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Cutiebunny wrote:

zaphdash wrote:

Good.

Is this the sort of thing you'd say to someone who just lost their child in the crossfire of a gang shootout because, without the police, those gang members will never be arrested? Clearly you've never been to countries like El Salvador where, unless you're wealthy, you're going to depend and continually pay the local gang to protect you.

The police are a gang. Here is a Minneapolis city councilor describing their protection racket. It's easy to cynically try to tug at people's heartstrings with tales of innocent victims of gang shootouts, but arresting the gang members doesn't bring the dead back to life. What we need instead is a society in which gang shootouts don't occur in the first place. This requires, as a very first step, acknowledging that crime has identifiable and remediable causes. The police, as a strictly reactionary institution, are not capable of addressing root causes. A gang shootout doesn't just flit into existence like Hawking radiation. Why do people even join gangs in the first place? Is that a question you've ever asked?

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Throughout this thread, I've yet to see any post suggesting a credible alternative to police. Yes, I understand that you don't like the current system and yes, like every other institution, it has its problems. But something like "It should just be like Japan" would require a voided second amendment, a largely homogenous society and the complete elimination of all firearms, which, with a porous southern border and over 200 years of guns ownership being legal in the US, is not going to realistically happen. Neither is eliminating all forms of prejudice unless we get to a point where we can program robots to do police work because every human has some sort of prejudice against someone or something.

This is what is called a strawman. It's actually quite a good example of one. I don't think anybody even said "It should just be like Japan" (although I have only skimmed some of the posts in this thread and could have missed it, but in any case, I certainly didn't say it), yet you quote it as if those are verbatim the words that were used. Then you set about attempting to refute this argument that wasn't made in the first place.

There is a lot of literature out there about what abolition could look like. It's not my job to distill it all for you -- if you are genuinely interested, feel free to read up. Just Google "alternatives to policing" for a start. But to very briefly summarize, it would necessarily be a multifaceted approach, in contrast to the one-size-fits-all, to-a-hammer-all-problems-are-a-nail approach of the police. It would include access to adequate health care services to address mental illness, drug addiction, etc, rather than calling cops on people with these problems. It would include harm reduction strategies, such as needle exchanges. It would include decriminalizing or legalizing low-level offenses, like marijuana possession, and no longer treating vulnerable populations like the homeless as criminals. It would include providing communities with adequate resources to help themselves as needed (one example would be social workers, as have already been raised earlier in the thread) and to address conflicts in the ways that they feel are most appropriate, invoking principles of transformative and/or restorative justice instead of relying on violence and prisons. And -- I've been hesitant to bring this up because I don't want to hijack the thread in another direction, but it bears mentioning -- it would include lifting up poor communities and dismantling the modes of socioeconomic oppression, including capitalism itself, that disadvantaged them in the first place.

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zaphdash wrote:

The problem with police is that violence is ultimately the only tool in their kit. Sure, they may be trained in techniques of nonviolent deescalation, but if that fails -- or even, if they think that it has failed, or suppose they don't even bother to try it in the first place -- then where do they go? To their monopoly on the supposedly "legitimate" use of force. And when cops routinely close ranks to protect each other, it doesn't matter what sort of training you received about "what behavior needs to be displayed" before you can escalate your use of force, because the truth about what happened will never come out anyway. And if the truth does come out, say, because someone filmed the incident, cops are still rarely prosecuted (much less found guilty) because prosecutors can choose not to bring charges, and police departments will helpfully provide them with a narrative of the event to justify that decision.

There are many cops that are very skilled when it comes to de-escalation techniques. Just because you're not hearing about it on the nightly news does not mean that it isn't happening. On the contrary, I would argue that it is happening often as these sorts of clips don't make for interesting fodder for the American public.

I'm sure this will make the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others feel much better.

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As I mentioned before, I do agree that there needs to be more transparency. I would like to see all bodycam video as well as write-ups from the officers about the incident to be made available to the public in a timely fashion. But I also think that the public needs to reserve their judgement on what happened until this information can be presented. Change has to be a give and take from both sides.

