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Just going to post some resources I've found helpful in motivating me to be an abolitionist (of both police and the carceral state in general). Very good interview of Mariame Kaba, a real deal abolitionist organizer who does amazingly great work in NYC and Chicago. posted:I believe that living in the way we live makes it difficult for most people to seriously consider the end of policing. The idea of security, the idea that cops equal security, is difficult to dislodge. To transform this mindset, where cops equal security, means we have to actually transform our relationships to each other enough so that we can see that we can keep each other safe and ourselves safe, right? Safety means something else, because you cannot have safety without strong, empathic relationships with others. You can have security without relationships but you cannot have safety—actual safety—without healthy relationships. Without getting to really know your neighbor, figuring out when you should be intervening when you hear and see things, feeling safe enough within your community that you feel like, yeah my neighbor’s punching [their partner], I’m going to knock on the door, right? I’m not going to think that that person’s going to pull a gun on me and shoot me in the head. I don’t believe that because I know that person. I know them. I built that relationship with them and even though they’re upset and mad I’m taking the chance of going over there and being like you need to stop this now, what are you doing? Part of what this necessitates is that we have to work with members of our communities to make violence unacceptable. What my friend Andy Smith has said is that this is a problem of political organizing and not one of punishment. How can we organize to make interpersonal violence unthinkable? From here: https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba "The End of Policing" grapples broadly with the question of "well if we don't have police then what" and you can get the e-book for free right now. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4729-the-problem-is-not-overpolicing-it-is-policing-itself Guidelines for abolitionist organizing around prosecutors and district attorneys: https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/abolitionist-principles Great interview with Simone Browne about the anti-Black, white supremacist origins of policing and modern surveillance states - I also recommend her book "Dark Matters": https://truthout.org/articles/the-surveillance-of-blackness-from-the-slave-trade-to-the-police/ I would also recommend: - The Condemnation of Blackness - This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (this is more about armed community organizing than policing explicitly) - Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces - Cities Under Siege - The First Civil Right - Are Prisons Obsolete - Women, Race, & Class - The Muslims Are Coming
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Jun 4, 2020 01:07
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What CelestialScribe and enki42 are suggesting are not "abolition" so much as they are just garden variety reformist ideas that either allocate more resources to the police or put a slightly nicer veneer on police methods without changing the underlying white supremacist structure of modern policing in the United States. When people make those arguments, or hypothesize that a post-police status quo would be some lawless hellscape, they're deliberately ignoring the vast amounts of quotidian violence enacted and enabled by police happening right now, every single day - and I'm talking about normal times, not just pandemic riot world. fatherboxx posted:Before this thread eats itself because of one reason or another... Short answer:   From here: Reformist Steps vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing - https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...tion_CRside.pdf posted:Ultimately, abolition is a practical program of change rooted in how people sustain and improve their lives, cobbling together insights and strategies from disparate, connected struggles. We know we won’t bulldoze prisons and jails tomorrow, but as long as they continue to be advanced as the solution, all of the inequalities displaced to crime and punishment will persist. We’re in a long game. From here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition Longer answer: posted:Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.” From this very good article on Ruth Ann GIlmore and her work: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html Much longer answer: Two of the most prominent scholars of police (and prison) abolition are Ruth Ann Gilmore and Angela Davis. I highly recommend reading any and everything they write, because they lay out the case very clearly and convincingly. Angela Davis in particular is a wonderful speaker who connects the need for abolition to everything from labor exploitation (here and in the Global South) to gender inequality to imperialism to Palestinian oppression. Here's a conversation between Ruth Ann Gilmore and Naomi Murakama (author of the First Civil Right) about Abolition right now in the context of the pandemic and other current events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf3f5i9vJNM Angela Davis on why reform is insufficient in dealing with the problems of policing and prison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfnbnTs0r-M The vital thing to remember, the thing that people who oppose abolition and concern troll about how without police the world will fall apart, is that we're not talking about just disbanding the police and walking away. No abolitionist expects to just turn a key or flip a switch and make the world perfect by getting rid of cops. This is meant to be a process, just as the creation of modern policing was, in which we replace violent, carceral systems with support networks and resources that enable communities to live safely and with everything they need so that we can all collaboratively figure out what accountability and justice look like without the threat of violence. It is possible. I know that people who argue for abolition (myself included) can sometimes seem absolutist - Abolition or nothing! That's a mistake on our part at times, but I think it stems from a genuine desire to not see abolition put aside as the end goal for whatever changes, reforms, etc that are suggested are explicitly focused on that goal, because often reforms that seem positive can get twisted to serve the needs of police, prisons, and the carceral state. For example: Campaign Zero put out their "8 can't wait" recommendations for police reform to curb violence. But places like D.C. have already implemented many of those reforms - and still have high rates of violence and police brutality. https://twitter.com/DavidKaib/status/1268373228185059328 You can be an abolitionist AND support reforms, if those reforms are loyal to the belief that we don't need police to be safe and that any reforms need to be rooted in the needs of communities. For example: posted:History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police. The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can’t begin to imagine a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the police increase their legitimacy through all of the non-police related “work” that they assume: including doing “wellness” and “mental health checks.” Why should armed people be deployed to do the work of community members and social workers? Why have we become so comfortable with ceding so much power to the police? Any discussion of reform must begin with the following questions: How will we decrease the numbers of police, and how will we defund the institution? From here: https://thenewinquiry.com/summer-heat/ I know that's a lot, sorry. Trying to be comprehensive while also providing resources that are accessible for folks new to this idea. Hope it answered your questions somewhat. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 15:02
