racialized oppression in this country, it was part of their mandate from day zero. So much so that ethnic immigrant groups in the US who aspired to whiteness and an exit from the underclass (like the Irish) achieved those goals in part by joining the police in droves and enthusiastically participating in anti-Black violence on behalf of the state. You are entitled to press your argument but not to misconstrue history.
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Jun 18, 2020 21:59
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Mat Cauthon posted:This is 100% backwards, and we know it because there's plenty of documented history about sheriff offices starting out as 1) slave catching armed patrols in the south or 2) racially exclusionary armed patrols in the PNW and other white only enclaves around the country. Those institutions provided the basic structure that was adopted as a default policing model and many have gone basically unchanged in ~200 years. That's partly why the sheriff is basically the most powerful person in your county. The argument was that the term "police" definitionally means a group that is enforcing a racist class system in support of capital, and doesn't need to be limited to American policing. There's plenty of examples throughout history where the goal of the police wasn't explicitly racist, or explicitly in support of capital. I 100% defer to what you're saying about the history of the American police, you clearly know more than me on it, but that doesn't mean that police everywhere throughout history exist solely to reinforce capitalism and racism (the obvious counterexample is police forces in socialist countries, but I think there's a fair argument that many worldwide police forces don't have a specifically racist reason for existing, even if they have often have racist outcomes). enki42 fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jun 19, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 22:38
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Zachack posted:I guess I disagree to an extent that it's a different discussion because a monopoly of force existing (or not) fundamentally determines the outcome. That said, I do agree that gun control discussion will result in Abolish This Thread, much as that eventual discussion may destroy an Abolish movement, so I agree that it should be passed for now. I think this is a fair take, but this movement came together pretty fast, and was using verbiage that only existed in pretty small academic circles of research but is surprisingly unified with it's core cause without much organization at all. I'm curious to hear what other word would have been effective but something to the "extreme" shock value of abolish is completely necessary to get the point across, IMO. Your experience of government is a bit different from mine because I'm less inclined to trust that those who would do those things you describe would actually do them. Assuming you are non black (no offense if you are), you are asking us to put the onus of letting the same entity who is empowered by the State to do these terrible things to, for lack of a better term, police themselves. I'm not sure this is at all possible. It's different if this was another function of government because at least at the baseline it's general purpose is not, or at least is no longer, the terrorizing and incarceration of black people to protect the elite's financial capital and stranglehold upon it. Abolition, even if it's just for the purposes of recreation gives at least a fair chance of the long list of things that are trying to be done to work. You've removed incentives and law related to why and how Policing got as lovely as it did. From what I see, the Abolition cause is somewhat synonymous with Defund the Police, but just taking dollars away from the Police and retaining the police structure as armed State Thugs won't make the problems go away, you just have angrier more aggressive shitheads to deal with. These changes will take a lot of money obviously, but if we take away responsibilities from what Policing entity we return to society, it's at least money well spent in the right places, and it will help us tackle some of the underlying issues that any sort of entity would even have to respond to. Over time we can reduce the amount of ways the State requires interaction with citizens about issues of law and ...order (that word is gross) which is a huge net positive in quality of life for all, especially those who are black. enki42 posted:I 100% defer to what you're saying about the history of the American police, you clearly know more than me on it, but that doesn't mean that police everywhere throughout history exist solely to reinforce capitalism and racism (the obvious counterexample is police forces in socialist countries, but I think there's a fair argument that many worldwide police forces don't have a specifically racist reason for existing, even if they have often have racist outcomes). Police certainly don't act like this everywhere but they certainly do and always have done so here. We can't compare our Police force to any other Country in that regard, our Police were formed for a very specific and insidious reason, it's just that it took an 8 minute and 46 second video for people to see what black people always knew. Yuzenn fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jun 19, 2020 |
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Jun 19, 2020 00:44
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