Yes, the public should definitely reserve judgment until the police department has an opportunity to settle on the narrative they want to present, which, as we have seen, is always a fair and accurate recounting of events.

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If you're a cop yourself, then you have your own perspective, and I have no doubt that you genuinely believe that you are doing good in the world and your community is better off for your service, and hell, maybe on a purely individual level, you're even right about that, I don't know. But the facts are: 1) cops kill a lot of people in America; 2) a disproportionate number of those people are minorities; 3) cops are almost never prosecuted, even in egregious cases that are caught on video. Whatever good an individual police officer might be doing, the police as an institution are rotten to the core.

The majority of people who choose to go into law enforcement do it because they want to help their community. There are some that choose to go into law enforcement for more selfish reasons, as there are with other professions. However, just because a few of them are bad does not mean that you fire everyone. That's like saying that because you scraped your hand when you fell, you should cut off your hand so you won't have to deal with the scrape. No other profession in the US is treated this way whenever someone in its profession does something bad. And while you can argue that the most harm that one bad doctor can do is kill a couple people or sexually abuse several patients, I could argue that what's done to the abused patients can be just as detrimental as what some cops have done when they've abused their position.

I don't cut off my hand when I scrape it because a scrape can be healed. The police cannot be fixed. Here is a brief article that does a solid job of explaining the problem.

When a bad doctor kills or abuses patients, that doctor gets prosecuted. If other doctors want to close ranks around that doctor to protect him, they can also be prosecuted. Police are unique in this regard because they control the investigation and the evidence. You can throw out however many examples of other professions as you want, but every comparison will fail for this same reason. Police are the the only group in our society that consistently gets away with murder.

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Cops do have limited liabilities, but that's needed for the work that they do. When it's a matter of life and death not only for yourself, but possibly people around you, you have to make split second decisions based on the information that you have available, your training and your physical status (ie. I'm a 5'4" woman and I stand little chance against a muscular 6 foot man in hand to hand combat). If you eliminate these liabilities, there are going to be less cops around, and as I've mentioned earlier, without the cops for protection, you run the risk of needing to pay gangs for it. Again, as I mentioned in an earlier post, until you are in a combative situation where you're facing bodily injury and death, you can't understand. No amount of training will prepare you for that scenario because, unlike real life, you're going to go home to your family at the end of your training.

Cops are well down the list of most dangerous professions. BLS data shows that, e.g., sanitation workers (that is, the garbage man) are about 3x as likely to die on the job as cops, and sanitation is not even remotely the most dangerous profession (fishing is nearly 10x as dangerous as policing). And fewer than half of police deaths are a result of homicide -- car accidents are responsible for about the same number of police deaths, and other causes (e.g. suicide) round out the rest. Obviously, police do sometimes face dangerous situations, but overall the job is actually not notably dangerous. And any cop who can't handle the danger without going right for their gun should probably not be a cop. If you believe your job will involve risking your life, then you shouldn't take that job if you aren't prepared to risk your life.

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I do think that those officers who have acted inappropriately should be fired and prosecuted. Most of the officers who I have spoken with about such events all feel the same way. There may be something else at work as to why that officer is not being fired, such as their ability to blackmail their supervisors. That actually happened in the case of my direct supervisor.

That would be a fine explanation if a cop escaping prosecution were an isolated incident, but it's the norm. Few cops are prosecuted and fewer still are convicted. Do all of these cops have dirt on the rest of the department or on the prosecutor? If, unbelievably, the answer is yes, all that really indicates is a completely different set of systemic problems affecting police departments throughout the country, so still not a great answer!

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zaphdash wrote:

"The current destructive path of looting, rioting and demanding that all police be fired" is exactly how some things have already been accomplished -- charges for Chauvin and the other cops present at George Floyd's murder, contracts with police departments severed (e.g. for cops to act as "resource officers" in Minneapolis and Portland schools, something activists in those places have been trying to eliminate for years to no avail), etc. Direct action works. It is often the only thing that works.

