a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by b_b
b_b  ·  1416 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Minneapolis Votes to Disband Police Department

I don't think we're disagreeing. I think all I'm saying is that police violence happens because it's allowed to happen, because laws are only as good as their enforcement. Let's pass every law we can to hold people accountable. But in the end laws don't hold people accountable, people hold people accountable with laws as a backstop. And people hold people accountable by being litigious as fuck. There's no chance the police are going to police themselves, so unless there's civil recourse for victims to hold individual bad actors to account, then we're going to get nowhere. I don't see anyone behaving themselves without deeper structural reforms. I don't see structural reforms without, say, reparations. I don't know what form reparations take. Obviously affirmative action was a flop, especially since it gave way to "diversity". I don't know what else you can do short of forcing landlords to sell their properties to the government, who can then guarantee forgivable loans or something to the renters. I don't know. We need the police. We need the police to behave better. We can't accomplish both of these things without some deep changes that go beyond putting a couple cops in jail for murdering people. I'm talking through this to try to understand myself better, too, FYI.



kleinbl00  ·  1416 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah we're largely on the same page. I think where we differ is that I see the short-term utility of pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL on police departments simply because it allows you to go "we're doing something else now" while also letting it be known that "starting over" is a viable management strategy.

---