- American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.
- As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it.
- I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.
- Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed.
- When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.
- To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.
- 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.
Reading from my personal perspective, the "average" police work feels very familiar to me. At Burning Man, I've done Ranger training, where you become the official first responder, with a radio calling for emergencies but mostly dealing with conflicts and noise complaints. Sometimes bigger things like consent violations, assault, drug-induced states that require compassion. Judging by how similar the actual work is, it's crazy how different the typical person it attracts is when you don't have toys like guns to play with. I find BM Rangers to be usually nerdy, compassionate people very concerned with Doing The Right Thing, due process and feedback. Annoyingly so at times, where sometimes i find they take things too seriously and my dark humour dosen't read well with everyone. One of the first thing explained in training is the concept of "social capital" where you have to be nice to everyone and earn "capital" so they respect and acknowledge your non-existant authority. And actually listen to you if at some point you come tell them nicely to lower the music. Sure, there's not a lot of gang violence and poverty to deal with at a festival, but I think there are still a lot of parallels to be drawn. Our job as first responders is to de-escalate situations to avoid having to call the police. The only times cops are called are basically when an arrest needs to be made for serious stuff like a participant assaulting someone. I can see how police work can be both draining emotionally and boring as hell. So people that got in for the flashy car chases, start provoking and instigating violence for a little action.
I know three ex-cops who have told me the same thing. Even if you are a "good apple" you are putting on the uniform and walking out into public with all the baggage of all the bad apples out there. You are STARTING from a deficit the moment you put the badge on. Until the "good apples" get that, police will always be bad. It's structural.
I like to think this isn't true, but the only cop I ever knew was a complete piece of shit, the kind of person who would pick up someone he suspected of being a gang member for nothing and drop him off on the other end of town in a rival gang's territory after taking the dude's shoes (I know this because he told me about it), so I guess maybe he wasn't the atypical case I always suspected.
I do wonder if there's a TSA effect here though. That is, the TSA are worthless, at least on the surface, but they do seem to deter would be law breakers just merely by their presence. Police could be the same in terms of crime in the community, so I'm still unconvinced they need to be completely gotten rid of.
I work with "security officers" on the reg. These are guys who make extra on the side not being cops, working security for the network. And we have our laughs, and things are convivial, and then you say something vaguely controversial and it's like you flipped a goddamn switch. They're not your buddy the "security officer" hanging out on the couch anymore; they're the cop looking for a skull to crack. You can see it in their eyes, in their posture, and in the way their speech changes. When I was in the clubs we had security guards that were definitely headed for the force and we had security guards that were paying the bills. There was one I didn't get along with because he defaulted to skull-cracker. The last I heard he'd "had" to use his sidearm in the line of duty four times, killing three people.
Yeah, but what motivates would-be law breakers? Police abolition has to happen in tandem with actually addressing why folks break the law. I'm sure there are some who are just out to cause mischief, and I'm okay with having some kind of small police-like infrastructure for dealing with them, but I reckon most people don't want to break the law.
I right with you. I'm for active reparations and an official government apology for slavery and Jim Crow and red lining, etc. I don't have high hopes for the prospect of any of these things. But in the interim I need to be convinced a bit more about cutting the police entirely.
The thing is, the police as you are imagining them here do not exist. If they did, we wouldn't have all these protests and police violence. You're not wrong for wanting something like you imagine, but given how bad things are and how resistant policing has been to any reforms, I don't think you're going to get it until you abolish the police.
Agreed on the reparations and acknowledgement of all the garbage that folks of color deal and have dealt with. There are some challenging conversations to be had here. Our police forces have to work from the model that physical force is the absolute last option and are held to the standard that they must demonstrate so in every interaction with the public. I'm definitely not for defunding or removing the police, just for exploring an entire remodel of the police force that we're used to. Why carry deadly force on your hip daily? Is is truly necessary to carry that power with you? Can we have highly educated and skilled officers that act as social workers to a great degree? Officers that can identify members of the public that need to be connected with a social service that can help them navigate a particularly tough time in their life? Can we rid ourselves of our for-profit prison system? I think it's possible. We've got a long way to go and a boatload of challenging discussions to get there. I think the quote attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” fits well in this situation.