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enki42 posted: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). Yeah like I said, it's possible to advocate for reforms that are grounded in abolitionist principles and explicitly work towards abolition. That 10 point list I quoted is in line with many popular proposed reforms, but acknowledges that they are just initial steps. Part of the work is ensuring that the reforms stay true to those principles and keeping the momentum going even after flashpoints around incarceration and police brutality diminish or fall out of the spotlight. 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. I don't disagree with this in principle, but I think it's a both/and thing. Police represent the white supremacist structure of the society they are charged with regulating but they also represent a very specific and unique application of the tenets of that structure. Which to me says that you have to work at the problem from both ends, because leaving one unaddressed while working on the other undermines the entire transformative project. enki42 posted: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? So IMO we have to be careful about using historic analogues, because the institution of police as it stands today - a professionalized, state sanctioned civilian force that is empowered to dole out violence in service of investigating crimes, bringing criminals to the legal system, etc - is only like...a few centuries old. There are not many one-to-one comparisons. That being said: posted:Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have compiled a great deal of information on societies that use various forms of conflict resolution in which an organization such as the police has no place (https://www.amazon.com/Restorative-Justice-Healing-Foundations-Everyday/dp/1881798313). From the Diné (Navajo) to the Semai, there are dozens of societies—all of them impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialism—that have practiced restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or social harm without ever having to be so brutal as to lock people up in cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or mobilize organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare neighboring societies that face similar socio-economic conditions but use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses. posted:Christiania is an autonomous neighborhood of Copenhagen that has been squatted since 1971. The area, with nearly a thousand inhabitants, organizes itself in assemblies, maintains its own economy and infrastructure, cleans up its trash, produces bicycles and other items in collective workshops, and runs a number of communal spaces. They also resolve their own conflicts, and with the exception of some aggressive incursions and raids, Christiania has been a police-free zone for most of its existence. Initially, the Danish government opted for a soft strategy, hoping that Christiania would eventually fall apart on its own. In the same era, the autonomous movement in the Netherlands and Germany was fighting major battles to defend their squatted spaces, sometimes defeating the police in the streets or burning down shopping malls in retribution for evictions. In context, the Danish approach made sense. However, Christiania thrived. Some suspect that the government was behind the crisis that threatened the autonomous neighborhood’s existence in 1984 when a motorcycle gang moved into the police-free zone to begin selling hard drugs (soft drugs have always been widely used in Christinia, while addictive drugs are vehemently discouraged). posted:The mutual relationship between police and crime was exquisitely revealed during the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. In June of that year, police viciously attacked the massive encampment staged annually by striking teachers. But the teachers fought back tooth and nail, quickly joined by many neighbors. They pushed police out of Oaxaca City, which remained autonomous for five months along with large parts of the countryside. People built barricades, which became an important space for socialization as well as self-defense, and they organized topiles, an indigenous tradition that provided volunteers to fight back against police and paramilitaries as well as to look out for fires, acts of robbery, or assault. All quotes from here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-world-without-police/ I haven't personally read through all the primary sources cited there, so grain of salt, but some of those examples (Christiania and Oaxaca) can be looked up in news coverage pretty easily, and provide examples of the complexities of navigating a society without police through autonomous organizing grounded in the needs of communities and their specific contexts towards the goal of ensuring safety and accountability without defaulting to violence. Also lots of reading resources linked in this article: https://transformharm.org/thinking-through-a-world-without-police/ It's important to keep in mind that police and prison abolition are not new ideas - people have been thinking about this deeply for a long time and so even if someone ITT doesn't have the answer to your question chances are it has been addressed in the field.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:43
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https://twitter.com/erikhinton/status/1267435394758512646?s=19
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Jun 4, 2020 21:36
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From what I've seen it's an idea that is gaining more popularity and prominence in international activists circles but there's a lot of variation depending on the specific country and/or cause you're referring to. France and the UK seem to be embracing it more quickly because of similarities in racist, anti immigrant, or islamophobic policing and violence. Same for South Africa. I've heard people from various South American countries advocate for it due to the realities of police oppression there, especially again indigenous groups or LGBTQ people. If you look for it it's out there but it definitely gets more prominence in the United States because our problem is much more egregious. That being said, white supremacy and carceral state politics are global, so the project of abolition is not somehow diminished or less relevant because country X doesn't have the same level of police violence or mass imprisonment as country Y. Also police violence or draconian imprisonment in one place is enabled by the carceral policies of other places - Israel takes their lessons from oppressing Palestinians and uses them to train US police and military forces, who take that training, refine it through the lens of US law enforcement priorities and share it with partner states like South Korea or Brazil or Norway. So on and so forth. Many European nations are involved in intelligence sharing and certain law enforcement operations with the US. The linkages are deep and complex. Abolition is framed as the way to create a world free from violence and dehumanization as the mechanisms through which we endure safety, order, and accountability, so it is inherently global in scope. We cannot of course impose an American model of abolition on any other country, but chances are people in any given nation are asking many of the same questions and trying to envision what abolition looks like in their country. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 00:36