No, what is happening right now is a knee-jerk reaction that is being done to appease the protestors. The state government needs to find some way to appease the protestors until their jobs return and they no longer have the time and energy to protest. The local and state governments will create some new measure, such as forbidding their local police to use choke holds, in order to appease the protestors. Then, the local police jurisdiction will implement a change designed to boost the police's morale, such as paying them more, giving them more tools and/or more protection. This will likely be quietly and internally approved.

A "knee-jerk reaction" to "appease the protesters" is fine. It is in fact better than a carefully considered proposal to drop the crumbs of fake "reform" that appears to do something but actually does nothing, as you (accurately) suggest that police would prefer to do.

Your point about waiting for jobs to return is not quite accurate (after all, protests occur even when we are not experiencing mass unemployment), but I appreciate your making it anyway because it is actually achingly close to understanding how class is used to perpetuate existing power structures and resist meaningful change. But that might be a tangent inappropriate to this thread.

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Having been around for a while, I can tell you that what will happen is that the protestors will be footing the bill for this damage. Prices, Property and sales taxes will likely be increased to pay for all the damage incurred to stores (because someone will need to help them pay those insurance deductibles) and property.

Protestors are made to foot the bill for our entire decrepit society. That's why they are protesting. This is not new.

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Since you'll probably lose a couple officers because they're being criminally charged, recovering from injuries sustained (or are dead) or they decide to part from the force, you'll now need to replace them and, in the meantime, pay overtime to officers in order to keep up the same level of protection that the public has come to expect. The local and state governments will have to find this money somewhere, and that often means that social programs such as education, medicare, social welfare workers, etc. are going to have their funds slashed.

This is all true (except the part about officers providing "protection"). This is why the police should be defunded instead.

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And as much as a local government threaten to slash the police's funds to appease protestors, the reality is that the money is going to come from somewhere and it's going to be from those that can least afford to lose these services.

This is also true. This is why the police should be defunded instead.

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If this is what you mean by direct action working, then by all means, continue.

Sure.

zaphdash, you're doing the Lord's work in this thread, truly.

Americans don't realize they're spoiled. At least they're allowed to protest. Where I come from we behave and we don't protest or else we may disappear. So I don't get this protesting business.

xyz wrote:

Americans don't realize they're spoiled. At least they're allowed to protest. Where I come from we behave and we don't protest or else we may disappear. So I don't get this protesting business.

I know, right? In my parent's home country, pissing off a mayor of a small city can be a death sentence. That said, those with the right to peaceably protest should if they genuinely believe in it, but the problem is that not everyone involved is peaceably doing so.

jl07045 wrote:

Jeff Bauersfeld wrote:

And just to add to that, non-consequentialists tend to ignore that their principles, while applied in a vacuum, weren't created in a vacuum. Humans, mostly privileged white ones, came up with them, and their thought processes are inextricably linked to their life experiences.

First of all, consequentialist philosophers are just as white and privileged. Second of all, those principles don't just spring up in some person's mind. They are a result of millennia of intellectual discourse and life experiences that, maybe weirdly, for someone high on a postmodernist koolaid, show that most things that people, rich or poor, treasure, are universal. Socioeconomic status may influence how those things rank in value.

My intention was to include most philosophers, those on both sides," as white and privileged. Sorry if that wasn't clear.I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on the extent to which cultural and privilege bias influence the principles we philosophize about.

Cutiebunny wrote:

In some states, these laws were created at a time where it would be difficult for the police to arrive in some sort of timely fashion.

So the solution was “let’s give citizens who of course are not trained in the same techniques as police officers and even worse instances not trained on how to handle a firearm cartel Blanche to shoot people they think are a threat to them. If the people they shoot are unarmed and if it’s the gun owners who agitated the situation who cares”.

These laws were not even at a partial level designed to benefit people who live in high crime areas or those where it takes the police time to get to a destination. The were specifically designed further expand Second Amendment rights at the state level with blatant disregard to the consequences let’s call it what it is.

encrypted12345 wrote:

xyz wrote:

Americans don't realize they're spoiled. At least they're allowed to protest. Where I come from we behave and we don't protest or else we may disappear. So I don't get this protesting business.

