ACAB, especially that bastard relative of yours.
The capitalist state and it’s forces in the form of Police and Military primarily exist to protect the private property of the rich. All other functions are secondary.
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Serious question, how do you suggest we enforce laws without police?
It’s perfectly possible to create a law enforcement arm of government that’s actually concerned with protecting vulnerable citizens, but that’s not what the institution of policing actually focuses on.
To suggest that we can’t have law enforcement without propping up a toxic system of professional predators is exactly the presumption they want you to make in order to preserve their jobs. We don’t need to capitulate to a lawless fraternity to enforce our laws, we can replace it with something that isn’t built on principles of oppression.
That said, their main job at the moment is to protect hoarders of wealth from the social consequences of wealth hoarding. Personally, I don’t see that as necessary.
Nobody is advocating for zero police. It’d be better to move the police budget to more social programs to try and help people so they’re not pushed into a life of crime. An ounce of prevention is worth of a pound of the cure.
The way I understand ACAB is not to remove all cops, but reform the system fundamentally. It’s a flawed system encouraging bad behavior and silence.
If the goal isn’t to remove “all cops”, isn’t it pretty counterproductive that the first two words in ACAB are “all cops”?
ACAB is a statement, not a plan of action
As in, “All Cops Are Bad,” not “All Cops Must Be Bad by Definition.”
You know, I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess being against police brutality must mean I think there shouldn’t be any law enforcement at all. Cause I certainly can’t imagine a world where there are police who uphold the law but don’t beat the shit out of people and kill them indiscriminately.
Your question is absurd. Pointing out that cops beat the shit out of people and kill them indiscriminately in no way presupposes that there should be no cops.
Well, if ACAB, then so are the ones that simply uphold the law without resorting to brutality. It’s not SCAB after all. So if that’s the idea, asking for a alternative solution to law enforcement does not seem that absurd to me.
ACAB is a critique of the policing system as a whole, not individuals.
Good individuals enforcing a bad system are still as bad as the systems they enforce.
Law enforcement should truly be built around the idea of protecting and serving the greater public, but at this time it’s really just legalized violence controlled by the rich, like a hit squad.
The cops are not inherently bad, it’s just the system currently encourages and supports bad ones while driving away good ones. Change the system, cops get less bad.
Defunding or otherwise reducing the number of police is just a temporary harm reduction measure, since in a lot of places things are actively worse WITH police (as they stand now) than they would be WITHOUT police. That’s not to say things would be great if we permanently abolish police. It’s just a choice between two evils and, crazy as it is, actual criminals are the lesser evil in many cases.
Ideally, we would have police, but an entirely different set of police with an entirely different structure supporting them.
For example, make “protect and serve” a job requirement instead of a slogan, end qualified immunity, get rid of grand juries for police, etc
It’s true. The good ones get purged and blacklisted, while the bad ones get hired at another station if they get fired for good cause. Just listen to the stories that the actual good cops tell when they’re forced out for actually being good.
The system can be fixed, but it would have to be remade from the ground up with a select group of trustworthy people who would have to be very scrupulous about background checks and creating a culture. We might be able to bring in outside consultants from places with better cops, like Europe or Canada.
Restorative Justice is the best if not only way to reliably reduce crime, including that of the chronically abusive cops themselves.
I would suggest a citizens militia made up of local residents, mostly tasked with keeping their community orderly. Not armed with guns but with Batons and Tasers for diffusing situations and self defence.
Serious deescalation and psychological training and only special units being allowed to bear arms which would only be used reactively.
ofc this would only work in a society which has alleviated social inequalities
In Germany we have something called “Ordnungsamt” (lit. meaning: Orderdepartment) imo smth like that should take over most tasks of current police and current police (in the way they are equipped) being reduced by a lot and used more rarely
So it’d still be their work? Wouldn’t you get the same form of power abuse even then?
A citizens militia could be a democratic instituion and be integrated in a form of council socialist democracy
And who would do it? Would the people be forced to do it or would those that want to become part of the militia be able to apply?
Just let the community do it themselves.
For starters you don’t actually need to enforce law a lot of the time, it’s sufficient to simply verbally reprimand or do a number of other non-law-enforcement things to correct bad behaviour.
This is why german/nordic police are famous for how not terrible they are, they’re more likely to help you out rather than punish you.
German Police will still harass you (even physically) if a swearword aimed at them slips your mouth. And if you don’t look German or are a POC, mentally ill or are otherwise causing problems they are too incompetent to deal with, you are muuuuch more likely to get murdered by them.
I think what you maybe are referring to is the “Ordnungsamt” which is kind of like a community task force
German police will still put a boot on your neck if you dare engage in non-violent civil disobedience to protest the objective destruction of our environment for example
No, I really think you’ve seen too much unrealistic information. Or project American news onto Germany.
Nobody in Germany is likely to get murdered by police. Check the statistics. The numbers are small enough (around 10/year) that you can look up every case in a year. I won’t deny that the police got some big problems. But coming up with completely wrong arguments isn’t helping anything.
I’ve been living in Germany my whole life fyi
And I will stay with my argument that you are more likely to get murdered by the Police if you belong to one of the groups I mentioned, the statement was relative to the usual chances of murder by cop.
