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Carrying over from USPol, but I think that a significant amount of first responder duties that police currently deal with should be handled by someone other than police (on top of everything else already said here). I'm from Toronto, and we recently had a case where a black woman fell to her death from a balcony after the police were called in (some confusion remains over the initial reason for the call, but it's fairly clear she was going through a mental health crisis and there may have been some DV aspects). Not a lot is known right now about the exact circumstances of her death, which has given folks an opening to excuse the police, since it's totally plausible that she fell from the balcony while trying to escape the police, or something similar. But even if we're that charitable, and assume that the cops were perfectly well intentioned, and didn't display any threatening behaviour to her (as unlikely as that could be), a big part of the problem is that police, and especially armed police, shouldn't have responded to that call in the first place. You have a black woman with a history of mental health issues in the midst of a crisis - of course armed police officers entering her apartment are going to escalate the situation, even if they aren't being violent. Send social workers to deal with mental health crisises, or to help homeless folks. Send relationship counselors to less serious DV calls. At the very least, don't arm police answering these calls unless there's good reason to believe that someone's life is imminently in danger (and have an independent body review those decisions each and every time they're made).
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Jun 4, 2020 01:49
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From doing quite a lot of reading tonight about abolishing police, and it feels to me (although I could certainly be missing something), that the "heavy reform" and abolition arguments are really trying to reach more or less the same end goal: - Local communities should have control and oversight over how laws are enforced - Law enforcement needs to be done in a way where escalation of force is an absolute last resort - Folks enforcing the law should honestly and genuinely be there to "protect and serve" the people in their community. - White supremacy, or bias against any oppressed or racialized group should be absolutely rooted out, full stop. The main difference seems to be a disagreement on what the most effective way to get there is. 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.
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Jun 4, 2020 02:32
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I feel like there's a circular argument with the abolitionists that I don't get. Please help me understand exactly how I'm misrepresenting the abolitionist argument, because I'm sure I am, but I don't know how else to interpret it. Abolitionist: We should let the community decide how to police themselves? Reformist: What if the community decides that lynching black people is OK? Abolitionist: You don't understand. These community decisions would only be made by cool and good people with cool and good ideas. The chuds won't show up for some reason. That last point is massively unfair, but I don't know how else to interpret it. If you live in a county where people are overwhemingly republican (say a county that had a margin of > 80% for Trump), who are the cool and good people who are going to argue for community policing solutions that don't involve "actually, lynching blacks is fine!"
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Jun 4, 2020 12:36
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Crumbskull posted:What is your proposal for reforming the racist US police state that never produces any harms or unjust outcomes? Or do you believe that black Americans are currently living in the best of all possible worlds? ( do not answer this, instead, please shut up: idiot) CelestialScribe and others posted a bunch in the USPol thread, but even within this thread, there's already been tons of clear suggestions (summarized here briefly): - Stop arming police in the vast majority of interactions - Community oversight of police through oversight and review boards with teeth composed of people in the community - Improved training and elibility requirements for police - Better / continuing to be decent (depending on local circumstance) pay for police, and focusing defunding on equipment budgets and number of officers - Requiring that officers pair up - Finding alternate first responders in certain situations (counselors for DV, social workers for mental issues, etc.) - Drawing police from the local community whereever possible and encouraging building ties with the community I'm sure I'm missing a bunch. I feel like you're trying to make the argument "abolish the police" vs. "do absolutely nothing", and no one has suggested that nothing should happen.
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Jun 4, 2020 12:47
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Crumbskull posted:these reforms/reinventions were more harmful than the previous system (they obviously couldn't be but whatever) How do you figure? Police departments have a lot to improve right now, but they could also be a lot worse. Police still at least sometimes investigate crimes committed against POC. In most cities, violence against LGBT communities is far, far reduced from where it was in the past (while I won't pretend all problems are solved, bathhouse raids and things like that are no longer a routine thing). Police do receive at least some training in de-escalation and mindfulness (notably, there was a significant amount of this in Minneapolis). This is by no means to excuse the police or say they're doing anything resembling a good job, but it could absolutely be worse, and has been worse in the past. quote:then they would advocate reforming back. People proposing this arent fanatically comitted to simple majority vote local democracy, they want an end to unnecessary violence and oppresion. You do seem fanatically committed to any solution being revolutionary and the complete abolition of the police force being a hard requirement, rather than one path to improve how the police function. I'm personally not necessarily even opposed to abolition fundamentally - I just genuinely don't understand what you're proposing beyond "Step 1: Get rid of the police. Step 2: TBD at a later date."