I know, right? In my parent's home country, pissing off a mayor of a small city can be a death sentence. That said, those with the right to peaceably protest should if they genuinely believe in it, but the problem is that not everyone involved is peaceably doing so.

We are protesting against people who were arbitrarily killed for minor "misbehavior," or even when they did "behave," which is not so different from the situation as you are describing it in these other two countries. You talk about protesting like it is some nice thing that our government benevolently permits us to do, but it is a right that was fought for and secured over centuries of often violent struggle, which we could easily lose if we fail to exercise it. Power is the same in all countries; the only difference is how it is divided up. It is only shared with the people when they have taken it, it is never freely given. In the US and other Western countries, we may be spoiled in any number of other ways, but the ability to protest injustice is not one of them.

(I don't want to go down a tangent that is too far off-topic for this thread, but I do think it is 100% worth acknowledging that at the same time Westerners were struggling to secure rights for ourselves, we were sending our militaries abroad to subjugate other people and deprive them of those same rights, and the oppressive regimes that persist around the world today -- probably including in the countries the two of you are referring to -- are a lasting effect of the colonial project. So I don't mean to come across as if I'm saying "we fought for these rights and you should too," because I am cognizant of the risks you would face in doing so and the fact that we are to blame for the fact that you face them. Nonetheless, I think that there is more value in oppressed people around the world expressing solidarity with each other than in regarding one group as being "spoiled" because you don't believe their struggle is as tough as someone else's.)

Whoever killed David Dorn, will be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The same cannot be said of police officers when they commit similar criminal acts. Civil forfeiture, allows cops to just brazenly steal money and property from civilians. Qualified immunity allows cops to kill, mutilate, and brutally injure civilians with no criminal repercussions. And when a cop does make it to trial, the entire process is altered so that the cop gets as much leeway as possible in ways no civilian defendant would get.

Dorn's death was sad, but its very possible justice will be met once the suspects are apprehended.

George Floyd's death, is likely to never get justice even when there is a video as plain as day.

I think we're just going back and forth now. Everyone is picking apart everyone else's point, but no one is really trying to understand.

We're at the point where everyone can say, "I'm aware of and understand your points, and I still disagree."

I'm thinking it's time to lock this.

Last edited by Puniyo on Tue Jun 09, 2020 4:51 pm; edited 1 time in total

Narutofreak1412 wrote:

Maybe it's because I'm not from the US, but I don't really understand what all this is about.

While I approve of spreading awareness of the police being too brutal in some cases and racism in general, I don't like the idea of treating the whole police as an evil force that spreads racism and I don't really get how spending money helps with the situation.
Isn't it more of a political issue, like what police can and can't do, in which cases they have to take responibility and how they are chosen and trained?

I'm largely in the same boat. I know and am not denying these things happen in my country too, but I've been in a small town where we're a bit disconnected from the outside world. Everyone else in my town is pretty confused about what's going on. It's a poor town with big drug busts every other week, yet people like the police enough to stop and talk to them. If anything, people here think the police are a bit toothless.

That said, the police in my town police operates a bit different from the city where I'm originally from, in a way I think would fix a lot of America's immediate problems.

Agent355 wrote:

*People calling for the abolition of police do have plans on how to deal with society’s needs, including replacing cops with social workers But I think they understand that the immediate goal is to reform the current system.

We have a system a little similar to this in my town. Real cops are reserved for really serious situations only, whereas we have 'community support officers' to respond to everything else. They have less powers (they can't make proper arrests or carry guns), and their main purpose is to diffuse or de-escalate situations so that arrests won't have to be made.
They're officers in name, but what they actually do is social work with a side of filing reports.
They also have a ton of extra rules to follow and mandatory visits with a psych/therapist.

