F The Police, and then what? A police/justice abolition thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > F The Police, and then what? A police/justice abolition thread

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

enki42 posted:

Being someone who argues for reform, it seems like a path that's more realistic and achievable in my mind. There's political will to add oversight to police, especially now. We can introduce complementary functions to police, like unarmed folks for routine violations like traffic issues, etc., or send specialists like social workers, while maintaining a "stop gap" of traditional police for more serious things (and gradually whittle it away).

Definitely the unions are an issue when they'll fight any reform, but they'll clearly fight abolition as hard or harder, I don't see how eliminating the police is any easier of a task.

I think the argument behind abolition is that the current role of the police is too deeply ingrained in our society to meaningfully reform without first challenging people's basic concepts of the role of police and even the existence of the police.

There are so many factors that'll stymie reform that it's not clear that abolition is actually any harder. Sure, the cops will fight abolition just as hard, but once abolition is done, it's loving done. On the other hand, incremental reform is highly susceptible to quietly backsliding, because the bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing the reforms would largely be pulled from the same corrupt system that's generating the current problems.

jabby posted:

Broken windows is a nice theory that the people in charge grabbed hold of to justify the draconian policies they wanted to implement anyway.

I can totally buy that the quality of the shared environment matters (i.e. fix the single broken window quickly and nobody will break the rest), but that's a reason to invest in repairing/renovating urban centres and cleaning up litter. Stretching it to say that jailing the person who broke the first window for ten years is still somehow a good thing is where it breaks apart.

Broken windows policing is explicitly draconian. The fundamental basis of the theory, dating back to its original publication, is that people commit crimes because they perceive that local authorities are weak and don't care, and the visible aftermath of those crimes fuels the perception that authorities are weak and don't care. By cleaning up the aftermath of petty crimes and bringing down the hammer on petty criminals in a visible and intrusive ways, the authorities demonstrate their power and send the message that they're watching closely, and thus deter crime with their shows of strength.

Of course, it's an explicitly authoritarian theory, with obvious ties to general police militarization. It not only discounts how inequality and oppression and neglect of a neighborhood drive crime rates, but also calls for police to be weaponized against those already-victimized communities.

Moreover, there's an aspect of the broken-windows theory that's been essentially left out of the public discourse today. The fact is that the broken windows theory was not just about preventing crime, but rather about keeping away "undesirables" whose existence created a perception of crime. The original broken windows article wasn't about decreasing actual crime rates, it was about making communities feel like crime rates were lower by making the streets openly hostile to rowdy teens, homeless people, alcoholics, and other distasteful groups held in low social regard. Or, to put it another way, it was explicitly about showcasing state power by openly repressing socially-disliked groups, because the presence of those groups makes the state seem weak. Of course, while the original papers didn't really mention race, it's no shock at all that such a premise was swiftly turned toward the oppression of minorities.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2020 19:47

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 17:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

enki42 posted:

I think where I might be struggling is that, in my mind, even if the "formal" institutional power structures are eradicated, it seems like informal power structures will still exist, and I can't see any particular reason to assume that those will be more egalitarian than the formal ones.

Maybe part of the root of my lack of comfort with this argument is that I feel that white supremacy in the police force is just an aspect of the culture at large being supremacist, rather than something unique to the police.

It's true that there will always be power structures. The issue in this case is that in diverse areas, the power structures at the local and regional levels often sit at above the community level, so that whites can maintain power over minority communities. Since residential segregation hasn't really waned, areas tend to be separated clearly into white communities and non-white communities, with economic and political power structures built encompassing them both to ensure that the white communities are able to extend their power and influence to control and dominate non-white communities.

For example, if you look at city-wide stats, Minneapolis is majority-white. But when you drill down into individual communities, you'll find a much different picture: an urban core of overwhelmingly non-white communities, surrounded by white communities. Lumping all of that into a single local authority allows the powerful white communities to control black communities, taking in tax money from the whole city and using it to craft a white supremacist government that only serves their communities.
https://mobile.twitter.com/whstancil/status/928352020951715840

Even when that's not the case, national power structures and norms mean that white supremacists tend to end up in control of the power structures in black communities anyway: for example, the Ferguson PD routinely discriminated against non-whites despite the fact that whites made up less than a third of the population. Ferguson was 67% black in 2010, a number that has likely only increased. With numbers like that and the map above, I hope you'll understand why abolition and a reversion to community control is rising in popularity: there's a solid argument to be made that police departments are essentially an occupying force imposed on black communities by neighboring white communities in order to unofficially maintain white supremacy.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2020 20:33

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Rapulum_Dei posted:

look at countries where police training is more comprehensive and professionalised and their comparative levels of police shootings - I think we all know what we’ll find.

