“I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse” by Bobby Fischer (1982)
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<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/bobby-f...>
If a bunch of white communists started carrying guns, filming the police in their communities, and providing school lunches, they absolutely wouldn't be assassinated in their homes like that. If you're uncomfortable that they carried guns - I certainly am - try to consider whether their lived experience was quite different than yours, and how you might behave if you were constantly surrounded by an armed and hostile police force, before the proliferation of smart phone cameras, who could and would murder you with impunity. They viewed their everyday lives as a survival situation, and they called their social programs "survival programs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Mitchell
also Baltimore, Maryland "peanut king"
Edit: I want to be clear here, the police can absolutely be abusive to paranoid people, and people struggling with mental illness might seem to be acting suspiciously or weirdly by the police who have no training in dealing with mental health. It's very possible Bobby was acting oddly though non criminaly and the police totally mishandled it, he certainly shouldn't have been arrested. But his exact claims of what happened need to be viewed with the knowledge he frequently made false accusations throughout his life.
This in itself is a conscious choice. Someone had chosen not to train the officers.
Person is stopped on the street because of looking like suspect. On closer look, doesn't actually look like suspect but acts oddly and invites police to arrest him. They arrest him, and are not gentle with the handcuffs or putting him into the car. The actual suspect is caught elsewhere, but Bobby is arrested on suspicion of acting oddly, not of being the bank robber, so no reason to let him go. The part about choking him during interrogation, I dunno, anyway they interrogated him and were unsatisfied. Placed naked into empty cell with the light on seems like normal procedure (whether that's right or wrong) for someone arrested for behaving oddly; then being transferred to solitary doesn't seem out of the norm either. That they were considering sending him to a mental hospital and concerned about suicide is consistent with that treatment. Bobby offers that he was doing a lot of screaming and what not during this time. Eventually, someone in charge takes a look in and asks direct questions and Bobby gets his clothes back and his phone call and released.
This isn't treatment I'd like to have, and I'd like for it not to be normal, but unfortunately, it's pretty much normal, so I don't think there's a whole lot to be skeptical about --- with the exception of the choking. That could have happened, or it might not have, I don't know if that was really normal or not; I think a lot of interrogations are now video recorded for many reasons, but probably not in 1981
If I was subjected to torture by a judicial institution for no reason what-so-ever, I would also be traumatized by the events and turn into a conspiracy theorist.
Maybe let's try "don't have police" instead. Why do we spend such incredible resources on a military force that hates us, that we must fear?
I feel like "don't have police" is not feasible, in fact a complete non-starter outside of "nuclear family" sized units, unless we get into semantics.
In a large society, there are likely to be some basic, ideally mutually agreed rules (unless we are advocating for a true dystopian anarchy). There will likely be some way of monitoring and enforcing those rules - whether it be as basic as "don't shoot children in the face with a shotgun" or "don't defecate on other people's food" et cetera, or something more elaborate and granular. We can call that organization "police" or "friendly helpful neighbourhood helpers" or "Gnorf" or whatever; We can and should have meaningful discussion and change on what the mutually agreed upon rules are, how we enforce them, what the balances, checks, authority, etc are, scope and mandate, training and oversight, absolutely; but I do not believe "don't have police" as an absolute statement is a valid proposition with thought-through consequences, and I don't believe it's helpful to any side of the issue in moving forward to make life a better place.
That being said, maybe I'm wrong, and I'd be interested in what your elaborated proposal might look like?
My assertion isn't that they're ineffective at their purpose, but that their purpose is not one worth serving.
We almost certainly disagree on this, but you should not be making any assumptions about what my relationships to the police are or have been.
1. I took a much more charitable interpretation of their post - "Somebody has to take out the trash" to mean somebody has to be the janitor / garbage disposal expert, even though it's not traditionally a desired or easy position. And therefore in the context of this discussion, to mean "Somebody (Police, or whatever we call them) has to respond to crime and danger".