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flashman posted:Community policing in America will be like HOA taking care of law enforcement. No thank you. Did you read any of the posted resources? Even one? flashman posted:Most importantly to me is an overhaul of the education requirements for officers though. Increase the education requirements for entry into the academy to a bachelor in one of the social sciences and increase the pay to attract a higher caliber of officer. This has already been tried, and failed, many many times. https://twitter.com/GoldyLandau/status/1266603925483986944 Median income in NYC: Household: $57,782 Individual: $50,825 Even second or third tier cities like Memphis have bumped up not just cop pay, in part by getting donations from millionaires and corporations, but also incentives like tuition reimbursement, take home vehicles, private school tuition, and housing subsidies. Part of the problem is that most people don't want to be cops. For those that do, the biggest deterrent is fear that they will get caught on camera doing something wrong. The issue is not pay. More on that here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/02/13/is-the-answer-to-crime-more-cops Some studies have shown that cops with a degree will use "force" less often. posted:The study found no difference with respect to officer education when it came to arrests or searches of suspects. But it found that in encounters with crime suspects, officers with some college education or a four-year degree resorted to using force 56 percent of the time, while officers with no college education used force 68 percent of the time. "Force" included verbally threatening suspects, grabbing or punching them, using mace or pepper spray, hitting suspects with a baton, handcuffing, throwing to the ground, or pointing or firing a gun at them. From here: https://psmag.com/education/cops-and-college-do-police-need-book-smarts-21852 Others have found that college degrees make cops more likely to overpolice: posted:One of the task force’s many recommendations called for efforts to encourage higher education for police officers. Underpinning this recommendation was an optimistic assumption that having a college education makes police officers more sensitive and responsive to the distinctive needs of the communities they serve. But is this true? From here: https://theconversation.com/college-educated-cops-enforce-the-law-more-aggressively-106333 So education maybe isn't the answer either. Hard to say conclusively without more data and research, but it's hard to get departments to go along with that because if the results aren't positive it kind of undermines the whole educational incentive part of further reform and professionalization of police. The Glumslinger posted:As a serious question, what would criminal investigation look in a future where we could fire all cops and build a new criminal justice system? For the purpose of this discussion, lets say the goal of criminal investigations is to accurately solve major crimes such as Murder, Rape, and other violent crimes. In 2018, we nationally, the US had a 63% clearance rate on murders, 45% on violent crimes, and 34% on rape. (1) This is a good question. Given that cops are already pretty poo poo at solving violent crimes, there's a lot of room for improvement outside of the policing model as it currently exists. My gut feeling is that the skills necessary to successfully investigate crime can be successfully divorced from the threat of force or punishment as motivation to comply with law enforcement. Further, assuming a post-police world where everyone has the resources they need and we depend on social/community connections to resolve things there would be 1) fewer violent crimes and 2) stronger connections = more witnesses, more incentive for them to cooperate with investigations and more mechanisms through which to prevent biases and corruption from hindering accountability and justice. That's all conjecture though, so if you ask me to extrapolate from there I can't and I won't. The Glumslinger posted:Would splitting the CSI/Detectives into a separate department, with separate unions be enough to prevent the current levels of corruption and racism from reemerging? Looking at LAPD, people are eligible to be hired as detectives after having spent atleast 3 years a regular officer, which comes after 18 months in the academy.(2) Would breaking up these career paths even further improve the culture of detectives and help remove the biases learned in the police academy and as a beat cop? The quickest path from hiring to promotion to a detective is approximately 4 years; What kind of way can we use that 4 year timespan to train detectives who are more able to effectively solve crimes accurately, without falling into patterns of blaming minorities and other disadvantaged people? I think you have to split those things apart. There will be some overlap as people decide to transfer from one career path to another but taking a street patrollman and turning them into a detective doesn't seem to discourage them from bringing the same assumptions and bias into their conduct, only a veneer of detachment from street level crime and professionialization. You can absolutely train someone to investigate crimes in 4 years outside the police model (investigators for civil cases or other noncriminal concerns do exist) and also we have to acknowledge that a lot of what is accepted as rational for detectives - collecting evidence for crimes - relies on evidentiary models that are increasingly seen as either completely made up (blood spatter analysis) or unreliable (fingerprint analysis) or outright counterproductive to ensuring the correct people are held accountable for crimes (eyewitness testimony, suspect line-ups, suspect interrogations, etc). The Glumslinger posted:I'd also like opinions on whether the local structure of investigation also hinders our ability properly solve crimes. Would we be better off with centrally run detective bureaus, either at a state level or even a federal level (though I guess federally run would probably be unfeasible and kinda overlap with the FBI). Something like local community-based structures for arbitrating everyday minor, nonviolent conflicts, with state run investigative bureaus to handle violent and/or technically complex crimes (financial stuff, identity theft, etc). Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 01:57