If you don’t want racist white police how are you going to do it without making more non-white non-racist people WANT to be police because at the minute it doesn’t seem like a large section of society want to step forward and police their communities better than they are being.

Starting again from scratch _might_ be the best approach but if it’s not achievable (and it’s very likely not) then you have to find another solution that is.

That’s why I think it’s counter productive to poo poo on anything that doesn’t get everything you want as fast as you want. Like yes, it may be insufficient, but it’s still better so what about getting there as start and then taking another step?

The problem with saying "look at other countries" is that there are other differences between countries besides the level of training in their police forces. For instance, mostly-white European countries tend to have lower country-wide rates of police violence and abuse simply because there's fewer minorities for them to abuse with total impunity, so they have to settle for beating and murdering immigrants, rowdy teens, and the occasional person with mental disabilities. The lower availability of guns to cops in European countries also changes the statistics, though that largely means that abuses take the form of beatings and less-visible discrimination that doesn't grab headlines in the same way as American police abuses.

Even then, a quick Google shows that police abuses in lily-white Scandinavia don't look so different from those in America - and in some cases, they're even worse. A story about Swedish police gunning down an unarmed man with severe Downs Syndrome from behind sounds very familiar to us, but stories about the Swedish police creating a detailed database of all Roma (and only Roma) in the area? That's something that goes well beyond even the NYPD's gang database. German policing is marred by numerous cases of racist abuse and an extreme lack of accountability. Even in Norway, commonly brought up as an example of policing excellence for its extremely low rate of police shootings, tales like police strangling a black man to death for making a scene at a welfare office will sound quite familiar - that's basically George Floyd minus the smartphone cameras. And that's just the stuff that manages to make it into English articles - most police brutality doesn't even make the national news, let alone the international news, so the vast majority of info on European police brutality can be expected to be in those countries' native languages.

It's not just a matter of individual police officers being racist. It's the fact that the policing system is racist at a fundamental level, because the core purpose of police departments is not to fight crime - it's to protect and enforce social and economic hierarchies. That's why the political and social forces driving police behavior are deliberately unaccountable to communities: because the reason for the existence of the police is to oppress and terrorize "undesirable" communities to keep the social and economic lessers in line.

Why so sure that starting over from scratch is less achievable than incremental reform of the system? To me, it's the opposite. If you're starting with a pig farm and want to raise flying animals, then you're not going to be able to teach the feral hogs to fly no matter how professionally or incrementally you try to train them for it. Better to give up the whole endeavor of trying to strap wings to them. Instead, have some pork, bulldoze the pigpens, fill in the mud pits, and have a fresh start that's aimed to accomplish your actual goals without foolishly trying to reuse what you already have.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2020 16:36

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Cuntellectual posted:

For the people who genuinely consider 'abolish the police' as an end goal... And then what, like the title says?

Why don't you read the thread? It's a whopping three pages of discussion dedicated to this exact question.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2020 05:38

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

CelestialScribe posted:

I think this is the crux of a lot of the problems here.

What is police abolition given these two opposing views?

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.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2020 04:08

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

The Kingfish posted:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1276923274157490177?s=21

Can someone post the text?

I can't say it's very interesting - it's basically a sympathetic biography of the man, going so far as to note the time he helped classmates with their homework on the playground when he was six years old. It quotes a number of other people saying "maybe the problem is that the system is broken, not just a few individual bad apples?????" but the article itself carefully avoids drawing any kind of conclusion at all.

quote:

MINNEAPOLIS � There were two black men at the scene of the police killing in Minneapolis last month that roiled the nation. One, George Floyd, was sprawled on the asphalt, with a white officer�s knee on his neck. The other black man, Alex Kueng, was a rookie police officer who held his back as Mr. Floyd struggled to breathe.

Mr. Floyd, whose name has been painted on murals and scrawled on protest signs, has been laid to rest. Mr. Kueng, who faces charges of aiding and abetting in Mr. Floyd�s death, is out on bail, hounded at the supermarket by strangers and denounced by some family members.

Long before Mr. Kueng was arrested, he had wrestled with the issue of police abuse of black people, joining the force in part to help protect people close to him from police aggression. He argued that diversity could force change in a Police Department long accused of racism.

He had seen one sibling arrested and treated poorly, in his view, by sheriff�s deputies. He had found himself defending his decision to join the police force, saying he thought it was the best way to fix a broken system. He had clashed with friends over whether public demonstrations could actually make things better.