2. When you say "their purpose is not one worth serving", I don't think we merely disagree; I am honestly having a hard time fathoming the framework/thought/life perspective/point/literally anything. The purpose of police is to "serve & protect". We can agree or disagree how well they do at that; what the margins and scope and mandate and methods and oversight etc etc etc are; but if you believe protecting the weak from the strong, preventing crime is purpose not worth serving, we may have an axiomatic difference so massive we may not be able to meaningfully proceed in discussion.
(and fwiw, I've lived in Canada & USA, as well as in what some might consider police state; I've been poor and well off; I've been on the privileged and on the harassed side of class/ethnicity/nationality/religion/group; me and mine have had our share of being harassed by various police in some places, and I also had friends who are police officers in other places; but I still cannot envision a societal framework anarchic enough to say that civil protection, which is the purpose if not the implementation, is not worth serving in principle)
Look if you can run a society without any kind of police to enforce laws, by all means. People are mostly good and maybe it'll work out. Maybe everyone will just behave.
This is the purpose of police as stated by the police and the institutions that create and endorse them. It doesn't make it true and I don't believe it is.
That's really what it comes down to I think. I'm not asking for a lawless world where all are free to commit whatever harms they wish without consequence. I'm saying an institution actually designed to protect people would bear almost no resemblance to policing as it exists now. And also that we should create that institution instead of police. There is no path that I can see from police as we have them to that other thing.
This has gone to the supreme court and police are not bound by this. In fact, what ARE police bound by here in the states?
Maybe you should work on your phrasing then.
The requests to water down the rhetoric would simply continue until it was diluted down to, "we should do something nonspecific about this problem which may exist."
FWIW, anecdata, per my other comment [1]: I and large majority of my friends & family (Canadian lower-case-liberals by and large) all fall into that category. It took us a LOOOOONG time (I mean weeks and months) to give the platform and movement enough benefit of doubt to investigate underlying proposals (and then largely agree with them), after having immediate and strong negative reaction to "defund the police".
And most people will not give it benefit of doubt. I literally to this day have conversations with acquaintances of the sort: "No, they're not actually advocating anarchy and everybody fend for themselves! No, I'm serious! Yes, I know that's what the term implies. Hear me out, this is what I think they're saying..."
It's a horrible horrible term that does horrible horrible disservice to the intent.
You giving it the benefit of the doubt, and reaching people who were just shy of doing so, _is_ the rhetoric being effective.
There’s being right, and there’s being effective (to steal a quote from Obama). The current phrasing is worse at turning public opinion than some of the more us/them-rhetoric that comes from I.e. vegans in that regard. Sure eating lots of meat is bad, and animals should probably be treated better, but screaming “meat is murder” won’t actually make any carnivores drop a single steak of their menu, whereas measures that don’t immediately make the respondent feel attacked might.
Yes, “defund the police” will turn heads, but it also immediately leads to being written off as fringe madness. A better slogan should be possible, that actually contains the message of demilitarization.
This is what I'm getting at; in changing the language, you change the idea, and an abolitionist agenda becomes a reformist one.
If you want to advocate for reform, then that's great, that makes sense. But telling people who are advocating abolition, "you're doing it wrong because you aren't doing it my way or appealing to my sensibilities," is patronizing.
And it won't be long until someone says, "Safer Police alienates law enforcement, we should call it 'Better Policing', that way we're sure to be taken seriously," and after a few rounds of this you're left with nothing. It's a losing game.
Society at large will take you seriously when they can't pretend otherwise anymore, because you have repeatedly demonstrated the veracity of your views, often for decades. There is no end to the excuses people can come up with to dismiss you if that is what they want to do. People either won't change their minds, will change their own mind, or will have some experience that shakes up their world view. The rhetoric you use almost doesn't matter; you can't change someone's mind _for them_, no matter what you say. The most you can do is share your ideas, giving them the opportunity to change their mind, if they so choose. What matters is that you're a part of the conversation, and that what you're demanding is just. People will come around. The ones who don't will get old and die.
