Ford employees ask the company to stop making police cars
theverge.com
theverge.com
This isn't any different from police having a "Blue Flu" or any other protest. People who are members of a company/ organization that want to influence the company do it in lots of ways.
They aren't implying vehicles have something to do with the problem.
Individually we all can't solve it all, but if they're able to take this stand and make it uncomfortable enough for management, they've done something that may contribute to the changes they're looking for.
Like, say, Amazon de-listing Washington Redskins merch. I personally love that move. Maybe, collectively, these things lead to the changes.
If police departments feel pressure in many different ways, they may start allowing for leadership and changes that have a material impact in the way they operate.
If that's your concern, consider it allayed.
It's a giant cash cow for Ford. This will only hurt Ford.
Police already have vehicles... and they can source new vehicles from any other willing company... even if it was a foreign company like Toyota.
However, I feel like there are much more direct ways of getting there. The marches on city halls, for example.
qualified immunity isn't the issue here. qualified immunity only protects against civil lawsuits. While it would be great if victims of police brutality can go after their attackers in civil court, the bigger issue is that prosecutors/police are refusing to go after the attackers in criminal court. Having to pay 500k in damages because you shot some unarmed black guy in the back sucks, but getting locked up for 10+ years sucks more.
Ford is no more liable for actions of bad cops than Volkswagen, BMW, or Mercedes were for the actions of the nazis.
It's praiseworthy but not obligatory. And it's also the only real power that Ford employees have.
If you go into a gun shop and the person working the counter believes you're going to use it to kill someone they're well within their right to simply not do business with you. The power to not associate or sell one's goods or labor is pretty much the only tangible power your average citizen has. Might as well let them wield it sometimes.
This is a ridiculous attitude. The vast, vast majority of police actions keep the populace in general from greater harm. This is just virtue signalling at scale, and I am glad the CEO is ignoring this.
> If you go into a gun shop and the person working the counter believes you're going to use it to kill someone they're well within their right to simply not do business with you.
This is an asinine comparison, and I think you know that.
Even if the old man was a facist, think we can all be grateful for all the machines they built to help the Allies win the war.
http://michiganhistory.leadr.msu.edu/wwii-and-ford-motor-com...
Dunno, maybe the evidence is more mixed
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/n...
By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, 57,851 airplane engines, 4,291 military gliders, and thousands of engine superchargers and generators. In addition to aircraft, Ford plants built 277,896 of the versatile vehicles (tanks, armored cars, and jeeps).
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ford-motor-company-nbsp...
Which is literally Hitler's creation (the name means People's car)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932%E2%80%931938:_...
Interesting piece of history: "Ironically" Ford is actually sort of liable for the actions of the Nazi's, well Henry Ford that is. Henry Ford was a BIG anti semite. Hitler himself has said Ford's anti semitism was an inspiration to him, Ford is also mentioned favourably a couple of times in Hitlers Mein Kampf, was awarded a high Nazi medal for his virtue in anti semtism and apparently Hitler for a time had a photo on his desk of Ford...
To be clear I don't think that they should stop selling cars to the police, pretty much everyone agrees the police are necessary, so I think it is also necessary to have companies sell cars to them. But if you work with an oppressive organization to create tools to help them do their jobs, you are partially responsible for what they do with those tools.
It’s not the cars that are the problem — there’s no modification that somehow senses POC and then runs over them, for example. Do you also stop selling them clothes because the uniforms are designed for cops as well?
This isn’t something where you can say this is universally bad. They’re a fundamental part of society - there to enforce laws. And if you agree that police are necessary, then they need to get around somehow.
I can appreciate how these employees feel like this is a way they can create change. They work for Ford, after all. But it’s a classic “when you have a hammer” situation. The problem is way more complex and nuanced. This only works against you because it makes your arguments look silly to those you want to convince to care.
If you are creating a legitimate product and making it available to everyone, I don't think you should be generally held responsible for how it is used (ex. guns, civilian vehicles). But that is not what Ford is doing - they are working with law enforcement to create vehicles suited to their needs, they are specifically working to make it easier for police to do their jobs. I think that gives them some responsibility, in the same way that I would feel like a company making military vehicles for Saudi Arabia has some responsibility for how they are used.
Thus as a car creator you must take some level of responsibility for any atrocity your car is associated with.
For example did you know 1.36 million car related fatalities happen per year every year? If you make cars you are participating in the violent mass slaughter of people on a scale that dwarfs the genocide committed during the holocaust. In the US alone car manufacturers are responsible for creating cars that kill 100 people per day.
Does creating a tool that you know with absolute certainty will "accidentally" kill millions of people make it an "accident?" Are you guilty for murder when you create something that you know with absolute certainty that it will kill people?
To make the moral contradiction even more confusing let's examine people who make weapons.
As a maker of nuclear weapons you know that there will be exactly zero deaths in the next year due to nuclear explosions. Thus you've killed less people than the car maker and you're fully aware that your weapon is basically going to kill nobody. You want to pick a career that will absolutely kill zero people? Make nuclear weapons.