�He said, �Don�t you think that that needs to be done from the inside?�� his mother, Joni Kueng, recalled him saying after he watched protesters block a highway years ago. �That�s part of the reason why he wanted to become a police officer � and a black police officer on top of it � is to bridge that gap in the community, change the narrative between the officers and the black community.�

As hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the police after Mr. Floyd�s killing on May 25, Mr. Kueng became part of a national debate over police violence toward black people, a symbol of the very sort of policing he had long said he wanted to stop.

Derek Chauvin, the officer who placed his knee on Mr. Floyd�s neck for more than eight minutes, has been most widely associated with the case. He faces charges of second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter; Mr. Kueng and two other former officers were charged with aiding and abetting the killing. At 26, Mr. Kueng was the youngest and least experienced officer at the scene, on only his third shift as a full officer.

The arrest of Mr. Kueng, whose mother is white and whose father was from Nigeria, has brought anguish to his friends and family. �It�s a gut punch,� Ms. Kueng said. �Here you are, you�ve raised this child, you know who he is inside and out. We�re such a racially diverse family. To be wrapped up in a racially motivated incident like this is just unfathomable.�

Two of Mr. Kueng�s siblings, Taylor and Radiance, both of whom are African-American, called for the arrests of all four officers, including their brother. They joined protests in Minneapolis.

In a Facebook Live video, Taylor Kueng, 21, appeared with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. to speak of the injustice that befell Mr. Floyd, acknowledging being related to Mr. Kueng but never mentioning his name.

Mr. Kueng�s sister Radiance posted a video of Mr. Floyd�s final minutes on Facebook. �Just broke my heart,� she wrote. In an interview, she said that as a black man, her brother should have intervened. She said she planned to change her last name in part because she did not want to be associated with her brother�s actions.

�I don�t care if it was his third day at work or not,� she said. �He knows right from wrong.�

Through his life, Mr. Kueng straddled two worlds, black and white.

Mr. Kueng, whose full name is J. Alexander Kueng (pronounced �king�), was raised by his mother, whom he lived with until last year. His father was absent.

As a child, Mr. Kueng sometimes asked for siblings. Joni Kueng, who lived in the Shingle Creek neighborhood in north Minneapolis, signed up with an African-American adoption agency.

When Alex was 5, Ms. Kueng brought home a baby boy who had been abandoned at a hospital. Alex soon asked for a sister; Radiance arrived when he was 11. Taylor and a younger brother came in 2009, when Alex was about 16.

Radiance Kueng, 21, said their adoptive mother did not talk about race. �Race was not really a topic in our household, unfortunately,� she said. �For her adopting as many black kids as she did � I didn�t get that conversation from her. I feel like that should have been a conversation that was had.�

Growing up, Mr. Kueng and his family made repeated trips to Haiti, helping at an orphanage. Mr. Kueng and his siblings took a break from school to volunteer there after the earthquake in 2010.

Joni Kueng, 56, likes to say that the Kuengs are a family of doers, not talkers.

�I had to stay out of the race conversations because I was the minority in the household,� Ms. Kueng said in her first interview since her son�s arrest. She said that race was not an issue with her, but that she was conflicted. �It didn�t really matter, but it does matter to them because they are African-American. And so they had to be able to have an outlet to tell their stories and their experience as well, especially having a white mom.�

Ms. Kueng taught math at the schools her children went to, where the student body was often mostly Hmong, African-American and Latino. Classmates described Alex Kueng as friends with everyone, a master of juggling a soccer ball and a defender against bullies. Photos portray him with a sly smile.

Darrow Jones said he first met Mr. Kueng on the playground when he was 6. Mr. Jones was trying to finish his multiplication homework. Mr. Kueng helped Mr. Jones and then invited him into a game of tag.

When Mr. Jones�s mother died in 2008, Ms. Kueng took him in for as long as a month at a time.

By high school, Mr. Kueng had found soccer, and soon that was all he wanted to do. He became captain of the soccer team; he wanted to turn pro. The quote next to his senior yearbook picture proclaimed, �We ignore failures and strive for success.�

Mr. Kueng went to Monroe College in New Rochelle, N.Y., to play soccer and study business. But after surgery on both knees, soccer proved impossible. Mr. Kueng quit. Back in Minneapolis, he enrolled in technical college and supported himself catching shoplifters at Macy�s.

About that time, he started talking about joining the police, Ms. Kueng recalled. She said she was nervous, for his safety and also because of the troubled relationship between the Minneapolis police and residents.

