It’s a longer read, but def worth it.
I think defund the police protestors have a point.
Read that. Powerful stuff.
Indeed, the defund the police people absolutely have a point.
I was debating how much credibility to attribute to an anonymous essay, but it seemed like it could have been true. In any event, consider this:
Whether or not this actually happened and whether or not this anonymous writer actually participated in such an act, it has already been well-documented how local city and municipal governments rely on ticketing for revenue, which is not the fucking reason citizens pay taxes for police “protection.” It’s also well-documented how municipal and county arrangements with third party debt collectors can result in mostly law-abiding people getting their property confiscated from them - land of the “free,” and home of the brave, eh?
And yes, I’m glad that this writer is illustrating American capitalism’s role in policing. We’d also be better off understanding how capitalism created Western racism in the first place. Capitalism didn’t invent oppression or slavery, but it invented race-based classism. It invented race-based slavery and oppression, and racism and racist policing are legacies of that. I don’t give a crap if anyone thinks I’m unhinged for writing this either, because it’s historical fact.
De-funding the police might seem radical or crazy, but only to people who don’t really want change and who feel threatened by changes to status quo. Police departments are very much agents of white racist capitalism in America, and if we as a society want to be free, then we need police reform just like we need prison reform. De-funding and disbanding the police is only “radical” if the intent is anarchy because even the most fanatical of police critics know that humans can’t always police themselves. But the intent isn’t anarchy; the intent is re-thinking policing to make it fairer and ultimately better for everyone. The intent is to make police departments focus on what their bullshit motto on the sides of police cars says it is: to protect and serve.
Wow! Amazing.
Enlightening read. Hopefully some journalists (or prosecutors) will take this as a starting point and hunt down some of leads to pin some corrupt departments.
I went into this thinking I would caution everybody not to put too much emphasis on one POV but that was a wrong take. I don’t agree with everything he said but it was very thoughtful and eloquent.
I don’t doubt that he personally experienced everything he wrote down in that essay - it’s probably similar to the experiences of many other former and current LEOs as well.
I’m cautious in concluding that it’s true for all departments. It could be that he worked at, with, for the worst of the worst of departments.
But I still think ‘defunding’ or ‘disbanding the police’ is a completely rational sentiment, and massive reforms are probably way, way overdue.
nm
I do. I’m not convinced it was really written by a former LEO. It’s written under an obviously phony name, and looking at the author’s profile shows that it’s the only thing he’s written. It reads like an anthology of every anti-police conspiricy theory I’ve ever seen.
I thought it was a lot more thoughtful and nuanced than that, but you see what you want to see.
Which statements in it do you doubt?
That wasn’t an easy read.
My opinion has long been that most cops are good.
I’m a white male who grew up in the 1970s in a small red-state town. I got hassled by cops a little (probably because I wore my hair long). I’d never touched drugs–didn’t even drink or smoke–but was sometimes pulled over while riding my bicycle and asked whether I was holding. There was always some pretense which I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to verify the validity of–my lights weren’t visible enough (at night), or I was holding up traffic.
Bastards!
I once learned from a close friend (who knew some cops, and had overheard them talking about work) that I was being investigated (I had attended a party where they thought some drugs had been sold). When I applied for a job a few years later which required a security clearance, I was relieved when there were no questions about any of this.
Since cutting my hair and becoming part of the “system”, things have been very different. But I’ve never forgotten how it can look from the outside.
I sincerely hope this guy’s experiences and stories weren’t typical.
The point is that an anonymous account like this can’t provide any real new information. If there’s some other source for claims that he’s making, use that other source, and disregard this one. If there’s no other source, then there’s no reason to believe that this is true, and you should still disregard it.
It might be different if it were from an interview with a reputable journalist, who said that he’d kept his source anonymous for his protection but had personally verified that he was a real police officer. Then we could at least make a judgement based on the journalist’s reputation. But this gives us nothing to go on, and it could just as easily be a troll as a real cop.
Some of the stuff seems like it would be unlikely to be made up by someone who hadn’t experienced it. The stuff about pulling trucks over for not having the correct number of brooms and giving a specific law that he used for that seems too detailed to be made up. My guess, after having read it, is that it’s more likely than not to be true.
I don’t know whether this guy was actually a cop, or whether it’s an article written by a journalist who interviewed a few cops, but regardless, the article presents a good case for why the culture of policing in the US needs substantial reform.
However, he lost me with the anti-capitalist rhetoric, and the idea that we can abolish the police and this will somehow lead to a communist(?) utopia in which no crime exists is ludicrous. The mere existence of a functioning police force is itself a deterrent to crime, and the fact that cops spend little of their time actually stopping crimes in progress in no way suggests that those crimes still wouldn’t happen if the police were gone. This is the same mistake embodied by the question “Why should I keep paying all this money for home insurance? My house has never burned down!”
This paragraph is particularly insane:
We can abolish the police in a communist utopia because crime is committed only by the victims of white supremacy and capitalism. Because white people themselves never commit crimes, and rich people don’t beat their wives or drive drunk. Uh, okay. :dubious:
I’m kind of surprised to hear you say that you think most cops are good, and then to follow it with a bunch of bullshit interactions with cops that are them hassling you for no good reason because of how you looked. That’s what bad cops do!
I’m also a white male, and I’ve had very few interactions with cops in my life. I can think of 7 total. Three of those seven were actively bad. Total assholes. Three of them were fine/neutral (stopped at the side of the road for car trouble, and they checked to see that I was ok but basically did nothing). One of them was me being a dumbass teenager up to dumbass teenager shit and they gave me a justifiably stern talking-to and could see from the fiery look in my Mom’s eyes that that was all that was needed.
3 out of 7 is a pretty bad ratio for someone with as much privilege as I have.
Well, no. That’s a sign that he just saw some dumb factoid somewhere and blindly accepted it. It’s not hard to look that law up and see what it actually says. Hint: it says nothing about a “regulation number of brooms”. It says they need to have at least one broom to sweep up debris, especially glass. The fact that he thinks DUI on a bicycle is a “dumb law” is another clue.
So, all crime is a product of desperation? Then explain the Melendez brothers.
This. Cue the “Things that happened” vs. “This” meme.
He doesn’t write like a cop, for one thing. I say that from reading enough reports and actually talking to cops and other member of law enforcement, in prior jobs. It really does read like wish fulfillment.
Where’s pkbites, assuming he feels like diving into this?
Ahem, **Menendez **brothers…
And while there are exceptions many crimes fit what the writer describes, if not because of bigotry, then the misguided war on drugs, that has also a lot of common items with racism.