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Hi you.
It’s me.
Let’s defund the police. It’s the call that activists have pushed in the past week since American police decided to go ham on the public they are sworn to protect. Y’all saw it right? The riots? The police riots. Out of control. But then that word, control, is the very reason we have policing the way we do. In the United States, the police were established as a means of controlling populations, first slaves, then just black people, but also poor people, labor organizers, etc.
For over a century, we have loaded up law enforcement with all sorts of duties. Help with the homelessness. Resolve domestic disputes. Walk my kids cross the street. Perform a wellness check. Respond to noise complaints. Handle unruly kids in school. Intervene in this mental health crisis. Oh, look over there, a black person is walking/reading/shopping/birdwatching/breathing! Get em! For each of these problems, we have prescribed the intrinsically excessive force of (mostly) men with guns.
While we loaded up these officers with jobs they aren't qualified to perform, we also loaded them up with guns, lots of guns, and other military hardware. We equipped them with advanced level Call of Duty hardware and zero accountability. Have you ever watched someone play Call of Duty when they have infinite lives? It's a bloodbath. It's insane. It's what we've done across the entire country. And it’s dumb if what you want to encourage is public health and safety. It’s diabolically effective if what you want to encourage is control.
If you wanted to encourage public health and safety, you would stop shipping military hardware to cops and start shipping N95 masks to nurses.
In Los Angeles where I live, 54 percent of the city’s budget goes to the Los Angeles Police Department. In other cities, the numbers are large as well. If not a majority, policing represents the largest share of city budgets in scores of U.S. cities. When the biggest line item spending in your government’s budget goes toward policing, you live in a police state. That’s just how math works.
We’ve tried the body cams and the implicit bias training and the toothless citizen oversight boards and the reformist chiefs and the progressive mayors. It. Has. Not. Worked. American police still murder the people they are sworn to protect in grotesque fashion.
The system of policing is too corrupt to "reform." It must be reimagined. The problem is not a few bad apples. The problem is the entire bushel is rotten. Police in this country behave like a gang, and not just some street gang. They effectively engage in coordinated criminal enterprises every time they cover up their crimes. There is no accountability because of the extremist unions, because of weak prosecutors, because of purposeful design and history.
For the future to be different, our approach must be different. So I’m saying “defund the police” and move that money into solutions run by qualified people. It turns out we have teachers who can educate, social service workers who can help people on the streets, counselors to manage non-violent disputes, and a big can of STFU for the next white person who feels “threatened” by the mere existence of a black person in their vicinity.
Defund the police. This is some of what it means to me. Imagine what it would be like to not live in a police state. Let’s go build that place.
For more on this topic, check out the book "We Keep Us Safe" by Zach Norris.
And now for your regularly scheduled content in these revolutionary times.
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