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silence_kit posted:I feel like a lot of the anti-cop arguments in this thread and elsewhere are basically: 'there is rampant corruption in the police force--they are not acting in the public interest, and they cannot be trusted'. Which I agree with, maybe not to the same degree as some, who right now are pretty much attributing 100% of the problems in society to corruption in the police force. But I do think it is very true. The police aren't corrupt (I mean some of them are), the police are doing exactly the job currently laid out for them. Which is to brutalize poor mostly black and brown people and constantly threaten public peace if they don't get budget increases and pay raises every year. The counter argument is that we don't want that.
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Jun 12, 2020 00:09
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CocoaNuts posted:The interview is not all about police, but there are some provocative and thoughtful quotes from Jon Stewart in this interview: quote:‘‘Look, we certainly were part of that ecosystem, but I don’t think that news became entertainment because they thought our show was a success,’’ Stewart says. ‘‘Twenty-four-hour news networks are built for one thing, and that’s 9/11. There are very few events that would justify being covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So in the absence of urgency, they have to create it. You create urgency through conflict.’’ This is all you need to read to understand the Jon Stewart is full of poo poo and has never understood either the role the media plays or the role he played in perpetuating oppression. The media is not an organism design to create conflict. Most of the 24 hour news networks are just talking heads telling viewers what to think - 18 hours a day, it's opinion programming. That has nothing to do with creating conflict and everything to do with manufacturing consent. They are an organism designed to perpetuate the views of an elite ruling class, particularly when it comes to what types of political opinions are acceptable and on-trend, and optimally to do it at a profit. And his show and his personal elevation were that. He made politics into a comedy show while real people died as a result of those politics. He helped manufacture the liberal "post political" mindset in a generation of mostly young mostly white people by turning lethal electoral outcomes (for mostly poor, mostly non-white victims) into a comedy sketch. There are tiny glints that he sees now in retrospect the sham covering over the gaping wounds in our society but no evidence at all that he understands his own starring role in that sham. I've heard enough from Jon Stewart. You want to defend yourself on CNN by saying your show is just a comedy program that comes on after crank-calling puppets? Fine. But you can go gently caress yourself when you want to opine on what ails society every day after that one. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 07:08
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Vahakyla posted:Jon Stewart is a massive influence for many people to pay attention to politics. He doesn’t pass 100 percent purity test, but you show me mainstream pundits with lines as scathing as this: Yeah, zing. Got'em. Scathing lines. Jon Stewart had a platform and he used it to give people a sensible chuckle at how gosh darned divisive politics is and check out from both electoralism and activism. How about instead of showing you flavors of the ten cent titanium tax that does/doesn't go too far enough from the diverse realm of blue-branded mainstream punditry vs red-branded mainstream punditry, we throw mainstream punditry on the trash heap of history and I show you my city councilwoman unlocking the doors of city hall to let thousands of people in to call for our mayor to resign instead? https://twitter.com/AGarlandPhoto/status/1270565427219841024 The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 08:14
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CocoaNuts posted:Article explains how "Defund the police" as a slogan doesn't have popular support, but asking people in polls if they would support taking some money from police budgets and putting it into homelessness, mental health and domestic violence counselling results in much greater agreement. "Black lives matter" was a majority disagrees statement until mid 2016. They'll figure it out eventually if everyone who actually has something to lose in this fight stays in it.
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Jun 20, 2020 09:21
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None of those do anything unless the police are disarmed and demilitarized, most of their funding is diverted to services that prevent crime from happening in the first place, the political power of their unions is destroyed, the criminal justice code is reformed, and oh yeah every single current police officer needs to be drummed out of the profession and investigated by a Truth & Reconciliation commission in every city. Otherwise you can just say you're doing it and go right back to killing black people. As they have done for fifty years. Seattle tried to do the absolute bare minimum of "reform" by banning the cops from using chemical weapons banned in war. Here's what the chief of police had to say - you can't reform a force that will only argue in bad faith and make every attempt to hold the people hostage when they don't get their way. https://twitter.com/MTaylorCanfield/status/1287089024247758855 Same police department today: https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1287212851807940608?s=20 The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Jul 26, 2020 |
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Jul 26, 2020 06:45
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Vahakyla posted:ACAB is about the institution. A lot of people seem to havr a hard time with it because they read it as Every Single Cop Is Hitler. Sorry, but no. Being a cop means being a bastard and I don't mean that in the abstract. Good cops end up quitting, being turned on by their compatriots (as was the whistleblower NYPD cop who was involuntarily committed to a mental institution by his "comrades" to silence him) or dead. Every single cop is a bastard and works every day to silence, fire, or kill the odd good person who finds their way into the job. It's in the job description to destroy good cops as is executing unjust laws and killing black people if they so much as look at you sideways. If the people you know aren't in the process of quitting, contemplating suicide over what pieces of poo poo they are, or being framed by their colleagues then they're not just "complicit with a bad institution" they're working their asses off every loving day to make sure that institution cannot be dismantled or improved. The fact that you don't see them doing this at the Saturday barbecue or whatever is completely irrelevant.