Even a ladder maker is aware sometimes people die when they fall off ladders but I can guarantee you that nobody died in a nuclear explosion last year.
Even if you make hand guns for the police, those guns will kill less black people than the amount of cars that killed black people. So car makers have killed more Black people than police men and gun manufacturers. Does that make them more racist? No.
You may be thinking that the above logic is absurd and your mind must be racing furiously to come up with counter-logic to make sense of all the garbage I said above. I'm telling you right now that it's a pointless endeavor to make sense of it all. It's pointless to talk about it and it's pointless to think about it. Morality was never suppose to make any sense.
Your morality is an inborn emotional module in your brain that is designed to help you survive and navigate a prehistorical setting where you lived as cavemen in a tribe. It's designed only for survival it was not designed for logical internal and external consistency. Think about it. Does Natural selection and evolution evolve these moral instincts in your head to help you create world peace or to help you survive so you can reproduce? Whether or not your morals had internal and external logical consistency never really was a factor for helping you survive thus your brain evolved moral instincts that can be highly contradictory when examined closely.
It's not suppose to be consistent and it's not suppose to make any sense.
Once you realize this, then you'll know all this stuff is really kind of pointless.
Don't think about it too deeply, is my advice... just deal with the surface issue: racism... there is no need to attack the manufacturer who makes police badges... because in the end even the surface issue of racism is sort of a superficial exaggeration from a cosmological perspective.
Even when you just consider the fact that the USA is already one of the least racist countries in the entire world it's sort of inconsequential. Have any of you been to other countries? The racism is on another scale in most other places.
Those people make bombs and guns knowing full well that these weapons will kill less people than cars even though the base intention of the weapon is to kill.
First, I'm sure we all agree that police brutality and murder are wrong. Second, the police are not the criminal justice system. They are law enforcement.
Ultimately, those cars enable quite a lot of good as well. Lives saved. Property saved. And so on. That doesn't make the wrongs forgivable. But where are Fords exported? Saudi Arabia? China? How much work does Ford do that's DOD related? If we zoom out a bit, police cars feel like chump change.
And meanwhile, what does this do to Ford sales outside of law enforcement, as in the red states ... where all of those pickup trucks are sold, and where police are far more popular?
So if they get what they ask they get a smaller more fragile employer with a decreasing workforce and fewer funds for raises, in return for a symbolic gesture.
I was under the impression that police variants of cars are heavily modified for structural and performance reasons, at least in the US. e.g. someone once gave me a ride in an auctioned used Interceptor and demonstrated the switchable performance and traction modes that were unique to that version.
I work at a company in SF that's gone full ACAB ("all cops are bastards"), defund the police, you must be with us or you are not an "anti-racist", et. There's a lot of internal activist groups and what not.
I worry that investors have no idea how much time and resources are spent on this, but then I consider that activist shareholders themselves have become a movement.
The reality is that this type of thing is going to become more and more common and accepted.
Millions of people in defund the police / abolish the police, and the entire African American community, along with many other marginalized communities; may consider that a very privileged perspective.
The police, with the broken laws and systems in place, could very well be universally bad. I think that’s an obvious point of contention at the moment and is a long standing belief that we are reconsidering.
Claiming that every single black person in America thinks that ever single police office in America is bad discredits whatever point you're trying to make. You must spend your entire life in a bubble if you truly believe that.
It's the old dilemma: There's 1% chance this beer can kill you: Do you want to try your chance and drink it? Of course not. But you can't not interact with the police. Just being black is enough to get bad cops' negative attention.
Really bubble much ????.
Protestors who are literally being beaten senseless in the streets or say, being hit by Ford police cars being used as "crowd control" aren't hysterical. Please watch some of the protest videos -- they're absolutely fucking terrifying. I watched a 120 lb unarmed white woman get picked up and slammed to the concrete by her neck. I watched a police officer pepper spray another unarmed woman point blank in the face when she came up to him asking for help. I watched police "enforce" curfew by spraying rubber bullets on unarmed kids standing on their porches. At the protests in my city I watched police purposefully destroy tables set up by volunteers to give protesters food, water, and medical supplies -- I watched the police bulldoze an old man with a cane -- I watched a disabled man get dragged on the concrete by police after they stole his prosthetic legs.
As long as they are allowed to investigate themselves and are not require to make any reports or have independent oversight, we can't even claim that!
Prosecute bad cops, sure. Throw the book at them. Their time in prison is sure to be horrible.
But run-of-the-mill, protecting-your-neighborhood cops? They are the good guys and gals. Without question. CHOP and Atlanta have shown us how self-policing pans out.
It's proven to not work. CHOP had murders just a few days later.
Everybody agrees bad cops should be prosecuted. A wild over-reaction that opposes the huge majority of good cops is a wrong move.
Separately - Why stop here why not ostracize anybody who works for any company that has ever had any relationship past or present to anything bad in the world. Point is where is the line drawn? This is all quite ridiculous.