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Cranappleberry posted:Can anyone furnish me with links to studies about systemic racism in the justice system? The Penology of Racial Innocence: The Erasure of Racism in the Study and Practice of Punishment The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves: Racial Disparities and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Justice System Beyond School-to-Prison Pipeline and Toward an Educational and Penal Realism Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers The Color of Mass Incarceration I would recommend that your friend read The New Jim Crow and the First Civil Right - even if he doesn't have access to academic resources it's a safe bet that his local library will have at least one of those books and they are very good starting points for reading about the deliberate disparities in policing. Another good read would be The Condemnation of Blackness, which puts a lot of the criminalization rhetoric around Black people into a historical context. cheetah7071 posted:Yeah I think most of the abolish crowd is okay with having government employee bodyguards for social workers No, they aren't. silence_kit posted:Haha so the social worker is a cop then, since they can arrest and detain people (just not directly, I guess, they have their 'armed bodyguards' do it) for breaking laws. Yeah I want to push back against this fixation on social workers a little bit. If you have had any exposure to social work and/or child welfare systems, you should be well aware that while they are intended to be a softer, gentler way for the state to facilitate healthy, safe homes, they can nonetheless be extremely carceral and onerous in their methods. Black, indigenous, immigrant AND poor white communities in particular have a very valid distrust of social workers, albeit not as pronounced as with police, because those institutions are often disproportionate focused on them and have been the cause of a lot of harm and pain and disruption of families. Edit: Very timely example I happened to come across tonight showing the intersection of draconian policing, social work, and mass incarceration: https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1270066217945006085 All of that to say that yes, there is a place for social workers in the abolitionist framework. However, if the assumption is that they will be empowered to harm people much in the same way that police are, except under a more beneficent guise, that's not actually changing anything. It's not more moral or ethical or gentler to take the imperative of violence as justice from the police and just move it under social welfare orgs - something that is already happening and already causing harm to people who interact with the government in order to attain benefits, or just function in society. https://twitter.com/noname/status/1270033897468751872 This sort of thing is why it's important to maintain clarity about the purpose of abolition - it's not "replace the police with something nicer and leave everything else the same". This is deliberately a project of changing the world. As abolition enters the mainstream political discourse, there are going to be a lot of attempts to conflate it with things it isn't, or water it down to make it more palatable. Case in point: https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1270002734570319872 Reformists are already misconstruing ideas about abolition in order to get people on board with their agenda. This is not a matter of them being "inspired" to adjust their platform, especially not if you know the history of Deray and other people involved in the org pushing 8CantWait. It is a deliberate and strategic move to shift public perception and belief about abolition into reformist frameworks, rather than moving to where the people and the energy of the movement are. I would suggest reading through this thread: https://twitter.com/survivepunishNY/status/1269671576557027330 https://twitter.com/survivepunishNY/status/1269672080599142401 Some other good resources: https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1270048527616561152 https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1270049571809439755 https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1269748027864072201 https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1269769455263010816 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 01:49
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Vahakyla posted:I think we do need a reform initiative in addition to abolishing ideas. Simply because I don't think abolishing is in the near future, and incremental change serves a purpose, too. If you look at some of the resources I've posted you can see that abolition is not mutually exclusive from reform, so long as those reforms explicitly work towards as an end goal. This is a work of decades, if not centuries. enki42 posted:I'm repeating myself, but I think this is reductive, and there's a whole host of serious crimes that have little to do with living in a capitalist society, and probably need some solution that's more comprehensive than "eh, it's an edge case": Do you suggestions on how to improve their ability to solve those crimes without giving them more resources and/or that is more specific than "more training, more education, etc"? Abolitionists have provided an idea of what their ideal looks like and how we get there. Can y'all attempt the same? Because I feel like this particular take is a circular argument. One side says that we don't need police, the other side says well what about x,y,z violent crime, so on and so forth. Stating that in the future abolitionist socialist utopia with fully automated luxury queer space communism we won't have to worry about violent crime (for examine, trafficking) because the underlying problem with have been resolved (open borders, eliminating poverty, etc) is obviously not the answer you're looking for and we need to avoid coming back to this same juncture every other page. It also feels like some of the arguments around reducing specific crimes (murder, rape, etc) come down to philosophical arguments that have little to do with a justification for the existence of police. Do you believe that eliminating patriarchy and sexism and gender essentialism along with expanding ideas about consent and bodily autonomy will drastically reduce the occurrence of rape? Do you believe that providing for the well being of all people, creating the conditions for everyone to live peaceful, plentiful, and safe lives free from exploitation and degradation along with elevating different ideas about conflict resolution will reduce murders? Or do you believe that all humans, or even a non insignificant minority, are just incorrigible rape murder machines that cannot be allowed to exist in society without a threat of violence to reign them in? Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 13:17
