Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Killer Mike has given a lot of good interviews since the Floyd killing. In each, he emphasizes the need to strategize and plan and make specific demands.
I understand the symbolism of defunding cops, but that forces the question, "What do we put in their place?" It'd be best to move with more strategy, like say:
1. Immediately taking all cops with a history of complaints off the street immediately;
2. Banning the acquisition and use of discarded military hardware by all police;
3. Banning the use of predictive police measures in inner cities (IBM and Palantir sell predictive software that, in coordination with cameras and racial profiling, basically turns many inner cities into versions of the movie Minority Report, none of which protects people in the inner cities as much it controls them, in the most Orwellian sense).
But the biggest pivot the movement needs to make is perhaps the hardest. It has to focus on the legislators who pass "tough on crime" laws and the courts that sentence people under them. These cops would not be emboldened to send four officers to deal with a suspected bad check if the legislature hadn't passed crazy laws that make such petty crimes on par with serious crimes.
The movement needs to target legislators who stand behind cruel and mindless laws and call them out as: (1) racists; and, (2) fiscally irresponsible. Jailing people drives up taxes needlessly and does nothing more than convert petty criminals into more serious criminals. The protestors should start demanding the resignations of judges that sentence harshly on small crimes and legislators who've run on tough on crime platforms. Make those fuckers defend themselves in the press.
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Those are good long term goals, but the immediate effort is to assign the right resources to problems, rather than send armed and armored warriors, many of whom view the community as their enemy, into every situation.
It really shouldn't be controversial that we respond to traffic crashes with traffic enforcement (that doesn't need guns), overdoses with EMS and mental health crises with mental health professionals. The men with guns can be backup. You know, like most of the rest of the world.
Yeah, we don't have the staffing for all of that, in part because all the money goes to the police, but the system we have makes no sense and we need to change it.
But it's lots of fun having conversations with people who only heard "abolish the police" for the first time in the last week.