"Safer Police" would've been radical 20 years ago. Many people's world views were shaken up by repeated videos of police misconduct. "Defund the Police" is radical currently; in 10, 20 years, it might well be mainstream.
If one is not willing to use force for enforcement... does one have enforcement?
"Enforcement" already presupposes violence. I'd suggest "governance" as a better term. Violence is an exceptionally poor mechanism of governance. It creates an outsized amount of unjust outcomes without working especially well.
Police are often called on to force homeless people out of an area, for instance. This often results in violence but never results in solving the problem that people need homes. The war on drugs has resulted in the over policing of impoverished areas and an inestimable amount of misery, but it hasn't helped a single addict to recover and has only enhanced the power of drug cartels.
The question I think people need to ask themselves is, do the police accomplish the goals I believe they accomplish? Am I bringing a lot of preconceived notions to the discussion that I should examine more carefully? Are there better ways to achieve governance?
I'd encourage this thought experiment. Let's say there's a stoop outside your apartment where people smoke, and they litter their cigarette butts. You want them not to litter. What's going to be more effective; threatening them with violence, or putting a trash can out there?
Armed robberies would probably require an armed response, which would certainly imply we'd need an organization with the resources to investigate this & dispatch armed people to interdict this robber.
That doesn't imply this force should be patrolling the streets or have the power to pull people over arbitrarily, and if you believe we need people serving in those roles, it didn't imply they should be armed or that lethal authority should seamlessly blend from responding to armed robbers to responding to a noise complaint.
> I think the problem is actually that you can't imagine a world where we have rules and governance without a militarized force which uses violence to enforce those laws
Then you said:
> Armed robberies would probably require an armed response, which would certainly imply we'd need an organization with the resources to investigate this & dispatch armed people to interdict this robber.
The only purpose for a paramilitary force in society is to respond to violence in an organized and accountable matter. There is no society that can possibly survive long-term without the organized ability to deploy violence on occasion.
You keep bringing up nonviolent situations where armed police aren't the best response; I agree with you that the modern people we call "the police" could be reformed, curtailed in responsibility, and replaced with other community representatives, but the core function of police, which is deploy violence when needed, is not appropriate to fully remove from society.
This would be agreeable to me, at least in principle; the specifics would be important. However, the police force is used in all manner of ways.
> You keep bringing up nonviolent situations where armed police aren't the best response
You continue to downplay or ignore that this is the role police are put to, in the real world, and that it routinely results in violence and unnecessary incarceration
You're the one who challenged us to think about how to enforce laws "without a militarized force". And now you're saying we'll need armed response. Which is it?
This is why people who advocate getting "rid of the police" (your words) sound like they're talking out both sides of their mouth.
"Get rid of police!"
"No, I didn't mean to get rid of police entirely. Why would you think that?"
It's not a good look. People who talk like this are self-sabotaging their side of the argument by using intentionally double-speak language.
This will never go through so long as people continue to use phrases like "get rid of the police".
Again, the vast majority of what police do is unrelated to violent crime.
The police often respond to completely nonviolent incidents, bringing guns into the situation, and then people die. That's entirely needless.
In Uvalde, the police arrived, armed and prepared, to a violent situation, and were unable to organize an effective response. School shootings should be a slam dunk to justify a militarized police, it's the literal "bad guy with a gun." But time and again they fail to respond effectively.
Violence is a one trick pony. Hurting people is the only thing it does well.
> Violence is a one trick pony. Hurting people is the only thing it does well.
Yes, and when your community is faced with organized violence perpetrated by people residing in your community, what is your non-violent solution? The only way to prevent further violence once it has occurred is by tracking people who committed the violence and detaining, reeducating, exiling, or killing them.
What I'm saying is that our conception of what the police is, what they do, and what they are for is wrong. This organization needs to be abolished; it's purpose is to inflict violence, in all manner of places, for any infraction the officer cares to enforce (while ignoring those they don't care to). A police force does not create safety or justice. It creates danger for those at the fringes of society, fails to stop bad actors (and often exacerbates the factors that lead to such bad actors), and creates innumerable injustices.
