I never understood the ‘abolish the police’ stance. Reforms, sure. Reform it to how you envision, okay. But to totally do away with it, I can’t get behind that.
Furthermore, the SJWs that I often see pushing this idea (as well as telling everyone they should never call the police on anyone for any reason, ever, period, ever) are the same ones that constantly talk about hate crimes, push the idea that every female as been at least ‘a little bit raped’, all men are [potential] rapists and so on.
I don’t understand how they reconcile those two ideas. If you want to do away with the police and prisons, then there’s not a lot you can do about the criminals. If you want to talk about how a lot of people have had a lot of bad things done to them…what should we be doing with the people committing those crimes.
Whenever I see someone talking about abolishing the police and getting rid of prisons my first thought is to question what I should do if I would happen upon them getting attacked? Do they really not want me to call the police because no one should go to prison, not even the person in the process of attacking/assaulting them? Should someone really not call the police on their abusive partner?
Granted, these are SJW, many of whom have a habit of taking a good idea or concept and running it so far to the left that it doesn’t even make sense any more.
It’s a bad slogan, because it doesn’t convey the idea and because it’s probably bad politically. The ideas behind it are fairly mainstream, I would think.
Ridiculous hyperbole. Nobody has claimed that there are no problems with the police. However, it’s just not true to imply that the police, as a whole, are as bad as organized crime, cartels, gangsters etc.
Look at all the violence and crime that occurs in cities across the country and throughout the world. Yes what happened to George Floyd was wrong. But to extrapolate that to come to the conclusion that a one centi-weekend in Chicago event is proof that the police as a whole are equivalent to criminals is not convincing.
But let’s say you folks get your wish. What do you propose to provide law enforcement? How do you prevent that institution from corruption or abuse of power?
That bad slogan is a thing coming mostly from some yahoos and a lot of critics of the proponents of police and justice reform, they grasp at what a few extremists say so as to disparage the ones with the more mainstream ideas, witness what took place coming from the moderates and right wingers against Janeese Lewis George in ward 4 in DC.
I would say that those who say “Defund the police” are those who are bound by the authoritarian state, but not protected by it. I can certainly see from their perspective how no police is better than the police we have.
I disagree on a society level, but on an individual level, I can understand it.
We should certainly take their experience and opinion into account as we help our law enforcement agents to better serve and protect the communities they are being charged to protect. That we should not take their suggestion literally does not mean that we should discount it entirely.
They don’t talk about “just” reform because they’ve heard calls for reform before, and it never seems to change anything significantly. They see a system that’s rotten to the core, founded to round up slaves, and see talk of “reform” as like trying to get a crabapple tree to grow bananas.
I agree with many of the points that the BLM groups are making, but they are looking like unhinged radicals when they talk of abolishing the police. As others have said, what is the new scheme that will replace them?
I think this is an issue where libertarian minded conservatives and the BLM movement can be in agreement and it would reduce the need for police: stop passing so many damn laws. There are so many laws on the books that everyone violates two or three per day and are generally not prosecuted, yet it allows unsavory actors and rogue police to apply them in an ad hoc fashion to harass the “wrong” people.
For example, I’ll bet many posters here who want police reform also support mandatory seat belt laws. Are you not at cross purposes with that? You want more police to enforce laws that harm nobody except the individual?
Not every social ill requires a new law, yet the left is all the time promoting new laws, new restrictions while now wanting fewer (or no) police officers.
But yes, I agree. NYC has 34,000 police officers, approximately the size of the Union Army at the First Battle of Bull Run. That is absurd, IMHO, and inconsistent with personal freedom. But you can’t just wipe it out full stop, you have to reassess some things and figure out how it will work.
Snopes rates it “a mixture” but the body of the article shows it is absolutely false. Police forces were started in major northern cities as well. They were a response to any new problem that came down the pike at that particular moment in time, be that murder, robberies, slave escapes, or any other public policy issue.
To link public policing to slave escapes is about like condemning your public square because those were used once upon a time to sell slaves. It’s correlation not causation.
There are probably some laws that could be dealt away with. Most drug laws, for instance.
In Ohio, not wearing a seat-belt is not a valid reason to pull you over, but it is a ticket-able offense if you are pulled over for other reasons. That seems reasonable to me.
I would certainly not ask the police to use violence to enforce seat-belt laws.