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enki42 posted:My point is, there's a significant amount of crime that moving away from capitalism does little to nothing to solve, and in my opinion requires something that looks at least a little like a police force (even if just in an investigatory capacity) to solve. I'm not saying that police abolition or eliminating capitalism is "too much", I'm saying it's not sufficient. What amount of reduction in those crimes would make 100% abolition worthwhile to you? Not as something that is going to happen tomorrow, mind you, but as an eventual goal that we might reach in a century if we start working towards it now. 50%? 75%? 90%? I just want to know where the goalposts are for proving the validity of abolition, as far as this thread is concerned. enki42 posted:How? I don't see a good argument for those being reduced, but I'm willing to listen. "lots of things where poverty, class, or race aren't significant parts of a motive" Such a crime does not exist. You can't divorce the context of crime or criminality from the society we live in, as if crime is an objective fact of the physical universe we live in. Something like 40-50% of police have domestic abuse complaints against them. Removing police won't make them not abusers but we can't pretend like there isn't a relation between the power dynamics and violent nature of policing and the crimes they are ostensibly supposed to stop. School shootings is maybe the worst example you could use here, because we have immense amounts of data showing that 1) the police are bad at preventing or disrupting shootings and 2) the US is the only country that has the problem of school shootings being a regular occurrence. So obviously the fix is not more cops, but addressing underlying factors - gun culture in America, our fixation on violence as the mechanism for justice or retribution, the lack of mental health resources for children, etc. School shootings are a perfect example of why police are useless. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 13:37
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enki42 posted:Sure, I feel like I've talked about this but I can definitely summarize again: Okay, so let's proceed from these suggestions. I have three questions: - If implemented, how much would these changes improve the ability of police to deal with the crimes that you cited (rape, murder, trafficking, abduction, etc)? I would like a number or a percentage if you have it. - If implemented, how much would these changes reduce the occurrence of said violent crimes? - How do these changes address the underlying structural and institutional conditions (poverty, lack of healthcare, etc) that contribute to incidences of crime? enki42 posted:Yes, for sure it's definitely circular. I don't think anyone has explained why certain crimes will disappear or even be reduced in a non-capitalist society. I'll half give you trafficking - my gut says that some amount of it would still exist in a socialist society, mostly because it has in every instance we've seen so far, but I could absolutely see it being reduced, but rape and homicides without economic motives don't seem as clear to me, and I don't think anyone has made an argument as to why there would be less of these. The argument is that we have lots of evidence from abolitionist policies and/or low crime and low incarceration communities. posted:Trends in the well-being of Swedish youth were examined to determine whether they have shown improvement or deterioration since the passage of the 1979 corporal punishment ban. Rates of youth involvement in crime, alcohol and drug use, rape, and suicide have decreased. Trends in rates of nonsexual assault are equivocal due to shifts in enforcement. Legal sanctioning of corporal punishment appears to be unnecessary to improve youth well-being. From here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242260887_Trends_in_Youth_Crime_and_Well-Being_Since_the_Abolition_of_Corporal_Punishment_in_Sweden posted:Nations that abolish the death penalty then tend to see their murder rates decline, according to a December 2018 report by the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a Washington, DC-based organization that promotes human rights and democracy in Iran. The report examined murder rates in 11 countries that have abolished capital punishment, finding that ten of those countries experienced a decline in murder rates in the decade following abolition. Countries were included if they met the following criteria: they had formally abolished the death penalty at least ten years ago, at least one death sentence had been imposed or carried out in the decade prior to abolition, and murder rate data was available from the World Trade Organization. The countries that met the study’s criteria were Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Albania. (Click image to enlarge.) From here: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/study-international-data-shows-declining-murder-rates-after-abolition-of-death-penalty posted:The truth is that we don’t know the degree to which crime can be controlled by addressing social causes. We don’t know it, because we’ve never seriously tried it. But we do know that there are cities in the United States that have incredibly low crime rates, where violent crime hardly ever occurs and property crime is incredibly infrequent. We are far from understanding why that’s the case. Since we know that it is the case, though, we know that it’s possible to create places in which crime is almost nonexistent. Violent crime has consistently been dropping in the United States despite the public perception otherwise (not helped by Donald Trump’s demagogic attempts to terrify people). It is impossible to know how much further it could be made to drop. (Nor is that because we’ve been locking up all of the criminals. States with low crime rates can also have very low incarceration rates, whereas states like, for example, Louisiana have both incredibly high crime rates and incredibly high incarceration rates.) Since very low-crime societies are possible already, even when they consist entirely of perfectly ordinary human beings, it does not actually seem especially naďve to believe that both crime and prisons can essentially be eliminated from the world. I refuse to see Anders Breiviks as an inevitability; I believe he is the product of a perverse racist ideology, one that can be countered and eradicated. From here: https://transformharm.org/can-prison-abolition-ever-be-pragmatic/ I highly recommend reading that entire piece. enki42 posted:This might be something that we might have to disagree on. I think that rape and murder are to some degree a constant given a large enough population. Sure, we can work to reduce them, but I think the fact that they appear to be a constant throughout human history demonstrates they're not completely reducible, and any solution whose solution to it is "eh, you're going to have some rape (shrugs)", isn't something I can 100% get behind, and I suspect I'm not alone on that. That doesn't mean I don't think the goals of an abolition movement and a non-BS reform movement aren't aligned. That's not the argument I made and I would appreciate you not insinuating that anything in what I've said equates to gross loving sentiments like "eh, you're going to have some rape (shrugs)". Beyond that, I ask again: What amount of reduction in those crimes would make 100% abolition worthwhile to you? Not as something that is going to happen tomorrow, mind you, but as an eventual goal that we might reach in a century if we start working towards it now. 50%? 75%? 