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Sep 12, 2020 03:37
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Vahakyla posted:You have to make the argument about the institution, because not every cop is a Hitler. Every cop is a Hitler. Every single one of them is a prison guard at Auschwitz. You keep taking what we're saying and twisting it back to the idea that not every cop is directly, personally, actively killing black people and suppressing dissent with violence and they're simply cogs in a bad machine. They're not. They're all individually putting people to the sword, helping others put people to the sword, paying their unions and police foundations to run mass disinformation campaigns about how putting people to the sword is good actually, intimidating and threatening politicians who try to put fewer people to the sword, and beating and maiming people who come out to protest the putting of people to the sword. If there were ever a truth & reconciliation commission on the crimes of American police, every single loving cop would end up in prison for what they've done and continue to do.
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Sep 12, 2020 19:11
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The Seattle OPA would like you to know that pepperspraying that 7 year old was fine because someone else was trying not be beaten in their vicinityquote:Myerberg’s office did not sustain the complaint against the officer who pepper-sprayed the seven-year-old, concluding instead that the officer had not intended to spray the child and therefore hadn’t violated department policy. The OPA wasn’t able to interview the child or his father (who was pepper-sprayed alongside his child) after the family’s legal counsel didn’t respond to the OPA’s interview requests.
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Sep 18, 2020 18:13
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Portland tonight. I'm sure this is also fine. https://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1307214168789889024
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Sep 19, 2020 08:26
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CelestialScribe posted:Yeah, and it's why this thread is confusing me. This thread is specifically about asking, what does a post-police world look like, but the discussion seems to be very much centered on, "abolish police and figure out the rest later". From the OP quote:Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?
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Sep 23, 2020 01:05
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Jaxyon posted:Meanwhile, Breonna Taylors murderers got away with it. A just public safety system cannot be made from the one we have now. It can only be built on the ground where it once stood.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:31
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ButterSkeleton posted:I mean, CS is an existing real person and there will likely be a ton of people just like him who will be asking a poo poo-zillion questions about every facet of police reform/abolishment. Even with the intent to be frustrating as hell, without that you won't be as easily prepared for actual pushback and discussion when it's really implimented. There are plenty of real Ben Shapiros too. Treating their arguments in good faith is counterproductive. Anyone who comes in saying "don't use the word 'abolish'" should be treated with that level of skepticism because it's pure concern trolling. I'm not going to engage with that; I'm going to engage with why they want to talk about edge-cases when the cops are murdering Black people every day and want to twist the discussion away from abolition of that murderous system. Why don't you want to use the word "abolish?" Optics? Or because you want a police force available to do violence to people on your behalf and abolition would end that? Confront your own need to have a murder force before you confront others' need not to be murdered.
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Sep 24, 2020 21:47
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ButterSkeleton posted:I mean, this sounds funny, but do you think people will just accept what you say is true even with facts and statistics on your side? No matter what people will ask insanely specific and detailed scenarios and come to an abolitionist about it, and if you -really- believe in the reform, you must be ready to tackle those difficulties every day in and out. So you're for police abolition but you're also an expert on the thinking of white supremacist reactionaries who will conjure up detailed hypotheticals to argue against it? It sounds like you should be the one making the argument to them then, not me.
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Sep 24, 2020 22:28
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CelestialScribe posted:If you aren't interested in talking about edge cases, you will never see police abolished. Period. "If you don't solve all problems brought about by abolition to my satisfaction, it can't happen," is, literally, an argument that slave-owners and their advocates used to defend chattel slavery regarding both the problem of post-slavery unemployment for Blacks amid what was imagined to be a newly-devastated agrarian economy and the problem of reshaping an entire mercantile legal system that had twisted itself into thousands of knots to make slavery defensible in the context of an otherwise basically libertarian legal framework. Given that chattel slavery was abolished without satisfying their concerns, I don't think your position holds.
