quote:

"You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?” And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence.

This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It’s not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government. These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as “violent offenders” are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to “protect the community” escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you’ll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?

Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What’s my solution for them, you’re no doubt asking. I’ll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, houselessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that’s done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system."

quote:

Reforming the US police would be a massive undertaking but I mean, it's not like the country lacks for resources, whether money, materiel, or manpower. This is after all the country that was able to set up places like Willow Run in WW2, and we've had most of a century of technological and management advances since then, the money is there, the people could be found, the systems could be implemented, if someone in power wanted to do it.

Really we're talking about a much broader set of changes than just the police, but assuming we're limited pretty much to just them, my own list would be something like;

1a) Demilitarize the police. Regular cops are not armed as a matter of course. Maybe (given America's major problem with gun violence) if it can be demonstrated that there's a pressing need in a given area (e.g. particularly high rates of armed robberies), a small proportion of squad cars may have like a shotgun in the trunk, but said cars are manned by cops who undertake major extra and special training, and activate all kinds of additional recording things etc. if said gun is taken out.

1b) Specialist firearms units along the lines of the UK's, where they can have actual heavy gear, armored vehicles, etc., but the training they get has to be truly spectacular, must be kept regularly refreshed and updated, and with a very strict and clearly outlined set of rules on when and how these forces may be activated. i.e. if there's a terrorist attack or active shooting going down, they're called in. If there's someone claimed to have drugs, they're not.

2) A top-to-bottom overhaul in police culture. Root out the whole notion that they are some kind of embattled thin blue line that stands between an anarchic, violent public and order. Police must be a part of the community they operate in (Exceptions may need to exist for very specialized work, but certainly beat cops and the like should as much as possible live in the areas they patrol and so forth). De-escalation of tense situations should be held up as the highest thing for a cop to aspire to. There should be universal acceptance among the public and police that if you're going to give someone police powers, they must be held to a higher standard than the public. Even fascist dystopian hellscape Judge Dredd has that as an important part of their Judges, and a corrupt Judge is explicitly treated far more severely than a citizen committing the same crime. If Mega City One can manage that kind of principle then we should be able to as well. No more acceptance of excuses about it being a "dangerous" or "stressful" job, many jobs are worse and are neither given as causes of malfeasance nor accepted as causes of it. Police today are obsessed with "respect" without comprehending what respect is, and substituing fearful obedience for it. We should have police who have a real understanding of respect, and who possess it because they have, individually and institutionally, earned respect - knowing that you can go to them for help without fear of being mistreated yourself, and knowing that if you attract the attention of the police your interactions will be professional, evenhanded, and genuinely not dangerous for you unless you really are the one who starts trouble, regardless of your race.

3) A complete overhaul in training to support the other objectives. It should be a much, much longer course. Flip the psychological screening around so that people who are inclined towards peaceable resolutions are encouraged to join, not barred, and petty fascists are the ones who can't get in. Probably get rid of intelligence tests entirely because there's no way those are trustworthy or useful anyway. It should include extensive study of at least a fairly broad selection of relevant laws, as well as police regulations on how to operate. Ultimately reconfigure the idea of what the police are for, what justice itself is, and what constitutes the successful enhancement of said justice.

4) Pair police up, if not on a per-unit basis at least on a per-precinct one, with social workers, psychologists, and so on. They should be involved as much as possible to help calm situations, to be able to direct people in distress to resources that can help them, and follow up on cases that may not have warranted an arrest to see how things are going the next day, two days, week, whatever.

5) Police should always have local community oversight and involvement. A council, oversight committee, whatever it might be, formed of people from the community a given precinct handles, with appropriate balances that represent the local population demographically. (The constitution of the police force itself should similarly reflect the makeup.) I'm not smart enough to outlay what kinds of actual powers they should have but they should at the very least be able to set an investigation in motion if wrongdoing is alleged. In a perfect world, it should be entirely possible for someone who has committed a more minor offense to go to their local cop, talk about what went down, and get help to sort things out in a productive way - sort of like a light side parallel to the way a middle class white kids will get "boys will be boys" or "he comes from a good family" or the like. All of this can also be tied together with exactly the kind of feel-good stuff both police and shitlibs love, as long as you're careful to avoid indoctrination or anything, but enhancing cops and regular folks getting to know each other personally. I'd suggest such oversight councils should probably also have a role to play in sentencing, at the least being able to make suggestions, things like "If the guilty is willing to do X amount of community service in our community, and to attend anger management classes, we'd recommend that over a prison sentence".