And seat-belts do actually protect others as well as yourself. A minor incident can become a much greater accident if you lose control over the car because you were not securely strapped into the driver’s seat.
An example of the laws that “the left” is proposing that would require violence on the part of police offers to enforce?
How long should the people who are suffering under the current system expect to wait while we “reassess some things and figure out how it will work”?
I’m not following. We cannot wait for a replacement plan; we have to abolish the police right now, yet still have enough to enforce petty things like seat belt laws? (Yes, while Ohio might make it a secondary offense, most states do not).
I’m also now following what it means to enforce seat belt laws without violence? If a guy pulls over, you write him a ticket and off he goes. If he responds with violence, do the police let him go? Or are you just arguing that police force should be reasonable and proportional to the thread? I don’t disagree. That’s the law now and we should enforce it.
But all laws require violence to enforce against people who don’t want them enforced, so I am again confused by these laws that can be enforced peacefully in all circumstances? I mean, you can arrest a murderer without violence if he complies, but you cannot ticket a jaywalker without violence if he throws a punch.
Which takes me to your first question last. Do I support their goals? I don’t understand their goals. If it isn’t to burn things and destroy government property and monuments, and it is only to say that “Black Lives Matter” of course I agree that black lives matter. I agree that police should not use unreasonable force when arresting people. I agree that there the police are too militarized and that pulling guns and taking a suspect to the ground for minor things should not happen. Things like George Floyd’s death should never happen.
But we’ve have arrested the four cops that did that, so tell me some specifics about what BLM want. The platitudes don’t help because almost everyone agrees with them. What specific enactments should occur and then I’ll be able to tell you if I agree with them or not.
I’m sure one of the things is to treat black suspects equal to white suspects, and I agree, but you can never have a policy to enforce that when so many trivial little laws are out there which provide a pretext for police to plausibly claim that he didn’t stop the man because he was black, but because his license plate frame was covering a cover of his plate.
So if you would give me some specific policies I could tell you. If you come back with “black people should be treated with respect,” I’ll say “sure, agreed” and then we have to move on to the what do we do about it part.
Ehh, I didn’t read it the same way. The article describes the different groups, but I don’t see that it addresses whether there is any meaningful connection between the two, nor does it seem to refute the idea. It seems to imply that the first official municipal police force formed out of the ether, without basis or inspiration, but I can’t be sure. I’m actually not even sure how (much) it actually addresses the issue at hand; I dunno if that’s due to the writer or the reader. I just came out of it not sure how and why it was called a “mixture,” nor do I think it actually establishes a complete lack of connection, definitely not as definitively as you read it.
That’s fair, but I read the essay to be pretty clear. Larger populations with larger incidents of crime could not be policed by Andy and Barney and more organization and more men were needed.
This was true in Boston or Albany or Charleston. And the specific thing that needed to be policed was peculiar to the place and time. So while Charleston may have indeed needed slave patrols and Boston may have needed to keep people from firing guns in town or Albany had a rash of drunken and disorderly anti-Christian behavior, the roots of policing was because of the large populations, not an effect of the underlying issue.
I think that is important because to get rid of modern policing (and I could be persuaded) would require throwing out the last 170 years of knowledge on the subject and declaring it wrong. To do that, we should do it for the right reasons instead of just declaring it has racist roots.
Obviously you are not following, as that is an extremely poor understanding of the words that I used.
If someone responds to receiving a ticket with violence, then they are committing violence, and you go from there. Not sure what exactly that has anything to do with what I said, though.
Do you often offer violence at getting a ticket? Is this something that you are worried about?
At some point, sure, violence is necessary to get people to comply that won’t otherwise. My measure of the success of a civilization is how far it goes to prevent resorting to violence to get compliance with necessary measures.
Police often escalate things, and increase the violence and tension unnecessarily.
To use your seatbelt example, if the driver gets a bit of lip about it, the police officer does not need to force them out of the car in order to get them to comply.
As I said, stop with the escalation. Unless someone is actually offering you violence, you do not need to resort to it yourself. Being disrespected is not grounds for using violence.
And if there actually are bullshit laws that serve no purpose of public safety, then we can certainly talk about them, I’m all ears.
As has been said before, when a cop demands respect, they actually mean complete submission to their authority. When a person of any ethnic background (including white) asks for respect, they are asking that their rights as a human not be violated.
Cops should deescalate whenever possible, and never escalate just because someone is not respecting their authority.