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Sep 25, 2020 01:34
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CelestialScribe posted:Let me ask again: what is this thread for? If we agree that abolishing the police is a goal, but we're not talking about how that goal is implemented, what's left to discuss? The goal is implemented by firing the cops - all of them - and prosecuting them for their crimes. You say over and over that abolition is what you want, then return to the discussion with an edgewise point about how surely we must have some cops after this abolition business. You've done nothing but concern troll, argue by dismissal, and straw-man throughout this thread.
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Sep 25, 2020 02:22
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CelestialScribe posted:Never said this. You said as much right here: quote:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3926317&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=24#post508271474 - Someone assaulted my friend - That person needs to be punished - That person would not have been punished without force being used against him - We need people who are authorized to use force to punish people or to ensure that they are punished by non-forceful means by others - The idea of not having those people is unacceptable That's you describing cops and stating flatly that not having them is unacceptable.
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Sep 25, 2020 02:32
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If you're seriously talking about chop as a failed example of a 'citizens' militia' then I think you need to explain how a protest camp covering three urban block-faces and a park that didn't involve the majority of the people living in the buildings there or even a permanent organizing committee, and had constant uncontrolled in-and-out traffic of thousands of different non-residents, could have citizens first before you talk about how their citizens' militia didn't work.
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Sep 28, 2020 20:17
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OwlFancier posted:He was president for eight years, if he wanted to do something about the police he would have. Well he held a beer summit about racialized policing and all the while silently blamed his friend for getting wrongfully arrested https://twitter.com/daniel_dsj2110/status/1333874806228480003?s=20
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Dec 3, 2020 00:23
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Gabriel S. posted:I'm not trying expand anything but in any event to avoid confusion - I'll go with largely democrats. Jenny Durkan? Ted Wheeler?
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Dec 3, 2020 01:56
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Gabriel S. posted:And as far as I am concerned, Progressives are shooting themselves in the foot. Sure Democrats aren't perfect, many aren't good at all - see Rahm Emanuel - but they are the best shot at reform and the current messaging is incendiary, confusing and easily weaponized by the opposing party. I don't want reform. I don't want bans on chokeholds; they use them anyway and have plenty of other methods by which to harm and kill people. I don't want police oversight boards; we have one and they do nothing. I don't want coffee with a cop; cops are racist murderers. I don't want them doing photo-ops with high-school kids that they're mentoring; the last time they tried that poo poo there were a string of rapes and sexual assaults by cops on those kids. I don't want a nicer occupying force that does lipsync music videos on youtube. I want the police out of my community where they harass, brutalize and murder people every day, and I want that money that currently pays them to be spent on things the community actually needs.
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Dec 3, 2020 02:47
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You're right, abolish the police is really the more accurate phrasing here.
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Dec 3, 2020 02:48
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In Dem Mayors Doing Cop poo poo news, Seattle's mayor had this to say about Cal Anderson park and the occupation fence around the police precinct next to it.quote:Mayor Jenny Durkan tells CHS that her office will “in coming weeks” launch two initiatives planned with local businesses and community representatives to “restore” Cal Anderson Park and take down the barricades around the East Precinct. Boy I hope these initiatives planned by local businesses and community representatives that put business and property at the front of discussions aren't more loving pogroms aimed at the homeless people who are camped up there with nowhere else to go!
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Dec 3, 2020 02:53
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Gabriel S. posted:I'm all for it. Then, again, you're a Democrat who says "defund is bad messaging" but actually means "I want the current amount of cops or more but maybe they'll be nicer." This isn't a messaging issue; you don't agree with the substance of what the protests are demanding.
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Dec 3, 2020 02:55
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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. Blah blah blah, you don't want what the people who say "defund the police" want, stop trying to tell them how to message what they want when you're not on their side.
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Dec 3, 2020 03:46
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Gabriel S. posted:I'm perfectly fine with redistributing funds originally for law enforcement to other organization such as those that assist with non-violent events. I don't agree with the use of "defund the police" as a political slogan, only as a goal or part of larger law enforcement reform. Do you want more, the same, or less funding for cops. Christ arguing with these people is like getting gum caught in your hair
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Dec 3, 2020 05:08
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Cpt_Obvious posted:No, there is nothing binary about it. Reducing police budgets by one dollar and abolishing them completely both fall under “defund”. Yeah, it's actually a pretty good example of the okie doke that "Defunding the police" in Seattle turned from a 50% demand into a 20% legislative FY2021 cut which is achieved almost entirely by moving departmental functions like 911 dispatch out of the police department leaving something between 5 and 7% actually being removed from money for cops which is... on par with the cuts other city departments are absorbing next year due to revenue shortfalls. There are tons of variations on defunding the police and plenty of space within the "defund the police" demand to make the cuts to actual copbucks turn into nothing. Which is, of course, just another reason why it's hilarious when people grump and grouse about it as a slogan. If you're not willing to take the first tiny baby step and admit that the cops are pulling down too much loving money for the anti-service they provide, you're not worth taking seriously on this subject whatsoever. "Reform" is just a stalking horse for giving cops even more money to roll their eyes through a mandatory training or get bonus pay to wear an additional piece of taxpayer-funded military industrial complex techfetish gear.
