Fiona :transbian: :autism:@Fiona@blahaj.zone
I want a better police.
This sentence implies two things:
1. The way most police forces are currently set up is bad and (varying degrees of) improvement is needed!
2. I want a want there to be a police!
This is Fedi, so unlike in many other places I probably need to justify point 2 instead of point 1 here. Don’t mistake that for me not feeling at least as strongly about point 1 and the two only go together.
Crime will always be a thing, no amount of revolution (short of literally eradicating mankind) will change that. (We can discuss whether it will change things on a quantitative level and I believe there is a lot of room for improvement there, but it won’t fall to zero!) At that point we have a choice to make:
Just letting it happen and do nothing about it, or do something about it. The former will however normalize crime and establish that there are no consequences for it, so it is essentially guaranteed to increase crime. I therefore firmly reject that approach from the start.
But in order to prevent crime there has to be someone who is willing to not just verbally say it’s bad, but in the end to physically stand in the way and pose some form of counter-threat that can deter that crime. And in order for deterrence to work it has to credible! And that implies a need for violence to be on the table at least in principle.
And once we are at that point, I’d much rather have the people whose job it is to enact that violence be under the control of the public and bound by rules (we might even say “laws”😉
) that were decided upon by society as a whole, not by the personal opinions of the person in question.
And at that point, we might as well call them police officers, because this is really all they are: People under control/employment/direction of whoever is representing society as a whole (the government) whose job it is to protect society from crime and who are allowed (and to an extend required) to use physical force if necessary to enforce the reduction of crime.
When I read pamphlets like What about the Rapists and there only solution with those that cannot be easily rehabilitated is vigilantism and physical violence, then that’s not a solution but a problem for SO many reasons! For starters you turned yourself into an ad-hoc might-makes-right police force that doesn’t care about evidence, presumption of innocence, accountability, or due process. You essentially became brown-shirts, the worst possible version of the very thing that you claim that you wanted to destroy.
We need police to actually be accountable, we need them to actually follow the law, we need their members to be a representation of the general public, and yes that means that we need communists and anarchists in the police(!), we need them to be trained well in how they can avoid violence as much as possible and to only use as little as possible when it is actually needed.
We can debate whether they need to be armed, and if so with what: The cops in the fucking UK don’t normally carry firearms, and they don’t seem to be much worse of because of that. (And obviously: There have to be police units that have access to serious weapons, someone has to be able to respond to a hostage situation, I’m talking about the regular cop on the street for whom a stick might be plenty.)
We can debate to what extend riot police should be a standing unit made up of people who don’t normally spend time in their communities and are only called in to respond to riots on an as-needed basis.
We can debate how police oversight should work, whether there is any hope that this can be anything other than an external agency whose primary job is police oversight and how that would be better for the police officers themselves too, both so they don’t get intimidated out of holding each other accountable (which needs to be a crime!) but also to deal with things like bullying and discrimination within the force.
We can talk about how it is a problem that police officers nowadays often don’t know their communities. Ideally people should personally know the officer that is assigned to their city block and be able to trust them. This used to be a thing in a lot of places! And once you have that, that cop can also go around and ask questions, because he has a network in the community, so even the investigative potential of the police increases.
We can talk to what extend police should be trained to in a pinch be able to act as a kind of low-level social worker even, and how to deal with mentally ill people.
Those are all exciting and interesting discussions to be had with plenty room for disagreements, but after all is said and done if I get attacked by a nazi, I want for there to be someone I can call who will come over at any time of the day on any day of the year and step in!