6) Crimes need to be thoroughly reviewed and reformed as well. Both in terms of what constitutes a crime, how a cop handles a crime, and sentencing guidelines (We'll take as read that reforms to what prison is should be included as part of all this). Obviously laws intended as racial cudgels need to go (War on Drugs), things like similar drugs being handled differently depending on whether they're predominantly used by white or black people, sentencing being vastly different for white and black people, and so on. When something is still a crime there needs to be some sense in how it's handled. If some kids are raking about doing a vandalism then we can probably have useful structures outside of taking them through the courts to help - see point 4.

7) Where someone is harmed as a result of crime then we should pursue the best known techniques for helping them recover and heal. This might be fairly simple - a general fund to help compensate people who are victims of thefts or vandalism for instance - but my understanding is that resorative justice is currently well-regarded and considered more effective than most alternatives, so that kind of thing should be pursued (And we should always keep an eye out for ways to either make this more effective and alternatives that might be better still).

8) Abolition of nakedly exploitative things like asset siezure, using fines simply to augment the department's bottom line, etc. etc. and similarly end all involvement of the private sector in prisons, because quite aside from other issues of prison reform that alone creates a massive incentive to send people to jail and enslave them there. Immediately release from prison of people who are there on things like non-violent drugs charges and, again, end the war of drugs completely. Immediate cessation of the death penalty, both because it's immoral in its own right, but also because of racial biases, corruption, and the fact that America does actually have a very lengthy and serious process of investigation and reviews and appeals and still gets it wrong so often.

9) To achieve all this we almost certainly need to undertake a massive overhaul in current police employment and stuff, which is largely going to be best achieved by the bitter pill of doing what jabby suggests and something that has been done elsewhere, and simply let go anyone who doesn't want to be part of the changes with good pensions. As I say, a bitter pill, but probably a necessary one. Of course, what might have been an element of reform that left nobody truly happy but was an "I can live with it" compromise is probably completely out of the window after the last few days, like so many other potential measures. On the other hand justice demands we do something about historical abuses, so there has to be a line that's walked between which cops are investigated/prosecuted/etc. and which are allowed to pass by for reasons of pure pragmatism. I'm not a victim so it's very much not for me to say where that line is, but certainly historic cases involving deaths and serious violence, as well as framing and corruption, need to be investigated, probably some sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

9b) Overhaul Internal Affairs departments so that they're empowered, well-funded, and extensive, and both willing and able to follow leads wherever necessary. Part of changing police culture needs to be making sure IA is welcomed in any department and that cops who are crooked or violent or the like being rooted out is seen as a good thing. Rather than the trope of IA being a bunch of assholes getting in the way of "real" police work.

10) Changes to trials themselves would also be good. I don't know enough to say exactly what would be needed, but something that accounts for how notoriously inaccurate eyewitness testimony is even when people of completely good faith and honesty give it would be a good start. I'm not a big fan of the adversarial system per se, but I do think everyone accused of a crime should absolutely have someone whose job it is to fight their corner. That OTOH runs into problems of "He's a good kid with a bright future he just got a little over-excited" and idk how to balance that, but finding a way to would be important and productive imo. Similarly we need to do something about character assassinations, rape trials being the most obvious problem here but really throughout.

11) Cops should, if they're actually in good standing and behaving themselves properly and conducting themselves well, be paid fairly generously and with benefits and pensions and stuff. Partly because everyone should, but also partly because A) We want to attract and retain people who are actually good for the job, and B) It'll probably help somewhat to reduce stresses and the allure of corruption if police aren't worrying about paying the bills and so on.