However it's important they're able to delegate serious incidents to real cops though - are social workers gonna be able to do detective work? Walk into active shooter situations? Diffuse physical fights? Of course not. A lot of people who propose these plans seem to lack a fundamental understanding of how many different kinds of cops and how many divisions and different specialisations are within the police force.

Another common suggestion is community-lead organisations - this is terrifying! All you need is the majority opinion of the community to be racist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc... 90% of my interactions with cops have been them responding to me being the subject of xenophobic attacks. I know for sure I don't trust my xenophobic neighbours to protect me. I'd be asking the perpetrator for protection, plus personal bias would run riot.

ranran-001 wrote:

The same cannot be said of police officers when they commit similar criminal acts. Civil forfeiture, allows cops to just brazenly steal money and property from civilians. Qualified immunity allows cops to kill, mutilate, and brutally injure civilians with no criminal repercussions. And when a cop does make it to trial, the entire process is altered so that the cop gets as much leeway as possible in ways no civilian defendant would get.

Surely the answer is accountability laws and an outside, non-police regulatory body to conduct investiagtions. Something like Inquest. If they didn't know they can get away with it, I'm sure the number of incidents would drop harshly.

Puniyo wrote:

Another common suggestion is community-lead organisations - this is terrifying! All you need is the majority opinion of the community to be racist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc... 90% of my interactions with cops have been them responding to me being the subject of xenophobic attacks. I know for sure I don't trust my xenophobic neighbours to protect me.

American cops are the racist/homophobic/xenophobic force.

ATastySub wrote:

Puniyo wrote:

Another common suggestion is community-lead organisations - this is terrifying! All you need is the majority opinion of the community to be racist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc... 90% of my interactions with cops have been them responding to me being the subject of xenophobic attacks. I know for sure I don't trust my xenophobic neighbours to protect me.

American cops are the racist/homophobic/xenophobic force.

Are the black, gay and immigrant cops racist, homophobic and sexist too?
It's almost as if... generalising whole groups of people is bad and illogical?

This aside though, I don't deny the US has more complicated issues (in my country a racist or homophobic remark can land you a fine or get you fired from any job) but that doesn't make any of these suggestions less insane. I am all for a reform, but if idiotic changes are made in the US, the rest of the world will likely follow even if it isn't working.

Puniyo wrote:

Are the black, gay and immigrant cops racist, homophobic and sexist too?

Yes.
Turns out that as long as there has been oppressed people there are those among them that are happy to sell out their communities for their own gain. They can claim whatever they want, but at the end of the day they work for an institution that is all those things, and which continues to show their disregard and barbarism at this very moment, and willfully do so. Good try on that gotcha though, but you probably shouldn’t be trying to do tokenism for the police. They do it far more often than you and with similar levels of success.

Last edited by Puniyo on Wed Jun 10, 2020 12:54 pm; edited 3 times in total

ATastySub wrote:

Puniyo wrote:

Are the black, gay and immigrant cops racist, homophobic and sexist too?

Yes.
Turns out that as long as there has been oppressed people there are those among them that are happy to sell out their communities for their own gain. They can claim whatever they want, but at the end of the day they work for an institution that is all those things, and which continues to show their disregard and barbarism at this very moment, and willfully do so. Good try on that gotcha though, but you probably shouldn’t be trying to do tokenism for the police. They do it far more often than you and with slimilar levels of success.

Again, as someone from a place where that isn't the case, I find it hard to wrap my head around how it's possible for an institution to be all these things, when it (is supposed to) enforce laws that are against the oppression of these people. Plus no institution is inherently anything, they're just groups of people and generally a reflection of those in charge. Not being an asshole, genuinely asking.

A lot of people keep coming out with these statements but can never qualify them. You can't expect to every non-American to understand all the nuances of what goes on in your country.

Puniyo wrote:

Again, as someone from a place where that isn't the case, I find it hard to wrap my head around how it's possible for an institution to be all these things, when it (is supposed to) enforce laws that are against the oppression of these people.

This might help you get a handle on it. He does a good job of breaking down how it all broke down.
https://youtu.be/Wf4cea5oObY

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