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Jun 4, 2020 13:07
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Hey, thanks for this! This was very helpful and after reading everything you're posting, I clearly wasn't understanding the argument (probably because other posters insist on their entire argument consisting of telling people to shut up and failing to explain themselves). I think what I'm calling heavy reform and at least the initial steps of what you consider abolition are more or less identical, unless I'm misunderstanding something: - A majority of the police budget is redirected to community support systems, whether it's having different folks deal with issues, de-militarizing the police, exploring other avenues to justice and punishment, etc. I think everything I've said about finding every opportunity to use resources other than police are in line with this. - I definitely don't think police should have more resources overall. I do think that we should be smart about how we reduce police budgets - massively decreasing equipment expenses and reducing the total number of officers make sense to me, but I think so long as we're going to have some police it makes sense for them to be paid decently. I guess the disagreement is more about how far you can take this model? I think there's always going to be a need for professionals who enforce the law in some capacity, even at a vastly reduced role from what exists today. Can you point to some reading of a successful implementation of large populations not having law enforcement in a professional, full time capacity? But if your argument is we should remove police from enforcement where it makes sense over time, instead of "fire everyone immediately", then that makes sense.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:13
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On the other hand, gently caress you. I've been making an effort to understand your argument, and asking where I'm misinterpreting things, and you've been completely unwilling or unable to assume any degree of good intent from any poster who has any opinion outside of "100% abolition now". You've consistently characterized the arguments of anyone arguing for reform as being 100% OK with the status quo, despite people consistently telling you that's not the case.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:15
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Baka-nin posted:The problem here is that it is ahistorical. Lynchings and other forms of mob violence against minorities were usually done with the support of one or more forms of institutional power including elements of the police. And a major stumbling block to minorities in those communities taking steps to defend themselves was the intervention of the police. 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.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:18
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Crumbskull posted:And yes i'm conflating your posts with CelestialScribe's because I believe you are two sides of the same stupid/evil coin. If you can't take on new information because someone is mad or frustrated with you: grow up. I can take on new information, and I've learned a lot and done a lot of reading thanks to this thread. If you bothered to read anything instead of getting to 500% aggro immediately, we've basically been arguing for the same steps (unless your standpoint is "completely abolish the police today with no plan" in which case lol). Advocating for serious structural reforms including disarming like 80% of police isn't an insane fringe right wing viewpoint like you seem to think it is. I'm not asking to be educated, I'm asking for you to actually read what I'm writing and not misrepresenting it because it's anything short of 100% abolition right now.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:30
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Cpt_Obvious posted:You can't make this poo poo up. I'm not saying it's their viewpoint, I'm saying that if that isn't their viewpoint, I'm not sure where we're in disagreement in terms of initial steps? - Defund the police significantly - Find alternate solutions to take the place of police for many interactions - Add community oversight These aren't points that I reluctantly agreed to, this is the very first thing I advocated for in this thread. I think everyone is yelling at each other for no particular reason other than perceiving people to be on the opposite side of a culture war, honestly.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:39
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Is it fair to say that a better way to think about "abolish the police" is "find things where the police are unnecessary or not the best solution", which right now could very easily be: - getting police out of schools - having police not be first responders for mental emergencies - having police not be first responders for DV issues - treat drugs as a health issue rather than a criminal one - many many more things before anyone gets around to guillotining homicide detectives It's "conditionally abolish the police where it makes sense right now, and continue doing that until there's no police." I don't know if I agree with the "no police" part, but for like 99% of what the police do and for anything that an abolition movement could accomplish in the foreseeable future, the above is probably what you're looking at, and I think you said in the USPol thread that all of those sort of things are things you're down for CelestialScribe. enki42 fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 23:19
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It's definitely a thing with progressive groups in Canada, particularly ones with an anarchist bent. The local anarchist group in my city regularly protests any sort of police interaction, including coordinating with them during protests or security for big events and things like that.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:23
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silence_kit posted:Man, the posters in this thread use the term 'abolish' in a pretty weird way. IMO it is a little sophistic. They should call it Police Reduction, if they want to emphasize that they have different ideas from the more common kinds of police reform. First off, please don't take my word for it. I'm figuring this stuff out, and still don't fully agree with total abolition (my point there was that people for abolition and people for very heavy reform have pretty much the same goals and strategies right now). There are a ton of useful links by people who actually understand this stuff in the thread. Second, I would imagine that anyone for abolition in this thread genuinely does want there to be absolutely no police at all. All of them realize though that the way to get there is not to fire 100% of police tomorrow, it's to chip away at the institution until there's nothing left, starting with things like getting police out of schools, varying first responders, demilitarizing police, etc. Think of abolition as an end goal rather than an immediate tactic (again, I'm not even close to an expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong here). To take your death penalty example, plenty of folks who are 100% against the death penalty focus their advocacy effort on cases where they can get agreement, like cases with sketchy evidence, or particularly young inmates. That doesn't mean they're A-OK with the death penalty for serial killers. enki42 fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 14:24