Of course all of this would be made massively easier by other changes throughout society. As an obvious example, there are myriad ways we can reduce domestic abuse (quite aside from the police being such avid practitioners of it) that don't even require most or any of the above, things like empowering women and ensuring women have authority and autonomy over things like pregnancy, creating a culture that reduces toxic masculinity, etc.. Providing for your population in terms of housing and welfare logically reduces their desperation and thus crime. Creating real communities instead of the busted situation capitalism itself has created would help reduce alienation and thus both reduce people's willingness to commit crime while also increasing their support networks and, again, reducing desperation.

Well that turned into an effortpost, and I obviously lied about not wanting to tell others what police reform should look like. It's just some thoughts really. And obviously it's a pretty massive list that would entail extensive, long-term, expensive work to pursue. It would certainly not be easy, but I do believe that with political will it would have been possible to do it. Bernie, certainly, might have had a real shot at leading reforms on this scale, and if there was genuine political leadership in America it could have been pushed forward as at least a general principle to pursue in the last few days. Pretending my list is a good one, imagine if Biden had put out something like this alongside credible, believable statements about his intention to pursue it should he become President - it could immediately have become both a focal point for how to proceed, have helped calm the situation by promising a real alternative that could be started in January, have created a dramatic boost to his campaign that brought in huge donations and volunteer efforts and support, and so on. All the people on the streets the last week would have a place to channel their energy and anger, with a real goal in sight. Instead, we got "Shoot them in the legs", and as my friend Karen said earlier, "I don't know why I expected anything better of a man who can only shoot himself in the foot". Of course, there are plenty of structural reasons Biden and most of the Dems aren't all aboard such a thing, but it could have been pursued as a credible policy platform, is my point, and probably one that made political hay.

posted:

I believe that living in the way we live makes it difficult for most people to seriously consider the end of policing. The idea of security, the idea that cops equal security, is difficult to dislodge. To transform this mindset, where cops equal security, means we have to actually transform our relationships to each other enough so that we can see that we can keep each other safe and ourselves safe, right? Safety means something else, because you cannot have safety without strong, empathic relationships with others. You can have security without relationships but you cannot have safety—actual safety—without healthy relationships. Without getting to really know your neighbor, figuring out when you should be intervening when you hear and see things, feeling safe enough within your community that you feel like, yeah my neighbor’s punching [their partner], I’m going to knock on the door, right? I’m not going to think that that person’s going to pull a gun on me and shoot me in the head. I don’t believe that because I know that person. I know them. I built that relationship with them and even though they’re upset and mad I’m taking the chance of going over there and being like you need to stop this now, what are you doing? Part of what this necessitates is that we have to work with members of our communities to make violence unacceptable. What my friend Andy Smith has said is that this is a problem of political organizing and not one of punishment. How can we organize to make interpersonal violence unthinkable?

That necessitates a whole transformation on so many levels for many people. But It doesn’t necessitate it, actually, for some other groups, who have never had the option of calling the police, they just haven’t—and they’ve been managing to take care of each other and themselves outside of that option.

What is very puzzling to me is like sometimes our questions answer themselves, if we look right at the thing that is happening in front of our nose. People ask me all the time [what abolition looks like] and I’m always like, you know, there are groups of people who are living a type of abolition now. I want you to think of [affluent, white] neighborhoods in the Chicago area like Naperville where there are no cops to be found … anywhere. You actually have to call them to show up. They’re not posted outside anything. Their kid’s schools? No cops, no metal detectors. They have what they need. They have resources they need. The people are working. Talk about full employment! People have houses that are worth millions, they’re not struggling for healthcare. They’ve got housing, healthcare, jobs: all the things that we say we want in a society that would be transformed enough to make it so people won’t feel we need needing police, prisons, and surveillance. There are some communities already living that today.

The question is why for them and not for all of us or the rest of us? I think to some degree imagination is necessary … yes. But we don’t have to imagine that far into the future. It’s here. Right this minute. Right now. We should not act as though it’s some sort of fairy tale or some sort of impossibility. It is actually not impossible.