Given his background, Mr. Kueng thought he had the ability to bridge the gap between white and black worlds, Mr. Jones said. He often did not see the same level of racism that friends felt. Mr. Jones, who is black, recalled a road trip a few years ago to Utah with Mr. Kueng, a white friend and Mr. Kueng�s girlfriend, who is Hmong. Mr. Jones said he had to explain to Mr. Kueng why people were staring at the group.

�Once we got to Utah, we walked into a store, and literally everybody�s eyes were on us,� recalled Mr. Jones, whose skin is darker than Mr. Kueng�s. �I said, �Alex, that�s because you�re walking in here with a black person. The reason they�re staring at us is because you�re here with me.��

By February 2019, Mr. Kueng had made up his mind: He signed up as a police cadet.

Only a few months later, his sibling Taylor, a longtime supporter of Black Lives Matter who had volunteered as a counselor at a black heritage camp and as a mentor to at-risk black youths, had a confrontation with law enforcement.

Taylor Kueng and a friend saw local sheriff�s deputies questioning two men in a downtown Minneapolis shopping district about drinking in public. They intervened. Taylor Kueng used a cellphone to record video of the deputies putting the friend, in a striped summer dress, on the ground. �You�re hurting me!� the friend shouted.

As the confrontation continued, a deputy turned to Taylor Kueng and said, �Put your hands behind your back.� �For what?� Taylor Kueng asked several times. �Because,� said the deputy, threatening to use his Taser.

Taylor Kueng called home. Mr. Kueng and their mother rushed to get bail and then to the jail. �Don�t worry, I got you,� Mr. Kueng told his sibling, hugging Taylor, their mother recalled.

Mr. Kueng reminded his sibling that those were sheriff�s deputies, not the city force he was joining, and criticized their behavior, his mother recalled.

After Taylor Kueng�s video went public, the city dropped the misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process. The sheriff�s office announced an official review of the arrests, which resulted in no discipline.

Mr. Kueng�s choice to become a police officer caused a rift in his friendship with Mr. Jones.

�It was very clear where we stood on that,� said Mr. Jones, a Black Lives Matter supporter who protested on the streets after the deaths of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile at the hands of Minneapolis-area police. �Our fundamental disagreement around law enforcement is not that I believe cops are bad people. I just believe that the system needs to be completely wiped out and replaced. It�s the difference between reform and rebuilding.�

After Mr. Kueng became a cadet, Mr. Jones went from seeing Mr. Kueng twice a month to maybe three times a year. He said he did not even tell Mr. Kueng when the police pursued him for nothing and then let him go.

In December, Mr. Kueng graduated from the police academy. For most of his field training, Mr. Chauvin, with 19 years on the job, was his training officer.

At one point, Mr. Kueng, upset, called his mother. He said he had done something during training that bothered a supervising officer, who reamed him out. Ms. Kueng did not know if that supervisor was Mr. Chauvin.

Mr. Chauvin also extended Mr. Kueng�s training period. He felt Mr. Kueng was meeting too often with a fellow police trainee, Thomas Lane, when responding to calls, rather than handling the calls on his own, Ms. Kueng said.

But on May 22, Mr. Kueng officially became one of about 80 black officers on a police force of almost 900. In recent years, the department, not as racially diverse as the city�s population, has tried to increase the number of officers of color, with limited success.

That evening, other officers held a small party at the Third Precinct station to celebrate Mr. Kueng�s promotion. The next evening, he worked his first full shift as an officer, inside the station. On that Sunday, he worked the 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. patrol shift, his first on the streets.

On May 25, Mr. Kueng�s third day on the job, Mr. Kueng and Mr. Lane, now partnered up despite both being freshly minted rookies, were the first officers to answer a call of a counterfeit $20 bill being passed at a corner store. They found Mr. Floyd in a car outside.

After they failed to get Mr. Floyd into the back of a squad car, Mr. Chauvin and Tou Thao, another officer, showed up.

As Mr. Chauvin jammed his knee into the back of Mr. Floyd�s neck, Mr. Kueng held down Mr. Floyd�s back, according to a probable cause statement filed by prosecutors.

Mr. Chauvin kept his knee there as Mr. Floyd repeated �I can�t breathe� and �mama� and �please.� Through the passing minutes, Mr. Kueng did nothing to intervene, prosecutors say. After Mr. Floyd stopped moving, Mr. Kueng checked Mr. Floyd�s pulse. �I couldn�t find one,� Mr. Kueng told the other officers.

Critics of the police said the fact that none of the junior officers stopped Mr. Chauvin showed that the system itself needed to be overhauled.