90%? I just want to know where the goalposts are for proving the validity of abolition, as far as this thread is concerned. The project of abolition is about remaking the world. I am not going to assume that crime will never occur again even if we have equality on all axes (gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc) and a perfect communist society of solidarity and plenty for all. But we've never lived in that world, so it seems a bit reductive to assume that the problem of violent crime is some intractable attribute inherent to human nature before we make a good faith attempt to materialize it. Personally I think it's worth trying anyway. enki42 posted:The fact that police don't do a good job of dealing with school shootings doesn't mean they're the cause of it. There should absolutely be efforts to reduce it, but similarly, at some level, these things seem like there's some baseline that we will never be able to completely eliminate, and not having a response to that doesn't seem workable to me. I didn't say police were the cause of school shootings - only that if you want to present that as an example of why police are necessary, it's a poor choice that harms your argument. In Sandy Hook, Parkland, El Paso, and many other school shootings or mass shootings the police were warned, in some cases multiple times, that the assailant was planning something and dangerous. IIRC in Parkland the school resource officer ran and hid rather than respond to the shooter. Exactly what good are police in the framework of preventing or even mitigating school shootings? If your answer is that they need better training and more resources in order to be "reformed" into a more effective force in this regard, that's not actually changing anything about the structure of policing. enki42 posted:This may all be a pointlessly theoretical argument, the more I think about it - if you at least agree that we should try to reduce these crimes first before we stop policing them, then it really comes down to how reducible these things are. If you're right, and we can reduce these crimes to minimal amounts, then yeah, by all means we don't need police investigating them. If they aren't reducible, and there's a significant amount that we can't get rid of, I hope you'd agree that we shouldn't eliminate the police first and just hope that we'll be able to eliminate rape afterwards. We can and should reduce those crimes. It is possible to do so without prioritizing or expanding the role of police and often efficacious to do so while minimizing their role - the police don't exist to reduce crime, they exist to enforce the law. So why do they need to be central to a discussion of crime reduction? Shouldn't the first priority be providing robust resources and social welfare, as well as expanding decriminalization of certain nonviolent offences and addressing structural and institutional bias in the law? Why do we need to reform the police to do any of that, beyond reallocating their funding to better ends? Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 15:06
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WampaLord posted:This was a really good piece written by a former cop who has realized that the system is fundamentally broken: Finally found a minute to read this. It's long but a great piece. Thorough and well-researched, but written from a perspective that will get people to listen. If you needed a piece to introduce someone to abolition and lay out the framework, especially in contrast with reform, this would do the job nearly perfectly. Might be a worthwhile addition to the OP, Yuzenn, along with the pull quote from Wampa's post. Edit: But if you want more reading...I came across these today and they're both pretty solid assessments of the current political landscape around abolition and reform. https://twitter.com/newrepublic/status/1270406554970447872 https://twitter.com/autotheoryqueen/status/1269778111727636480 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 18:33
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"What about gun violence in Chicago?" is basically the Free Space on the Cop Lover Argument Bingo Card but thanks for your contribution.
Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 20:53
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Angela Davis time. https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1270434723064696835 https://twitter.com/abhiprofen/status/1268768193297952773
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Jun 10, 2020 04:40
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Couple of things: There's a really wonderful FREE virtual event this Friday with actual factual abolition activists. If you can make the time I highly recommend signing up and donating. I saw something on Twitter about spots filling up, but I think it will be hosted on YT as well. Also PLEASE DONATE if you can, even if you can't attend. On the Road With Abolition: Assessing Our Steps Along the Way posted:How can we assess which proposals to support or to oppose in our organizing? What are some abolitionist proposals? Join Dean Spade, Woods Ervin & Kamau Walton from Critical Resistance, K Agbebiyi from Survived and Punished NY and Mariame Kaba from Project NIA and Survived & Punished to discuss these questions and more. Join us for this conversation to deepen our shared analysis and to discuss how we use abolition as a politic, practice and framework to move us toward liberation and self-determination. Ruth Ann Gilmore spoke on the Intercepted podcast this week, very pro click: https://twitter.com/intercepted/status/1270709080630403072 Activists are pushing back against proposed bans on things...that are already banned. https://twitter.com/MotherJones/status/1270686434933059586 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 15:23
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Yeah none of those are any better than your normal cop, you just have less exposure to them. Trouble in reform-land, apparently. https://twitter.com/karolle/status/1270565490054893568 The cops have pissed off the webcomic guys, which is how you know they really messed up. https://twitter.com/deepdarkfears/status/1270153775559237635?s=19 More on that social workers as cop replacement angle: https://twitter.com/MyHarmReduction/status/1270745987770912768 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 18:26
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Verso is offering another free e-book on policing that is absolutely worth your time to read. https://twitter.com/VersoBooks/status/1270827604069810178 Interesting thread here: https://twitter.com/sam_lavigne/status/1270716267876343808
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Jun 11, 2020 01:50
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silence_kit posted:If what police departments are doing now is not government corruption, but is instead government working as intended, doesn't that undermine the entire idea of using the government to improve the lives of people? If the only use of law enforcement that you could ever imagine is to brutalize the weak, and not to enforce justice, then why would you ever want to expand the power of government? Why aren't you both hardcore libertarians? (Maybe you are, and I'm just projecting normal progressive beliefs onto you?) A government based on white supremacy is only interested in improving the lives of certain people and the police are the enforcement mechanism to suppress or eliminate the rest. So it doesn't undermine the idea of government, only that specific variant. Unfortunately that's the regime we currently live under, so the transition to something better is going to be a bit unpleasant.