When Johnny who lives in Naperville gets into trouble, they do restorative justice. Johnny is sat down and talked to and even if he gets in front of the judge, the judge is like “Johnny, your parents really love you, gotta do better, boy. We’re not putting you in jail for this, get treatment!” Or sometimes not even treatment. “Do better. Here’s your third chance, Johnny!.” It’s not like we don’t know how to do this and it’s not like some populations don’t already benefit from not being criminalized when they cause harm.

I think we have to stop making things so complicated and seeming so fantastic around abolition. “Oh my gosh, that doesn’t make sense! How would we ever do that?” I’m like: you’re doing it right now. There are ways in which certain people’s race and [status] protect them, and that protection needs to be possible for everybody. It just needs to be the default way we work in the world. That’s what I’m thinking.

Mat Cauthon posted:

Just going to post some resources I've found helpful in motivating me to be an abolitionist (of both police and the carceral state in general).

Very good interview of Mariame Kaba, a real deal abolitionist organizer who does amazingly great work in NYC and Chicago.


From here: https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba

"The End of Policing" grapples broadly with the question of "well if we don't have police then what" and you can get the e-book for free right now.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4729-the-problem-is-not-overpolicing-it-is-policing-itself

Guidelines for abolitionist organizing around prosecutors and district attorneys: https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/abolitionist-principles

Great interview with Simone Browne about the anti-Black, white supremacist origins of policing and modern surveillance states - I also recommend her book "Dark Matters": https://truthout.org/articles/the-surveillance-of-blackness-from-the-slave-trade-to-the-police/

I would also recommend:

- The Condemnation of Blackness
- This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (this is more about armed community organizing than policing explicitly)
- Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
- Cities Under Siege
- The First Civil Right
- Are Prisons Obsolete
- Women, Race, & Class
- The Muslims Are Coming

quote:

Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression—most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. “Broken windows” practices, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dramatic expansion of the police’s role over the last forty years have created a mandate for officers that must be rolled back.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice—even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives—such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

jabby posted:

Extremely difficult. It has to be top-down reform, similar to how other countries have had success tackling corruption. You would need to replace multiple levels of management, probably including local politicians. Embark on a major programme of recruiting ethnic minority officers. Institute psychological screening for new recruits. Overhaul police training, with a focus on de-escalation and community engagement, and make it much, much longer. De-militarise departments, ditching the scary black uniforms and armoured vehicles and reserve heavy weapons for a select, highly-trained few. Scared cops are dangerous cops, so spend plenty on officer safety but do it the correct way: top-of-the-line body armour, an effective partner system, and large enough departments that backup is rapidly available. Bodycams at all times that can't be disabled. Make sure cops are paid well and feel valued in their jobs. Use some of your new officers to set up an effective internal investigations department. Make it easy for cops who don't want to work under your new system to leave, with early retirement and generous pensions.

Honestly there's so much you can do, but a lot of stuff isn't effective unless it's done together and there's just no political will.

The posts you and Guava made are also good. You do need functioning social services and healthcare to take that sort of pressure off the police, and to prevent the line becoming blurred between "criminal trying to hurt you" and "mentally ill person in need of help" or even "homeless person trying to exist". There's also a lot of truth to the idea that if you dress someone in a balaclava and tactical gear you reduce their humanity, both to outside viewers and in their own perception. It's a lot easier to be violent if you're viewing the world through a gas mask and know you can't be identified, so ditching that and going for protective but non-threatening uniforms with no face coverings allowed would be a top priority of mine.

Ms Adequate posted:

https://twitter.com/anarchonbury/status/1268311431436554245

jabby posted:

Guess i'll throw in the post I made in UKMT.


tl:dr

Role - The police are for crimes, not dealing with the mentally ill, drunk, addicted or homeless. Fund your social poo poo properly instead of using the police.

Scope - Get rid of petty offences, treat drugs as a health problem not a crime. Stop "broken windows policing", all it does is create bad feeling within communities.