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Perhaps we are reaching a moment in history when poverty and hunger can be abolished. It would certainly be the first and most vital step towards removing violence from everyday life. I definitely agree that a large amount of violence can be traced back to poverty and hunger, but I don't think it's universal, and my gut feeling is that becomes less universal as the severity of the crime increases. I could absolutely buy that 95+% of theft ties back to poverty and hunger in some way (or, at the very least, to unequal distribution of wealth), but that doesn't feel like it rings true for many homicides (particularly ones involving family or close connections), rape, or things like child abductions. Of course, that's a vanishingly small part of the roles we assign to police these days, so I think it's absolutely fair to say that we can eliminate needing violence to respond to these issues in turn, but I feel there's still a significant amount of violence that isn't going to be solved by having a more equal society, and at least to some degree, violence or the threat of it is going to be necessary in one form or another for the foreseeable future.
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Jun 8, 2020 13:51
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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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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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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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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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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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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".
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Jun 18, 2020 14:11
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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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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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Yuzenn posted: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. Sure, I totally agree. But I do think it's important insofar as the police are a reflection of the society they operate in (how couldn't they be if most of their purpose is to enforce that social order), and (and this is my broader point), I think it's at least a little inevitable that any replacement to the police will have a tendency to reflect that society.
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Jun 19, 2020 01:25
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I think very few people have "eliminate 100% of the police today" as an immediate tactic that they are fighting for. Look at even the most extreme proposals of what should be passed by councils today, and most of them are eliminating specific programs or making budget cuts that are significant but well short of 100%. It's probably better to look at this as an idealized goal that abolitionists are moving towards. Eventually there should be no police, but how quickly that can happen depends on building up alternatives that can take the place of what the police are doing right now. One exception I think some people have argued for is disbanding the police and rebuilding something that looks an awful lot like the police immediately, sort of like the example from Camden NJ, but I don't think anyone is saying "disband the police 100%, don't replace them, and figure everything else out later".
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Jun 23, 2020 12:15
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Nurge posted:I don't have much else to add but this is kind of hilarious you know, in view of the history of the entire world. You seem way too optimistic about the motivations of the average person. So long as they aren't putting the cart before the horse and actually work to fix those problems first, who cares? If the end result of trying to eliminate violence is that you can only eliminate 80% of it, that's still a win. I agree insofar as I think it's naive to think you can completely get rid of violence (I'm not accusing anyone of specifically claiming that), and something that looks an awful lot like the police is going to need to exist to deal with that irreducible amount of violence, but I do think it can be reduced, and in turn the number of police needed to deal with it can be reduced. But the thing is, so long as someone isn't going to demand immediate abolition right away, and can make small steps towards it, whether they're right and we can get violence to 0, or I'm right and violence can only be reduced by 80% or whatever is sort of irrelevant. We'd take the same actions both ways, we're just disagreeing on our guesses on how effective we think it will be.
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Jun 23, 2020 12:22
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Yuzenn posted:I mean, it kinda is eliminate the police 100% today, but it's using police as a pejorative - not as whatever agent will enforce the State's power over laws. Sure, I guess this feels to me sort of like the Camden example but perhaps more extreme in how different the thing you rebuild after the fact is. It's eliminating police organizations, not the concept of policing, and ensuring that the thing that replaces it has fewer of the structural and cultural issues that current police organizations have. I asked this in the other thread, do you think people are inherently violent? In the western world? quote:I think this is fair, but I disagree in one point - small steps just won't work. The police are far too big of an institution and too ingrained in over a hundred year racial paradigm in which they have been the enforcement end. They are backed by law and given much more firepower and leverage than maybe any other institution sans the military and at least the military has strict rules about how they deal with their own populace. We have a lot of centrist or worse lawmakers, and progressives aren't in power in enough places for a systematic change to happen by slow walking it. I know this thread has been over it, but I feel that if there's the political will and ability to abolish the police entirely, it shouldn't be an impossibility to slash programs, defund the police significantly, and disarm them. Yes, it will be a political clusterfuck and probably all out war between the city and the police department, but so will abolishment. I do think disbanding and reforming departments is a valid strategy for forcing those changes if the police won't accept them willingly, so our opinions probably aren't that far apart.