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Jun 11, 2020 23:45
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 free book alerthttps://twitter.com/VersoBooks/status/1271030096107798528?s=19
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Jun 12, 2020 19:07
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Mariame Kaba in the New York Fuckin Times talking abolition Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police posted:Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.
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Jun 13, 2020 14:31
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chinigz posted:The 'what about rape' paragraph doesn't really answer it's own question, just points to a bunch of bad things and handwaves. What would society do with reports of rape in absence of the police? I guarantee rates of sexual assault will increase once the chance of getting caught goes even lower. You have no way of knowing that beyond your own fatalistic assumptions about sexual violence, also look up the investigation clearance rate for rape and sexual assault as well as the number of untested rape kits sitting in police evidence lockers in your state right now and get back to me. Maybe read this paper on the prevalence of police sexual violence while you're at it: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3403676
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Jun 13, 2020 15:30
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chinigz posted:Everyone ITT knows clearance rates are low, kits go untested and it should be illegal for police to have sex with people in police custody. But police do arrest and prosecute sexual assault offenders, and without that disincentive it seems reasonable to worry that rates of sexual assault might increase - if the article is advocating abolition of the police it seems reasonable to ask what the process will be instead. This is so disingenuous. Abolitionists have laid out a process through which we transition away from the current carceral state into something new that INCLUDES mechanisms for dealing with violent crime (without the oppressive, nigh genocidal system we currently have) AS WELL AS creating structures that reduce those crimes (based in increasing equality, providing basic needs, deconstructing white supremacy/patriarchy/capitalism, etc). Abolitionists are explicitly clear about the fact that if we defund police and put those funds towards building community-based structures then we will have to formulate new responses to violent crime as part of that process. From a different article written by Kaba: posted:History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police. The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can’t begin to imagine a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the police increase their legitimacy through all of the non-police related “work” that they assume: including doing “wellness” and “mental health checks.” Why should armed people be deployed to do the work of community members and social workers? Why have we become so comfortable with ceding so much power to the police? Any discussion of reform must begin with the following questions: How will we decrease the numbers of police, and how will we defund the institution? From here: https://thenewinquiry.com/summer-heat/ No one is suggesting that crime will go away overnight but you (and whoever else posits the same circular logic arguments) are straight up lying if you say that 1) abolitionists have not provided a blueprint and 2) that anyone is calling for some sort of lawless society.
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Jun 13, 2020 16:57
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Count Freebasie posted:And who will put down the criminals that will grow to become crimelord/warlords? Who will put down the gangs that take over the city? Mexico is a perfect example of what happens when the police are removed. Cartels rule whole sections of the country and law is based on their will. You've seen what happens to those who they even suspect of resistance. Mexico has the fourth largest police force in the world. The problem there is endemic corruption and militarization, as well as their own problems with brutality driven by class, race, and ethnic oppression. The Sicario movies are fictional, not documentaries.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:09
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Very good thread on the financial incentives for police to be as violent and punitive as they wanna be: https://twitter.com/GalvinAlmanza/status/1272254871664766976?s=19
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Jun 15, 2020 07:11
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It's cool that Jon Stewart said that but he should've said it a decade ago when he had a tv show. Not like any of these problems are new. Unrelated but useful article: https://twitter.com/DorothyERoberts/status/1272882526495936519?s=19
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Jun 16, 2020 18:26
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By the end of that video there are what, somewhere between 8 and 10 cop cars on the scene? At least a dozen officers, a couple of whom decided to pull out rifles for no good reason at all since the guy was already kneeling and compliant. Nevermind that two of them were fumbling with the rifles so much that I half expected them to drop one. There was absolutely no justification for that level of force nor that many cops to show up for one guy who wasn't a threat to anybody. They all just wanted an excuse to drive fast, flash the lights, and play with their new toys to break up the monotony of what was otherwise an uneventful shift.
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Jun 17, 2020 13:19
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enki42 posted:
This is 100% backwards, and we know it because there's plenty of documented history about sheriff offices starting out as 1) slave catching armed patrols in the south or 2) racially exclusionary armed patrols in the PNW and other white only enclaves around the country. Those institutions provided the basic structure that was adopted as a default policing model and many have gone basically unchanged in ~200 years. That's partly why the sheriff is basically the most powerful person in your county. Police didn't just fall into the role of violent racialized oppression in this country, it was part of their mandate from day zero. So much so that ethnic immigrant groups in the US who aspired to whiteness and an exit from the underclass (like the Irish) achieved those goals in part by joining the police in droves and enthusiastically participating in anti-Black violence on behalf of the state. You are entitled to press your argument but not to misconstrue history.