Organisation - More BAME officers, better training, encourage old crusty officers to retire. Most effort should go towards community policing. Stop giving the majority of officers military-grade poo poo they don't know how to use, instead keep a small highly-trained force to send after actual dangerous criminals.

Crumbskull posted:

I also want to point out, before a certain class of poster shows up: you can absolutely believe in and demand police abolition/reform without personally being able to explain every single detail of what it would like. The people asking you to can't even accurately describe the system we currently have.

Yuzenn posted:

The theory suffers from blurring correlation and causation and decriminalizing those "low level" offenses bears out to be better in almost every measuring metric, we shouldn't be INCREASING the level of enforcement and the harshness of the penalties!

Boris Galerkin posted:

So I'm catching up with USPol and people are saying "just let the community police themselves."

Is this where to talk about that because jesus loving christ. Do you want more people being lynched like Ahmaud was? Because that's what you're going to get.

Like seriously, I'm trying to listen and understand this point of view here where you think the community can police themselves without turning into the same racist hate group the police currently are, only now "it's the will of the community! " so gently caress you if you're not white (or gently caress you if you're white and live in a predominantly non-white area) you're just going to have to pack up and move?

jabby posted:

Broken windows is a nice theory that the people in charge grabbed hold of to justify the draconian policies they wanted to implement anyway.

I can totally buy that the quality of the shared environment matters (i.e. fix the single broken window quickly and nobody will break the rest), but that's a reason to invest in repairing/renovating urban centres and cleaning up litter. Stretching it to say that jailing the person who broke the first window for ten years is still somehow a good thing is where it breaks apart.

Crumbskull posted:

If you're taking 'community policing' to mean 'everyone votes on who gets to live in the town' then you'd probably have to move! Good thing thats not what anyone is talking about when they propose this.

CelestialScribe posted:

No, but that’s one effect that community policing could have in some areas. That’s the issue.

I mean it wouldn’t even bother me so much if community policing advocates would just admit: yes, community policing would result in some unwanted situations. But for some reason community policing will take place in environments where everyone will act in everyone else’s self interest? It’s a bizarre rejection of reality.

Mat Cauthon posted:

Just going to post some resources I've found helpful in motivating me to be an abolitionist (of both police and the carceral state in general).

Very good interview of Mariame Kaba, a real deal abolitionist organizer who does amazingly great work in NYC and Chicago.


From here: https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba

"The End of Policing" grapples broadly with the question of "well if we don't have police then what" and you can get the e-book for free right now.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4729-the-problem-is-not-overpolicing-it-is-policing-itself

Guidelines for abolitionist organizing around prosecutors and district attorneys: https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/abolitionist-principles

Great interview with Simone Browne about the anti-Black, white supremacist origins of policing and modern surveillance states - I also recommend her book "Dark Matters": https://truthout.org/articles/the-surveillance-of-blackness-from-the-slave-trade-to-the-police/

I would also recommend:

- The Condemnation of Blackness
- This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (this is more about armed community organizing than policing explicitly)
- Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
- Cities Under Siege
- The First Civil Right
- Are Prisons Obsolete
- Women, Race, & Class
- The Muslims Are Coming

Crumbskull posted:

What is your proposal for reforming the racist US police state that never produces any harms or unjust outcomes? Or do you believe that black Americans are currently living in the best of all possible worlds? ( do not answer this, instead, please shut up: idiot)

Crumbskull posted:

these reforms/reinventions were more harmful than the previous system (they obviously couldn't be but whatever)

quote:

then they would advocate reforming back. People proposing this arent fanatically comitted to simple majority vote local democracy, they want an end to unnecessary violence and oppresion.

enki42 posted:

CelestialScribe and others posted a bunch in the USPol thread, but even within this thread, there's already been tons of clear suggestions (summarized here briefly):

- Stop arming police in the vast majority of interactions
- Community oversight of police through oversight and review boards with teeth composed of people in the community
- Improved training and elibility requirements for police
- Better / continuing to be decent (depending on local circumstance) pay for police, and focusing defunding on equipment budgets and number of officers
- Requiring that officers pair up
- Finding alternate first responders in certain situations (counselors for DV, social workers for mental issues, etc.)
- Drawing police from the local community whereever possible and encouraging building ties with the community

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch.

