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kleinbl00  ·  1389 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Minneapolis Votes to Disband Police Department

    I said it's the "tip of a very long spear", by which I meant that the underlying root cause of racial inequality goes back a very long way, and until we address those causes no amount of police reform is going to make our racial problems disappear.

I don't think this assumption should be unchallenged. Cops mostly associate with cops. The reinforcement for their behavior comes from other cops. They are on an adversarial footing against everyone but other cops, but when interacting with people who aren't cops, they show deference to those who aren't minorities, poor, or riding skateboards.

The problem is, if you have a bull that acts aggressively towards red and passively towards blue, and you collect statistics of all the altercations involving the bull, you will have amassed an impressive dataset indicating the combative nature of red. Certainly: there are underlying causes for the bull hating red but if you're the bull, every time you see red you need to kick ass.

So yeah - I agree with you. There are problems much deeper than the cops. But the cops are still a problem even in splendid isolation.

I mean - 60% of police departments have SWAT teams. So now you have militarized combat troops sitting around waiting for a reason to go out and throw flashbangs. I watch this on the coptercams as they fly around looking for news - they'll see a SWAT partyvan with twenty guys huddled behind it and they'll hang around to watch. Then they'll go back over the scanner logs to see what they're about to watch and invariably, it's some low-level drug warrant. The problem is: if you don't have a SWAT team do you execute a low-level drug warrant? Fucking of course you do. But if you do have a SWAT team, are you going to execute a low-level drug warrant without a SWAT team? Fucking of course you aren't. You're going to minimize any chance for harm to your officers while also justifying the very large tank-shaped hole in your budget. So now look - you need a SWAT team because you've been using it daily.

And I mean - we can pass legislation that says "No use of SWAT in anything but an active shooter situation" and now we're against law and order and we've got all this SWAT shit sitting around doing nothing. We could probably even pass legislation that creates a "public safety division" who don't carry guns and only roll out to domestic disturbances or lost dog calls but the minute you put in any disclaimer about "unless there might be a gun in the house" there will always be a gun in the house and now there's a gun in the house so fuckin' hell let's roll SWAT.

I agree: there are a lot of problems of inequality and prejudice that aren't rooted in the police departments. But there are a lot of problems that are.