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Dec 3, 2020 08:51
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Sucrose posted:And right-wingers will do everything in their power to convince moderates that "Defund" does mean "abolish" since it could mean that and sure enough you can find some leftists arguing for abolition who can be used as a convenient boogeyman. Yeah, it could and generally does mean that - or steps in the direction of abolition. Cpt_Obvious has pointed out that it's an easy enough slogan to neutralize into more do-nothing poo poo, but "defund" is a compromise step from "abolish." This is, again, just Democrats first calling "defund" a messaging problem rather than what it is (a policy divide between liberals and the left) and calling for unity to try to co-opt and divert the movement toward nice, safe reformist rhetoric that does nothing and lets liberals stay nice and cozy with the cops, particularly when they're in power and having their own army of occupation is pretty convenient actually.
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Dec 3, 2020 09:15
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fool of sound posted:Any effective reform is necessarily going to involve a reduction in the number of officers, because the only reason police forces require the huge number of under-trained street cops is because their mission is suppression and their strategy is occupation. You need a lot of manpower for that, but that manpower only needs to be violent thugs who aren't compatible with properly reformed law enforcement. Defunding is the only reasonable way of forcing staffing cuts like that. Eventually, as a real training program is implemented and de-escalation and crisis care resources are expanded, they'd get some of their funds back, but for use with assets that allow a significantly smaller number of employees to better protect people, rather than hiring a horde of skinheads. I mean, I think the police in basically every city are completely unredeemable monsters led by the most unredeemable monsters among them and that there will never be a point at which the best next step is not "take away more money away from the cops to immediately reduce the harm they can do" until all we're left with is civilianized emergency response services and a National Guard or other paramilitary SWAT function for dealing with barricaded shooters and other edge-case situations with no legal powers of their own. But I'll tell you what, let's do a couple defundings, cut their budgets by 80 or 90% and see what happens. Maybe they'll surprise me.
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Dec 3, 2020 19:15
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fool of sound posted:My magic wand scenario is "fire literally every cop and start over with an entirely different system" but I'm talking in terms of "well ok if we're stuck with reform how do we make that reform actually do something?". My own reason for supporting iterative defunding rather than immediate abolition is that I believe saying "ok no more cops" at a shot will turn our current police departments (and their unions) into either PMCs/PSCs, street gangs, or brownshirt orgs or hybrids that are incorporated as private security companies and collect lucrative protection contracts from city and state governments but then also do a little fascism and gang protection activity on the side. If we're not willing to go to war on them the day after abolition happens, we need to reduce them by attrition first. Otherwise we'll see a wave of poo poo like what happened at the East Precinct evacuation during the CHAZ/CHOP standoff, where cops were piling tactical gear, body armor, AR15s, and grenades into their personal vehicles and driving off with them for those items never to be seen again, only this time the trigger pullers will also disappear along with all the equipment until they come back a week later as Thin Blue Line Security and Fascist Beatings Co.
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Dec 3, 2020 23:04
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Gabriel S. posted:For those looking for further reading on linguistics, check out George Lakoff. This is no different than Estate Tax vs. Death Tax, Weed vs. Dope or Obamacare vs. ACA. Is there a reason you need to continue this bad faith fog machine posting when the subject of discussion, the desire by establishment liberals to sweep policy divides under rug and call them messaging differences, is exactly what you're doing in here?
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Dec 4, 2020 00:43
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Gabriel S. posted:I don't know what makes you feel that way because this isn't true and if activists actually want to make a difference they need to win elections. And not just in liberal coastal cities and states either. Dude you're literally misrepresenting your own policy preferences as a rhetorical device and then blubbering that my position can't win elections when you're called on it.