There are a lot of things hat can be done through policy changes that have nothing to do with the police per se (at least in terms of regulating their person-to-person interactions), but that would affect greatly how the police behave. For example, let's make it illegal to do asset forfeiture and to impose onerous court fees on civil infractions, as well as to bar any money generated by court fees and asset forfeiture to be used as operating revenue (it is the disgusting truth that some courts have to "self-fund"; the legal system is ostensibly for public protection, so it needs to be funded by the public at large, full stop). And let's make it illegal for employers to be able to see civil infractions and misdemeanors on a background check, and do something about aggressive credit monitoring by employers as well. All these things can be abused by the legal system and they lead to keeping poor people (black and otherwise) poor. I guess some of my frustration has been that so many of the root causes about why the police can act with impunity come down to money, plain and simple. We need to solve those money problems in parallel with police reform or it will amount to lip service and nothing more. That's my worry when we just say, "fuck the police" and we're done.
I certainly agree that these are all problems that need to get addressed regardless of what we do with the cops! This is begging for a socialist analysis of policing, but I'm not sure Hubski is ready for that and either way I'm certainly not the girl to do it. :) Any police abolitionist who has put thought into it knows it's more complicated than just closing police departments. Abolition only works if you do it in tandem with building social services and abolishing mass incarceration, reforming laws that unjustly punish folks, developing non-punitive forms of justice, and so on. But that's a bit less catchy than "fuck the police", so it's not what you see on signs or Twitter :) If you are interested in reading more, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? and The End of Policing are both available as free e-books right now!so many of the root causes about why the police can act with impunity come down to money, plain and simple.
These are all questions worth asking. I have yet to hear tangible arguments against them. The high suicide rate among police also tells us that the profession needs redefining.
This has been making the rounds, but why is no one willing to wonder whether it's true? This is just some person posting on the internet. We really need to be careful reading too much into it without actual, y'know, vetting and/or proof.
Those of us who know cops when they are out of uniform do not see anything unusual or out of character in his blog post. It passes the sniff test. And he does speak of specific precinct-internal processes and procedures that are everyday workplace things, that don't generally get seen by civilians outside the office. Two ex-cops I know have nodded sadly at this post. "Yep."
I'm inclined to believe it because it lines up with what I see on the news, what black/queer/homeless folks have been saying for a while, what I know from the cops I've interacted with, and what other cops are saying. I will see if I can turn up some other sources; I haven't been trying to keep a comprehensive list, but here's one: You're welcome to not give this 100% credibility; I don't know either of these guys from Adam and can't vouch for their authenticity.
In a way that's the problem, though, in that it lines up very well with a given movement. Even if I largely agree with that movement, it doesn't mean I'm going to accept something as fact just because I like what it says.
Same thing went through my head. Would have been nice if the person would have used a real name so that fact checking would be possible. The thing that gives me pause to some extent is when the author gets preachy about living in a capitalist system, as if that has anything to do with the rest of the essay. Sounds more like someone with a pov trying to use the moment. Even if it's BS the person makes some good points though, so I'm not sure it matters a ton.
I agree that it makes good points, but it's hypocritical IMO to complain about conservative media bias and the like while being perfectly okay with it when it supports what I believe.
Right, but I guess what I mean is that we shouldn't stop being appropriately skeptical just because we like the message.
My perspective is that if you imagine this as a work of fiction, can you still learn something interesting? If the answer is yes, then it has value. If the answer is no, then it doesn't. I think we have to assume that many things posted on Medium that lack any ability to be fact checked should not be taken completely literally unless there's a compelling reason to believe so.