�How do you as an individual think that you�re going to be able to change that system, especially when you�re going in at a low level?� said Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality in Minneapolis. �You�re not going to feel OK to say, �Stop, senior officer.� The culture is such, that that kind of intervening would be greatly discouraged.�

All four officers have been fired. All four face 40 years in prison. Mr. Kueng, who was released on bail on June 19, declined through his lawyer to be interviewed. He is set to appear in court on Monday.

A day after Mr. Floyd�s death, Mr. Jones learned that Mr. Kueng was one of the officers who had been present. Around midnight, Mr. Jones called Mr. Kueng. They talked for 40 minutes � about what, Mr. Jones would not say � and they cried.

�I�m feeling a lot of sadness and a lot of disappointment,� Mr. Jones said. �A lot of us believe he should have stepped in and should have done something.�

He added: �It�s really hard. Because I do have those feelings and I won�t say I don�t. But though I feel sad about what�s occurred, he still has my unwavering support. Because we grew up together, and I love him.�

Mr. Jones said he had gone to the protests but could not bring himself to join in.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2020 20:09

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

fool of sound posted:

For loving WHAT? Terrifying a bunch of cops into huddling together in the panic room of their own building by yelling mean things at them?

Prosecutors are just throwing everything they can think of at them, regardless of how likely the charges are to actually stick, to intimidate them into taking a plea deal. It's a common strategy against minorities and unsympathetic defendants: even if the charges are so hyperbolic and exaggerated that they're incredibly unlikely to stick, so many charges are stacked up that the defendant is risking a ton of jail time if the case goes to trial, and when they're facing down an openly vindictive prosecutor who's experienced at getting black defendants in front of all-white juries that starts to look like a nasty gamble.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2021 00:40

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Pretty much.

I’m sure the tank was absolutely necessary.

Edit: does anyone else think it’s weird that we’ve normalized prosecutors fabricating charges? Like, we just expect the state to invent crimes that didn’t happen in order to coerce confessions for actions that are not yet proven to have occurred.

Not really.

The issue isn't that prosecutors are fabricating charges, the issue that the system is glitchy enough (or white supremacist enough) that those fabricated charges have a meaningful chance of surviving a trial and being ruled to be true.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2021 07:18

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 17:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

OwlFancier posted:

I feel like perhaps the idea that the state's job is to make poo poo up to put you in prison might be an issue, personally. Even if you hope there would be a mechanism to counteract it?

I mean it's not weird if you understand the point of the state to be to perpetuate itself and the power of particular types of people but it is, perhaps, a bad thing. I feel like there is supposed to theoretically maybe somewhere be an idea that you aren't supposed to view the state as being basically a drunken malevolent psychopath waving a gun around.

I'm not saying it's the state's job to make poo poo up, I'm saying that the mechanism to prevent that is that making up false charges they can't defend in court is pointless - or, at least, it should be pointless.

Obviously it's unethical for prosecutors to make poo poo up. But from a systemic perspective, there's no way to get around the fact that someone has to exercise human judgement to determine the list of charges, and it's not reasonable to assume that it's possible to come up with a selection mechanism where the person who does that will never (deliberately or not) add unlikely or outright false charges to the list.

So if there's a problem with false charges, then from a systemic perspective, the first place we should be looking is whether the system has a check in place to determine whether charges are reasonable or unreasonable, true or false. And it turns out we already have something like that: it's called a trial. The ultimate problem here is that trials routinely convict people (especially black people) for poo poo the prosecution has no actual evidence to support. The fact that prosecutors often intentionally cook up false charges is just a symptom, not a cause - they wouldn't bother if the system wasn't so broken that they could routinely get away with it.

And yes, they've contributed a lot to that breaking themselves, with stuff like developing all sorts of tricks to get black defendants in front of all-white juries for the sake of maximally exploiting white supremacy and racial prejudice. All the more reason why it's important to follow issues to their root.

The Oldest Man posted:

State's lawyers creating a raft of bullshit charges for the express purpose of bullying the innocent into accepting false guilt, prison, and the permanent suspension of many of their rights isn't the issue? Habitually? With no repercussions?

How should our system tell the difference between a good charge and a bullshit charge? Should it, perhaps, have someone look at the info about the case and the relevant laws to determine what crimes can likely be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury? That's the current system, and the person who does that is called the prosecutor. Coming up with charges and then trying to convince a jury the charges are true is pretty much exactly what a prosecutor's job is.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2021 15:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > F The Police, and then what? A police/justice abolition thread