I feel like you're trying to make the argument "abolish the police" vs. "do absolutely nothing", and no one has suggested that nothing should happen.

fatherboxx posted:

Before this thread eats itself because of one reason or another...

Can anyone recommend me actual good material on "police abolition" ideas? I.e., point-by-point program with research and maybe global experience to back it up? And not "police reform but with a punchy name".

I am not opposed to learning something on the topic but whenever goons or random lefty on twitter boosts that, it is either "abolish first think later" cheerleading or something utopian/surface level so I can't help but be sceptical.

edit:

missed this good post, would appreciate more recommendations!

posted:

Ultimately, abolition is a practical program of change rooted in how people sustain and improve their lives, cobbling together insights and strategies from disparate, connected struggles. We know we won’t bulldoze prisons and jails tomorrow, but as long as they continue to be advanced as the solution, all of the inequalities displaced to crime and punishment will persist. We’re in a long game.

posted:

Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”

Following an incarceration boom that began all over the United States around 1980 and only recently started to level off, reform has become politically popular. But abolitionists argue that many reforms have done little more than reinforce the system. In every state where the death penalty has been abolished, for example, it has been replaced by the sentence of life without parole — to many people a death sentence by other, more protracted means. Another product of good intentions: campaigns to reform indeterminate sentencing, resulting in three-strike programs and mandatory-minimum sentencing, which traded one cruelty for another. Over all, reforms have not significantly reduced incarceration numbers, and no recent reform legislation has even aspired to do so.

Which isn’t to say that Gilmore and other abolitionists are opposed to all reforms. “It’s obvious that the system won’t disappear overnight,” Gilmore told me. “No abolitionist thinks that will be the case.” But she finds First Step, like many state reforms it mimics, not just minor but exclusionary, on account of wording in the bill that will make it even harder for some to get relief. (Those convicted of most higher-level offenses, for example, are ineligible for earned-time credits, a new category created under First Step.) “So many of these proposed remedies don’t end up diminishing the system. They regard the system as something that can be fixed by removing and replacing a few elements.” For Gilmore, debates over which individuals to let out of prison accept prison as a given. To her, this is not just a moral error but a practical one, if the goal is to actually end mass incarceration. Instead of trying to fix the carceral system, she is focused on policy work to reduce its scope and footprint by stopping new prison construction and closing prisons and jails one facility at a time, with painstaking grass-roots organizing and demands that state funding benefit, rather than punish, vulnerable communities.

posted:

History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police. The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can’t begin to imagine a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the police increase their legitimacy through all of the non-police related “work” that they assume: including doing “wellness” and “mental health checks.” Why should armed people be deployed to do the work of community members and social workers? Why have we become so comfortable with ceding so much power to the police? Any discussion of reform must begin with the following questions: How will we decrease the numbers of police, and how will we defund the institution?

On the way to abolition, we can take a number of intermediate steps to shrink the police force and to restructure our relationships with each other. These include:

1. Organizing for dramatic decreases of police budgets and redirecting those funds to other social goods (Defunding the police).

2. Ending cash bail

3. Overturning police bills of rights.

4. Abolishing police unions.

5. Crowding out the police in our communities.

6. Disarming the police.

7. Creating abolitionist messages that penetrate the public consciousness to disrupt the idea that cops=safety.

8. Building community-based interventions that address harms without relying on police.

9. Evaluating any reforms based on these criteria.

10. Thinking through the end of the police and imagining alternatives.

Importantly, we must reject all talk about policing and the overall criminal punishment system being “broken” or “not working.” By rhetorically constructing the criminal punishment system as “broken,” reform is reaffirmed and abolition is painted as unrealistic and unworkable. Those of us who maintain that reform is actually impossible within the current context are positioned as unreasonable and naïve. Ideological formations often operate invisibly to delineate and define what is acceptable discourse. Challenges to dominant ideological formations about “justice” are met with anger, ridicule or are simply ignored. This is in the service of those who benefit from the current system and to enforce white supremacy and anti-blackness. The losers under this injustice system are the young people I know and love.

enki42 posted:

How do you figure? Police departments have a lot to improve right now, but they could also be a lot worse. Police still at least sometimes investigate crimes committed against POC. In most cities, violence against LGBT communities is far, far reduced from where it was in the past (while I won't pretend all problems are solved, bathhouse raids and things like that are no longer a routine thing). Police do receive at least some training in de-escalation and mindfulness (notably, there was a significant amount of this in Minneapolis).