Start there, that should probably solve a plurality of police brutality cases.
To follow up, I think this idea can gain traction because even rich white people dislike an overbearing police presence.
If my wife comes home and says that she saw a couple of cops in town as I am heading out the door, I don’t think “Ah good, police keeping the peace and order. I feel much safer now on my travel into town.”
No, I think that I better keep it slow because I might get a speeding ticket if I don’t pay attention, and did I buckle my seat belt?, are the tags up to date?, shit I had a drink after dinner am I good to drive?, and to make sure I come to a full and complete two second stop at the intersection.
I think that is the disconnect here. The average rich white person, let alone poor whites or poor blacks, don’t view the presence of police positively and that is a real problem that needs dealt with.
And before anyone says that I would be glad for those police if I was being assaulted or robbed, sure I would, but police can help with those things without screwing with people on the other. Speed limits should be set high enough that most people will never worry about breaking it, don’t worry about my safety in a seat belt or the extraordinarily minor chance of being able to recover an accident if I was wearing one, or require a new sticker on a car every year that is perfect safe to drive, or screw with people who are clearly not drunk, or be overly technical on stops. Quit screwing with people and be there to protect them.
That goes back to my earlier point. We blame the police but continue to elect people who pass more and more and more ticky tack laws that affect everyone. We have asked for this type of control over our lives.
Shit, I think we are in full agreement. But before I start reaching for my zap pack, who actually disagrees with that?
I know a lot of police officers that do, but as a defense attorney, I point out time and again to these officers that it is not “obstruction of justice” for a person to mouth off to them.
For example, a few years ago the cops here had a prostitution sting. A female cop would pose as a prostitute, the mark would drive up, agree on a price, and she would tell him to drive around the corner. He would be met there by cops with guns drawn, his door opened, and made to lie down face first on the pavement. This was everyone caught, white and black.
I thought it was appalling, but people in the courthouse thought I was crazy and that was perfectly reasonable because you didn’t know if this suspect would resort to violence. They just shrugged their shoulders.
Perhaps that is somewhat what you are talking about.
This seems completely unobjectionable and I can’t imagine why anyone would disagree with it. It also doesn’t seem to have anything much to do with the title of the thread (“Abolish the police?”) or with the actually-expressed (but undoubtedly very fringe) idea that
I mean, with the “deescalate” quote we’re still talking about a society with “cops”, we just want them not to be arrogant and occasionally homicidal bullies, right?
Now, MOST people using the “Defund the police!” slogan–which I have suddenly started seeing crop up in public discourse, to my great White Bourgeois Liberal confusion–probably don’t mean the whole “abolish the state in its entirety” thing, as far as I can tell. But for that very reason, “Defund the police!” is a terrible slogan. It doesn’t promote the ideas that the people saying it actually want to promote (most of them, I think, anyway).
MEDICARE FOR ALL!
Now, see, that’s a great slogan. A lot of people will argue that none of the M4A plans were really “Medicare For All” and that they were in fact very different from Medicare (or some hypothetical plan to just sign up every single American on Medicare) and would be impractical for this that or the other reason. But as a bumper sticker level argument, it works: “Gosh, Grandma’s always been a solid Republican, but she can’t stop going on about how great it is now that her and Grandpa are finally on Medicare. It would be wonderful if you and me and Junior and Sissy were all on Medicare too!”
ABOLISH MEDICARE!
And replace it with a more comprehensive single-payer health plan that does a much better job of providing true health care to all Americans, not just the elderly and disabled.
Regardless of the merits of its ideas, that there would be a TERRIBLE political slogan (and in fact no one would ever dream of using it). You’d never make it past the large-size bold exclamation point; everyone would just stop reading right there, and then you’d be overrun by people clutching their AARP membership cards in one hand and their pitchforks in the other.
And, OK, Fox News and the Republican Party in the Age of Trump are gonna lie and distort no matter what you say. But why just hand them a propaganda victory on a silver platter before you’ve even gotten started?
Well, the OP addressed that. The protestor said that yes, abolition is what he meant by defunding, and the crowd of protestors agreed.
I take your point that it could have some obscure meaning, but I’ve never heard any explanation of what that means. If we use your Medicare analogy and say that we will abolish the police but replace them with something much better, then what is that something much better?
I get what BLM is saying, but who is going to enforce any laws with no police? Who will replace the vacuum?