In replacing it, we'll have to address the thorny question of how to intervene in violent situations. It's true that we will need to organize something to address this. You're saying this will necessarily be a recapitulation of a police force; that's certainly a danger, but not a necessity.
A police force is a standing army which has broad authority over the populace. I am proposing we can change those parameters; they may not need to be standing, their authority and mandate can be very narrow.
"We don't need police" though says very different thing. It may be that it was a quick statement of strong belief, but for what it may be worth, it may not communicate to others the message/point you intend to communicate.
If we're going to have a bunch of people with guns, we can't tell them that they're warriors, the last line of defense, the thin blue line, et cetera. It greenlights abuse by creating a culture where the rules are viewed as impediments which can be discarded as long as you get away with it, justified as "doing what is necessary," a sort of Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer theory of policing. This creates a culture that imposes it's desires on society rather than one that protects, serves, and defends society.
My response was specifically to the notion,explicitly stated, that we don't need and shouldn't have police no matter how defined, and that it's purpose is not worthile. Later I think that position was clarified and we are all good now.
1) If the state itself acts maliciously, eg mass deportations, gulags etc then it's the police that enforce this. Even if the state is unjustified, you cannot fight back because fighting back itself is an offense against the police and society. Even if you are eventually cleared of the injustice that the state enacted on you, you will still have to deal with the consequences of having fought back.
2) If the police act maliciously, eg police brutality or a social worker separating kids from families as political retaliation[0], then you cannot fight back either. As fighting back will get you punished. On top of that, the police are not held liable for their actions so that they can do point 1).
I think what would help enormously is if the police were more liable for what actions they take. It shouldn't be such an uphill struggle when police or social workers or judges do something very clearly wrong.
It's the new logic. We may be doing the bad thing, but our worst enemies also do the bad thing, therefore the bad thing is good q.e.d.
I don't know, seems pretty debatable. It also probably depends on your ethnicity.
Also, police mistreatment is not only killings (which can be sometimes be justified and other times not) but also rights violations and other lesser violence. For example, you are extremely unlikely to be killed by Japanese police (they can bet perps will not have weapons) but once you get arrested, you have very few rights. Other places are rife with bribery and corruption (Mexico, Brazil). In Spain you might get the rubberhose treatment, and anecdotally, I know someone who got a very nice dog sicked on to them by the police in Germany (it looked like you were running away!).
Not really feasible to put the 2. Amendment Pandora’s box back together to get similar logistics in the US I fear.
Something like "De-thugify the police!" (or "No thug cops!", or "Get rid of dumb cops!") might've worked better ("Reform the police" is so bland that it might not excite anyone), and TBH they could've gained a lot of support after that school shooting where the cops just stood around being stupid for an hour or so (I forget which city it was, you know one of the ones of several that occured recently).
In that linked article a congresswoman explained that the phrase meant "It's not a slogan but a policy demand. And centering the demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country gets us progress and safety.". But come the frakk on, if you start with "Defund the police", people who disagree with you will have stopped listening before you continue with "... and by that I mean...".
When I initially heard "Defund/decomission police", I thought it was utter insanity. Then (sadly, some time later) when I forced myself to read the policy recommendations, I 100% agreed - alter and reduce the scope of police, move the funding to methods that may provide better results, look at root causes rather than just reactive enforcement, engage with community in more productive and empathetic ways, demilitarize the police force, etc. So I'm 100% the target audience for massive agreement, but mighty flying spaghetti monster, the phrase chosen is awful and completely counter-productive/counter-communicative to any literal-minded nerd like myself :P. If I were a conspiracy theorist I would call it external sabotage :D
Talking certainly didn't lead to a good outcome in this case.
A cop friend I had told me with a straight face that there are no innocent men in jails. His reasoning was that there are lots of things that you are guilty of but never charged with like think of all the times you got away with speeding. So even if a particular man is innocent of the crime he is jail for, it doesn't matter because there are things that he should be in jail for but isn't. Ergo, no innocent people in jails.