I’ve been living in Germany my whole life fyi
Then you should get it right.
the statement was relative to the usual chances of murder by cop.
Great, so the chances increased from 0% to double that.
That said, [the police’s] main job at the moment is to protect hoarders of wealth from the social consequences of wealth hoarding.
We are all wealth hoarders. What are the social consequences of wealth hoarding? Is it okay to steal? How much does a person have to have before it’s okay to steal? Most of the people of the world live on a couple of US dollars a day. Is it okay for them to steal your wallet when you have 40 dollars?
Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of “incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate”, and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called “the most apt description of Twitter you’ll ever see”.
Wow you just described all the conservatives I’ve ever talked with.
As an aside, i still remember someone on reddit going off their shits accusing me of sealioning when they kept spewing out highly specific buzzwords and i kept very genuinely asking them what the everloving fuck they were on about.
Not to mention that accusatory shit gets…problematic with people who are ASD.
Either respond to the question or ‘nah bro’. Not every thing needs to be high dramatics.
If you have $40 to your name, the cops are just much more likely to beat you and take it, than they are to protect you from someone else taking it.
Cops don’t actually spend much time on solving crimes, they mostly spend their time ticketing and harassing the poor in favor of the rich.
Much more likely? What country are you talking about? Assuming we are talking about the United States, this is just not true.
The police are not that cartoonishly evil like most posters here seem to think they are.
Let me introduce you to asset forfeiture, which is a thing cops do to steal from people by claiming that the property or money was guilty of a crime. The owner isn’t actually allowed to argue in defense of their stuff, because the owner isn’t on trial, their stuff is.
If you’re poor and a minority, you have it much worse.
A quote from that last one;
Police seized as little as $25 in cash, a cologne gift set worth $20 and crutches.
Now, contrast that to this little article that says police solve about 2% of all major crime, and you see the reality of American policing.
They rob the poor and then ignore crime in favor of harassing the poor a bit more. So yes, if you only have $40 to your name, cops will not protect your money, they’re more likely to take it from you.
I’m aware of what civil forfeiture is.
I read the techdirt article you linked, but it doesn’t state how many people were affected, what percentage of people the police interacted with had money or items taken from them, or any data that supports your claim that police are “much more likely to beat you and take it”. Moreover, the article did not mention any of the victims being physically beaten by the police before being robbed.
To be clear, I do not support civil forfeiture or the police stealing from anyone. I am just not convinced that a person is significantly more likely to be beaten and robbed by the police.
I said that cops are more likely to beat you and take your money than they are to protect you from someone else taking it.
That context is important. Don’t try to strip it away.
As to backing that statement up, it’s easy, It’s the combination of article A and article B.
Or rather the Reason article that plots out the tens of thousands of times cops stole from poor people in Chicago in a 5-year period versus the 2% of major crimes that cops solve yearly.
Which make the statement, “much more likely to rob you themselves than save you from being robbed” true.
Because saving people from criminals isn’t their real job. No, their real job is enforcing the status quo of rich and poor, and keeping the poor nice and oppressed.
Which make[s] the statement, “much more likely to rob you themselves than save you from being robbed” true.
In Chicago, sure. What are the statistics for Lafayette, Illinois? Harvel, Illinois? Kell, Illinois? I could go on, but astute readers already get my point.
Astute readers know that you’re mindlessly pro-police. They also know that the police will never return the favor. Because we all live in the real world, not your thin blue line magic world where the police don’t go out of their way to harass the poor and minorities.
Solving a crime and protecting someone from being robbed are not the same thing.
Go away, capitalist bootlicker.
point: completely missed. Impressively so
There’s a difference between saving money so you can live and hoarding it. It’s fine to want to have a secure future for yourself and to be able to help the people you care about. If you have so much money that you could trivially buy people out of poverty, but you don’t because you’d rather have seven yachts and a bigger bank account, we have a problem.
The social consequences of wealth hoarding have traditionally been decapitation once they actually catch up. I imagine it’s probably a little less extreme in this day and age, but we won’t really know that until the hoarders push things beyond the tolerance of the average person.
There’s a difference between saving money so you can live and hoarding it.
Okay, what’s the difference? 100,000? 500,000? 5,000,000?
f you have so much money that you could trivially buy people out of poverty, but you don’t because you’d rather have seven yachts and a bigger bank account, we have a problem.
Who has seven yachts? Most wealthy people invest their money. The only reason you know the names of billionaires is that Forbes magazine publishes their names. You have no idea who all the millionaires are and what they do with their money.
If we’re speaking of social consequences and eliminating people, it makes more sense for the populace to go after crooked politicians and judges than rich people. Just saying.
Ah, yes, the police of the communist Soviet Union were certainly a model of how law enforcement should be done.
Politically illiterate and strawmanning, gj!
Lenin loses me with his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Personally, I think that demonstrating such lack of faith in humanity and in the power of workers to take things into their own hands is fundamentally at odds with the sort of organically arising communist-style models Marx and Engels are talking about.
Lenin wanted power. This was the way he could get it.
Sounds about right.
