this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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I think this is flawed. The policing system is built in such a way that it protects the bad apples at all costs. From police unions making it difficult to get rid of the bad cops, to the laws, legal precedent, and cultural norms which make it impossible to prosecute them. In the US, police are allowed to lie to people, but they are often trusted in court, regardless if they regularly lie. The police often form a Blue wall of silence in order to protect other cops when literally perjuring themselves in the process. Qualified immunity makes it impossible for people to seek damages from individual cops when they violate their rights. While good cops might break the blue wall of silence (and they might get punished for it) and they don't violate other's rights and therefore are not protected in court by qualified immunity, the participation of these good cops does nothing to address the system in the first place.
You and I both agree that there are many legal or governmental institutions that are rotten, but police fundamentally protect them and enforce their will. It is police who break strikes. It is the police that arrest protestors and activists. It is the police that hold the power to call legal protests illegal by declaring them riots. Fundamentally, the police protect the system that lets them be corrupt, and make it difficult to change it outside the impossible task of making change within electoral systems.
Police are often an ineffective force at catching criminals. One of the best examples of this is sexual assault and rape. 70% of survivors do not involve the police. All the survivors I know did not call the police. They have good reason not to, 24% of them are arrested after doing so! If a person belongs to a group that is often oppressed by the police, such as gay and trans people, or a group that is criminalized, such as sex workers, there is nowhere for these people to turn in order to get justice.
In the event these people do call the police, odds are there will be no arrests. Only 5% of cases will result in arrest. Fewer will result in convictions and incarceration. (WATR Zine (this is a download link))
On a more ironic note, Policing increases crime. After NYC cops went on strike and reduced proactive policing, major crime reports fell.
While I wholeheartedly support trying to make a change for the better, and protecting and building community, I think police are a terrible way to do so. I think working outside the system is a much better way to materially help people's lives. Organizations like Food Not Bombs helps people with food insecurity eat. Instead of joining the police which might make you destroy homeless encampments and make them worse off, you could instead volunteer at soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Joining an antifascist organization can help protect communities from fascists, but joining the police might make you side with the fascists and protect people with demonstrably harmful rhetoric, or worse, oppressive and murderous, fascist, intent
I still think it is fair to call them bastards. While it sucks to call someone with good intentions a bastard, ACAB points out that police as a whole is a flawed institution, and participating in it does not change that, it reinforces the legitimacy of it, and brings erroneous hope to people that it can be fixed from within, when in reality it needs drastic change if not total abolition.
I genuinely appreciate this, ngl. I live in a very conservative area and when speaking about this, I'm used to discussion quickly devolving into meaningless argument
Even though I agree with all of this, it seems like this speaks more to an american perspective than to any other given country, and all your citations are from an american perspective as well. Though I think you could maybe make an argument on how the police are conventionally leveraged to protect private property, and private property is bad, and how if you were to take away the "protecting private property" element of their job description, you'd basically be abolishing the police. You could make that argument, along more universal lines, but that's kind of contingent on people agreeing that both private property is bad, and that police are exclusively the protectors of private property, and nothing else.
In any case, I wouldn't really be willing to make so certain of a statement on the police departments of other countries. I've never really heard anyone say anything bad about, say, finnish police, for example. British cops, they wear funny hats, they go "oy", and shit, I've not really heard anything good about them, but finnish cops? Never heard bad about them. I also think a lot of what makes the police in america bastards, is because the prison system here is so fucked up and so punitive, and so particularly bad, compared to a lot of other countries.
I also kind of like, as an aside point. What do we do about park rangers? They're technically cops, but you wouldn't really hear anyone thinking that we shouldn't have them, or that they should be actively abolished. I say this to mean, you know, as with the first paragraph, what do we really mean by "police"? You've given a pretty good description of the fact that the police suck, but not really why, or how they could be fixed.