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Jun 23, 2020 16:44
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Beefeater1980 posted:I still want to know what gets done with all the police when they’ve been defunded and sacked. A lot of angry young men trained to use weapons suddenly being unemployed is usually a problem in itself. There's approximately zero chance that any city immediately abolishes 100% of their police force all at the same time. Even in a super-aggressive defunding / abolishing process, you'd have layoffs here and there but never enough that you need to worry about ex-police gangs suddenly forming and roaming the streets or something. Even if you did somehow fire every single police officer simultaneously, a big part of the reason police brutality is a problem is because they have power and the system protects them. Take that away, and the brutality will largely go away with it.
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Jul 11, 2020 14:36
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OwlFancier, it seems like your arguments imply that the threat of being caught or being punished either doesn't act as a deterrent at all. Have you read anything that supports that claim? I'm definitely not an expert, but it definitely seems from just some light reading around that while things like lengthy prison sentences or the death penalty are lovely deterrents, it's pretty generally well accepted that having a high likelihood of getting caught is a pretty effective deterrent. Like I said though, that's just from memory and a pretty quick search around the internet, but that seems to be a pretty important part of what everyone is arguing about.
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Sep 25, 2020 16:39
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Jaxyon posted:They literally do not want to reform or defund the police, beyond lip service. I'm not sure if I can think of a recognizable Democrat who wouldn't be for police reform. Defunding, sure, 100% - there's plenty of Democrats who will align themselves with that phrase without any desire to meaningfully defund the police, and more still who reject the notion of defunding altogether.
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Dec 3, 2020 00:00
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Gabriel S. posted:I am someone who believes that while Law Enforcement is going to be integral to any society there's a shocking lack of accountability from these organization in the United States. And it's getting worse. Not just that either, there's a bizarre lack of respect towards civilians, sexism, racism, classism, etc. but also against their own Democratic Governments. To this very day law enforcement unions even in California still fund anti-marijuana campaigns and criminal sentencing reform for the most benign offenses. Yeah, you're not saying anything that is in opposition to what The Oldest Man said. You both agree on the problem, you don't agree at all on the solution, and the solution you're proposing doesn't appear to have anything to do with "defund the police", so it's not really an argument about messaging, you just don't agree with what the protestors using that phrase want.
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Dec 3, 2020 03:42
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Cpt_Obvious posted:To put it another way: The lovely things that cops do are a symptom of a larger disease, capitalism in general and private property specifically. If everyone owned their own house and a piece of their own workplace then the cops wouldn't be needed to protect the property of the ultra wealthy because everyone would have enough resources such that 'crime' (i.e. stealing enough bread to eat) would be minimal. I think this makes sense for quite a lot of crime, but does it hold up for terrorism and politically motivated crime? People didn't storm the capitol to feed themselves, they did it to advance their own political aims. Even in full service luxury space communism, there's going to be people who are going to want changes to the system and are willing to use violence to achieve those aims.
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Jan 8, 2021 23:17
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OwlFancier posted:It's a weird conception of "political aims" that seemingly bears no relation to material circumstances. As if politics just fall out of space and into people's heads without making contact with the earth at any point. This feels like it comes dangerously close to the old "economic anxiety" canard. Obviously to some degree riots are always going to be influenced by people's material conditions, but I don't think it's a fair assumption to say that improving those conditions will completely eliminate any and all unrest in a society. Even in a society where people's needs are largely being met, it seems completely reasonable to me to assume that agitators will exist that will try to convince people that they would be better off under another system - it doesn't even particularly matter if it's true, just that people can be convinced of it. And as long as that exists, there's going to be the potential for unrest. On top of that, I think there's plenty of examples of unrest, protests, riots and violence that aren't 100% tied to the economic welfare of the rioters, even if many are. Pro-life demonstrations, religiously motivated extremism, racially charged violence all have at best a tenuous link to capitalism.
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Jan 9, 2021 11:50
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I don't necessarily disagree with that, I don't think that it serves as a 100% complete explanation. Tribalism predates capitalism or even notions of private ownership.
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Jan 9, 2021 14:21
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