Running racism in America thread

Too many people take for granted that we need a police force to "protect " us or to preserve "law & order" but large, organized police forces as they exist today didn't always exist, and to the extent they grew in the US in the mid to late 1800s, they were pretty shitty organizations, concerned with maintaining the dominant political, social and economic interests. There is nothing inherrently noble about what cops do, and at their worst, they are an instrument of corruption and harassment. When they were first formed, they were picked by the political praty bosses or ward leaders, and were an instrument to allow one group of people to break the law (usually saloon owners who kept political power), while harassing opponents of the party in power. I'd argue that they are more sophisticated today, but not entirely different.

Maybe we want professional police forces, because it provides a public good that might not get paid for privately, but I wish people would remember that we are not an authoritarian country, and nobody should want a force of people given runaway and expanding authoritarian powers over us. I don't get why a segment of people are always so eager for that.

To the extent we do all chip in for policing, it shouldn't put us under the control of the organization we created, it should make them continually accountable to us (and paid for by us, working for us as we see fit). They should be doing as little, or as much, as we as citizens task them to do.

In my opinion, we should be tasking them to do as little as necessary to protect us from each other. They should be on a tight leash. When their power grows too unchecked, they act like any group that is given authority over others. As an organization, those powers make them susceptible to corruption, it makes them susceptible to being a tool of elected officials looking to maintain their power, and it can make them a terror to any group (racial, or otherwise) without the economic or social or political leverage to fight back against them when they are unchecked and out of control.

We have gone decades with public police forces gaining too much power over people's lives and not having nearly enough accountability to the people who should be tightly controlling them (not the other way around). When I saw that video in the tweet a page or two back of that loudmouth NYPD PBA blowhard, I wanted to tell him to STFU with his "seat at the table." He works for all of us. It should never have been in his purview to dictate what his job is to the rest of us. It's up to us to decide what we want his job to be. His people can decide if it's a career or job that they want to do, or they can go find other careers. If they choose to do the job, then him and his union should be free to negotiate their pay, and health and safety policies. But we have created what seems like an insane culture that is just backward to me. We don't work for the PBA. The PBA works for us, and their job needs to be what we collectively say it is, not the other way around.

 

You are pointing to a 24 hour period in which mass demonstrations and protests in which thousands of people took to the streets, devolved into chaos, rioting, looting, and culminated with those shootings. What happened that day wasn't a function of the police "disappearing." The police disappearing was a function of that particular day.

Instead of looking at that outlier day as a barometer of policing in Chicago, look at Chicago on all the non-extraordinary days. There is a reason the city has an international reputation for crime. ... on all the days the police don't "disappear." There is a reason why the Chicago police themselves have a reputation for corruption and lord knows how many convictions that have had to have been vacated because of cops who made a habit of severe misconduct; things like planting evidence and lying.

FWIW, this is what happened when the Camden, NJ police disappeared. This New Jersey city disbanded its police department 7 years ago. Here's what happened next - CNN

It's a small city, but it was a very violent city, police corruption was out of control, and they remembered that the police work for the people, not the other way around. When the police force was proving not only useless, but harmful, they got rid of it and started from scratch .