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Dec 4, 2020 00:47
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Gabriel S. posted:I completely agree that often reform in the past has been largely toothless and that why everyone is so understandably skeptical of any reform. Defund this disingenuous bullshit
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Dec 4, 2020 01:06
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I also think that instant abolition would lead to a wave of violence from non-police as people decide it's open season and they can do what they like and settle scores without fear of punishment or imprisonment. I know that "oh, prison's not a deterrent" is a popular sentiment, but it is (at least for some people), it's just not a 100% effective deterrent. Agreed, I just have a feeling that a big part of that wave would be from the ex-cops, for multiple reasons (capacity/equipment/training to do it, revenge/spite, ready organizationally and culturally to dehumanize and do violence to others, incentive by way of being able to victimize people they already hate who have seizable liquid assets that they're not able to keep fully for themselves now but could post-abolition for a short window of time, and used to operating as an extractive force).
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Dec 4, 2020 01:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:People who are not safe in their homes are right to protest outside those of politicians. The comfort of privileged rich assholes has always been equated to the lives of Black and indigenous people and complaints about protests outside government officials' homes are no different. People whined about a protest outside our mayor's house even though she already has a permanent, 24/7 state security detail from her former job as one of Barack Obama's US attorney bagmen.
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Dec 4, 2020 09:18
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I wonder if there's a group of people who have been rapidly escalating their criming and constantly complain loudly and in public about the minimal restraints placed on their right to do violence and steal poo poo who might go absolutely buck wild in the aftermath of police abolition Ed: if anyone has a more updated version of this chart, please post. I've seen stats that this trend is continuing to accelerate but not visualizations of same.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:14
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I also can't believe there aren't a bunch of domestic abusers who would go after their ex-partners if not for the threat of punishment. This is just the cops e: gently caress
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Dec 4, 2020 18:30
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Gabriel S. posted:If you have a way to change the culture so that the phrase is understood, I am all for it! It is however going to much, much easier to change a phrase than a culture. This is literally responding to a demand to defund the police by saying, "I agree with you, but this is bad messaging. What if we didn't defund the police instead?" This isn't a disagreement over messaging strategy and never was. Some people want the same or more cops and money for cops. Other people want fewer cops or no cops and less money for cops. Whether both of those groups say they dislike police brutality is not relevant to this discussion.
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Dec 5, 2020 00:52
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Crespolini posted:So what? I mean, leaving aside that it's complete bullshit, and it says no more about him than wanting an alarm is saying something about your propensity to burgle, so what? What if he was saying he'd be emboldened to hurt you in the absence of police? I feel more confident in my ability to protect myself from him with no police. Now what?
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Dec 6, 2020 00:38
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fool of sound posted:It's a tricky one. There are two big problems: first, it's hard to target them specifically without also busting other public sector unions or otherwise harming labor right. second, police unions are toxic because they're representative of police culture; all police spaces are at least as bad as police unions and are often far worse, and breaking up unions would probably push their labor organization into even more venomous spaces. I don't think it would be particularly complicated to target police unions specifically with legislation since cops have a number of criteria such as law enforcement powers that no one else does on account of no one else is cops, but I agree with the rest of what you're saying. Cop unions and their associated non-profit orgs aren't going to stop being a font of poison because we ban collective bargaining for cops or whatever else. That said though, it would probably be a very good thing solely for the reason that we can take money out of cops' hands more easily if they're unable to collectively bargain, so I'm in favor of banning them.
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Dec 7, 2020 09:29
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Jaxyon posted:Complaining about police unions is falling into anti-labor framing of problems, as FoS has already said. I evaluate the ability of cops to pull down a quarter million dollars a year to be a salient material issue, and frankly, I don't care about the optics of that. Cops are a hostile, occupying army, and all means electoral, legal, and economic must be deployed to break their power in our society. OwlFancier posted:A union is as good as the thing it defends, which for most professions is good because most professions are good or at the least the remit of their unions is trying to advance the workplace rights of their members. But when your workplace rights are that you need the right to kill and maim other workers with impunity because that is what you are paid to do, that isn't a problem with your union, it's a problem with your job. Cop unions actively use collective bargaining to ham-string the ability of civilian authorities to restrict their use of force, deploy chemical weapons, and acquire weapons and training with non-governmental funding. You can't disentangle the cop job from cop unions because cop unions are effectively dictating what the requirements of the cop job are. The "right to kill and maim other workers" isn't some fixed universal truth to cops, it's something cop unions have advocated for and won at the bargaining table and still fight to expand further with each contract negotiation.
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Dec 7, 2020 20:01
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