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Jun 18, 2020 21:59
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https://twitter.com/ElyssaCherney/status/1275080862615261189?s=19
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Jun 23, 2020 22:35
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Nurge posted:Maybe I'm just hoping you are wrong. Because without basic empathy we're all lost. I have empathy for a lot of people and have personally intervened in dangerous situations to help people who I figure might not have done the same for me but I was also six years old the first time I saw somebody die violently up close and personal and therefore have no problem with it happening to someone who has done real quantifiable harm to innocent people. But the point of abolition is in part eradicating mindsets like mine, because violence is not justice no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that it is. Cops deserve to be held accountable and the institution that empowers them ground into dust but they are also people who should have their needs met and who we should try to bring into the new, better world that is necessary. It's a hard truth to hold but that's the work as much as anything else.
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Jun 24, 2020 05:27
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ElCondemn posted:This is why you will never win, your opponents do not believe you are a person who deserves anything. They don’t believe cops should be held accountable and they do think violence is the answer. I'm not a liberal. My feelings about violence and justice and my beliefs about the best way to change the world are two separate things. I try not to let the former get in the way of the work of the latter. I agree with your point that we need to bring more people into the project, but my argument is not about moral purity it's about walking the talk of what abolitionists say we believe in. That's not an unreasonable standard and it's not an unwinnable fight either.
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Jun 24, 2020 06:07
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CocoaNuts posted:That's one helluva hook, officer! Either that was a weak punch or she's got a strong jaw. Still, the fact that was provoked it was "you acting like you white" is hilarious. White-passing minorites get real upset when you remind them they're not actually part of the club over there. If the LAPD cut is actually a cut that's good but it's not enough to stop poo poo like this: https://twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1278804770275250176?s=19 Just a couple of buds here, catching up! https://twitter.com/MsLisaHendricks/status/1279637036605927428?s=19 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Jul 5, 2020 18:53
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cross posting some stuff from the general thread: The police shot a disabled Black child with rubber bullets, detained him illegally, and left him in a cell to die. He will require heart surgery as a result of what they did and their deliberate callous negligence. https://twitter.com/blackphxoc/status/1281303169549492225?s=19 https://twitter.com/blackphxoc/status/1281303177267015680?s=19 And good news on some fronts, however small. https://twitter.com/Terrence_STR/status/1281425476708438018?s=19 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 16:40
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The protests are still going, albeit in a smaller capacity, but the media stopped covering them and a lot of states stupidly reopened, forcing people to make a choice between being in the streets or going back to work (if they still had a job to go to). The cops unfortunately have not stopped throwing their tantrum. https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/1281649929782468608
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Jul 10, 2020 19:38
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Cross post from the general thread: Black veteran who legally uses medical marijuana (in Arizona where he lived) to treat his PTSD and service- caused brain injury that left him with mental disabilities gets his car searched on a bullshit pretext while visiting family in Alabama. He gets arrested. His wife gets arrested for having prescription meds in the wrong bottle. He gets railroaded into taking a plea to spare his wife. His wife loses her job anyway because of the charges. Eventually they end up homeless, penniless, and he's facing half a decade in prison over a bunch of bullshit and the system doing it's usual thing. Now his wife needs heart surgery to live and they have nothing. https://twitter.com/BarackOMamba/status/1283028747675930632?s=19 A legal nonprofit is trying to help them and get more attention for their cases, and there's a GoFundMe by the wife as well. https://twitter.com/AlaAppleseed/status/1281036694972780546?s=19 Please amplify and donate if you can.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:46
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Very good piece on the "abolition looks like the suburbs" rhetoric making the rounds.posted:If, as Angela Y. Davis reminds us, we as a society avoid dealing with the structural dimensions of harm, when it is committed, by disappearing perpetrators in prisons, the other side of the coin is this privatization of accountability available to elites. There are notable differences, of course, as captivity in a cage is a much different and vicious form of being tucked away from public view. I would never confuse captivity with the privacy, money, and racial status shielding an affluent, white suburbanite. But a shared dimension is that each approach tries to make people, when they have committed harm, be disappeared from public view and consciousness while the structural roots of harm go unaddressed and society operates as normal. Again, abolition involves figuring out what nonpunitive accountability looks like in public. Affluent, white suburbanites being shielded from the violence of carceral systems while others are not offered the same opportunity is not a model of abolition. It is just an expression of relative power and racism. https://twitter.com/newinquiry/status/1283746110729854982?s=19
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Jul 16, 2020 14:18
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Kaep apparently has his own publishing outfit now and is kicking it off with a bunch of essays on abolition by extremely smart and cool rear end people. https://twitter.com/Kaepernick7/status/1313566658540208129
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Oct 8, 2020 03:53
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Cool resource on defunding the police: https://twitter.com/micahherskind/status/1316425654020255744 Really clear, succinct information that is very accessible to young people in particular.
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Oct 14, 2020 18:27
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https://twitter.com/justincharles/status/1336033494531796995
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Dec 8, 2020 04:11
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Jaxyon posted:Police barely responded to this. https://twitter.com/atKiara/status/1346936743849824263?s=19 They've killed people for much less than any of this.
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Jan 7, 2021 00:06
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