This is by no means to excuse the police or say they're doing anything resembling a good job, but it could absolutely be worse, and has been worse in the past.


You do seem fanatically committed to any solution being revolutionary and the complete abolition of the police force being a hard requirement, rather than one path to improve how the police function.

I'm personally not necessarily even opposed to abolition fundamentally - I just genuinely don't understand what you're proposing beyond "Step 1: Get rid of the police. Step 2: TBD at a later date."

enki42 posted:

How do you figure? Police departments have a lot to improve right now, but they could also be a lot worse. Police still at least sometimes investigate crimes committed against POC. In most cities, violence against LGBT communities is far, far reduced from where it was in the past (while I won't pretend all problems are solved, bathhouse raids and things like that are no longer a routine thing). Police do receive at least some training in de-escalation and mindfulness (notably, there was a significant amount of this in Minneapolis).

This is by no means to excuse the police or say they're doing anything resembling a good job, but it could absolutely be worse, and has been worse in the past.


You do seem fanatically committed to any solution being revolutionary and the complete abolition of the police force being a hard requirement, rather than one path to improve how the police function.

I'm personally not necessarily even opposed to abolition fundamentally - I just genuinely don't understand what you're proposing beyond "Step 1: Get rid of the police. Step 2: TBD at a later date."

enki42 posted:

I feel like there's a circular argument with the abolitionists that I don't get. Please help me understand exactly how I'm misrepresenting the abolitionist argument, because I'm sure I am, but I don't know how else to interpret it.

Abolitionist: We should let the community decide how to police themselves?
Reformist: What if the community decides that lynching black people is OK?
Abolitionist: You don't understand. These community decisions would only be made by cool and good people with cool and good ideas. The chuds won't show up for some reason.

That last point is massively unfair, but I don't know how else to interpret it. If you live in a county where people are overwhemingly republican (say a county that had a margin of > 80% for Trump), who are the cool and good people who are going to argue for community policing solutions that don't involve "actually, lynching blacks is fine!"

Mat Cauthon posted:

Crumbskull posted:

Baka-nin posted:

The problem here is that it is ahistorical. Lynchings and other forms of mob violence against minorities were usually done with the support of one or more forms of institutional power including elements of the police. And a major stumbling block to minorities in those communities taking steps to defend themselves was the intervention of the police.

enki42 posted:

Hey, thanks for this! This was very helpful and after reading everything you're posting, I clearly wasn't understanding the argument (probably because other posters insist on their entire argument consisting of telling people to shut up and failing to explain themselves).

I think what I'm calling heavy reform and at least the initial steps of what you consider abolition are more or less identical, unless I'm misunderstanding something:

enki42 posted:

I think where I might be struggling is that, in my mind, even if the "formal" institutional power structures are eradicated, it seems like informal power structures will still exist, and I can't see any particular reason to assume that those will be more egalitarian than the formal ones.

Maybe part of the root of my lack of comfort with this argument is that I feel that white supremacy in the police force is just an aspect of the culture at large being supremacist, rather than something unique to the police.

enki42 posted:

I guess the disagreement is more about how far you can take this model? I think there's always going to be a need for professionals who enforce the law in some capacity, even at a vastly reduced role from what exists today. Can you point to some reading of a successful implementation of large populations not having law enforcement in a professional, full time capacity?

posted:

Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have compiled a great deal of information on societies that use various forms of conflict resolution in which an organization such as the police has no place (https://www.amazon.com/Restorative-Justice-Healing-Foundations-Everyday/dp/1881798313). From the Diné (Navajo) to the Semai, there are dozens of societies—all of them impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialism—that have practiced restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or social harm without ever having to be so brutal as to lock people up in cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or mobilize organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare neighboring societies that face similar socio-economic conditions but use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses.

posted:

Christiania is an autonomous neighborhood of Copenhagen that has been squatted since 1971. The area, with nearly a thousand inhabitants, organizes itself in assemblies, maintains its own economy and infrastructure, cleans up its trash, produces bicycles and other items in collective workshops, and runs a number of communal spaces. They also resolve their own conflicts, and with the exception of some aggressive incursions and raids, Christiania has been a police-free zone for most of its existence. Initially, the Danish government opted for a soft strategy, hoping that Christiania would eventually fall apart on its own. In the same era, the autonomous movement in the Netherlands and Germany was fighting major battles to defend their squatted spaces, sometimes defeating the police in the streets or burning down shopping malls in retribution for evictions. In context, the Danish approach made sense. However, Christiania thrived. Some suspect that the government was behind the crisis that threatened the autonomous neighborhood’s existence in 1984 when a motorcycle gang moved into the police-free zone to begin selling hard drugs (soft drugs have always been widely used in Christinia, while addictive drugs are vehemently discouraged).

Earlier in Christiania’s history, there had been a fierce debate about how to deal with the problem of drugs. Over intense opposition, a part of the neighborhood decided to request police assistance, but they soon found that the cops were arresting the users of non-addictive drugs and ignoring or even protecting the proliferation of hard drugs. After that, Christiania decided to keep the police out, and their autonomy was well established by the time the motorcycle gang moved in. The gangsters thought they had picked an easy target: a neighborhood of hippies who not only disavowed making use of the police, they actively kept the police out. These drug-pushers, however, had fallen for capitalist mythology, which presents us all as isolated individuals, vulnerable to organized delinquents, and therefore in need of the greatest protection racket of them all, the State. Christiania residents banded together, exercising the same principle of solidarity that was at work in all the other aspects of their lives, fought back, and kicked the motorcycle gang out, using a combination of sabotage, public meetings, pressure, and direct confrontation.

posted:

The mutual relationship between police and crime was exquisitely revealed during the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. In June of that year, police viciously attacked the massive encampment staged annually by striking teachers. But the teachers fought back tooth and nail, quickly joined by many neighbors. They pushed police out of Oaxaca City, which remained autonomous for five months along with large parts of the countryside. People built barricades, which became an important space for socialization as well as self-defense, and they organized topiles, an indigenous tradition that provided volunteers to fight back against police and paramilitaries as well as to look out for fires, acts of robbery, or assault.

The defenders of Oaxaca soon learned that the police were releasing people from their prisons on the condition that they go into the city to commit crimes. In protecting their neighborhoods against these acts, the topiles did not function like Western police forces. They patrolled unarmed, they were volunteers, and they did not have a prerogative to arrest people or impose their will, the way cops do. Upon coming across a robbery, arson, or assault, their function was not only that of first responders, but also to call on the neighbors so everyone could respond collectively. With such a structure, it would be impossible to enforce a legal code against an activity with popular participation. In other words, the topiles could stop a stranger who was robbing the store of a local, working class person (as were many of the neighborhood stores in Oaxaca), but they couldn’t have stopped the neighbors themselves from looting a store they already had an antagonistic, classist relationship with, as was the case in Ferguson.

People in Oaxaca also had to defend themselves from police and paramilitaries, and they did so for five months. The topiles and many others were unarmed. They had to fight back with rocks, fireworks, and molotov cocktails, many of them getting shot in the process. Their bravery allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live in freedom for five months, in a police-free, government-free zone, experimenting with the self-organization of their lives on social, economic, and cultural levels. All the beautiful aspects of the Oaxaca commune are inseperable from their violent struggle against police, involving barricades, slingshots, molotov cocktails, and thousands of people who faced down armed opponents, over a dozen of them giving their lives in the process. In the end, the Mexican state had to send in the military as the only way to crush this flourishing pocket of autonomy.