zeoevil wrote:Okay. I can accept that. I've been harassed by police before. I know it isn't the same thing, but I can extend my understanding of my experience to accommodate and learn from your experiences. However, I have had more positive experiences with law enforcement than negative ones so the idea that all cops are bad and their livelihoods should be taken away from them is something I cannot rectify with my personal experience. There has to be somewhere between those two extremes that accounts for both of our experiences. Maybe we should find that spot and see if we can occupy it together.
No one is claiming that every individual police officer is a "bad person," (what that would even mean is unclear), nor is anyone claiming that every single person's experience with law enforcement is going to be all bad. The issue is more complex than that, as our government forces us to utilize police services by putting them in charge of many public safety functions that absolutely should not involve people with handcuffs, mace, and guns.
What I am saying is that the police, as an institution, do not exist to uphold law and order, or to keep the populace safe. Their ineffectiveness in these areas is a matter of well-documented fact- most violent crimes are not even reported, and of the ones that are, most are not prosecuted or cleared. The majority of people in federal prisons are there for non-violent crimes, while the law regularly fails to prosecute rapists and other offenders whose actions leave people traumatized for life.
Look at the sheer number of offenses for which the penalty is a fine. Such penalties essentially state "this is illegal for the poor, but legal for the rich." Thus the wealthy walk free for crimes that will land the poor in prison.
When people go to prison (the majority of whom, again, have committed non-violent offenses), they are typically put to work for pennies on the dollar, far below minimum wage, in manufacturing or manual labor, in conditions that violate labor laws, providing a fertile source of profit for the very corporations that openly buy politicians. In fact, these corporations have been known to lobby for bills that will keep incarceration rates high, so as not to threaten their income.
Each individual police officer may be a perfect angel in their personal life (though the amount I have personally seen take joy in inflicting suffering upon others contradicts that), but that does not change the fact that every day, they go to work for a state that puts profits ahead of human lives, that uses guns, mace, handcuffs, and batons to enforce the rule of the wealthy, to remove people from their homes when they can't pay their landlords who keep jacking the rent up year after year, to ticket those same people for sleeping in their cars, to stop and frisk a young black kid walking home and arrest him for the joint in his pocket.
The police, as it exists in the United States of America and other western nations, need to be abolished. Armed state enforcers should not be showing up to public health situations involving addicts and the mentally ill and disabled folks. I should not have to worry that I'm going to be shot for removing my wallet when I got stopped for a broken tail light. I should not have to worry that the state is going to discover I enjoy a particular substance and throw me in a cage. And even if the only crimes on the books were violent ones, the prison system is in no way reformative and does not prevent crime or keep people safe. (See sources).
I'm not going to spend another hour typing out the exact plan for how the public safety functions of the police would be replaced because this has already been addressed with numerous other resources. One of my sources includes a video on Rojava, the autonomous zone of 2 million+ people in Northern Syria that has done away with the State and has no police force that resembles anything that exists in the United States. These are not fantasies as the ruling class would have us believe - hundreds of thousands of people worldwide live in self-governed communities. I invite you to consider whether that's a space you can occupy.
'm going to have to let this one stew a bit. We agree about the need for health care. So high five there. However, I don't believe there is such a thing as a victimless crime. Every action has consequences no matter how small. You might not be hurting anyone else, but you are probably hurting yourself. If I'm supposed to care about my fellow man, then how can I allow him to hurt himself? To what extent do I owe it to that person and society to help and what options should be available to me to do so? To me, the law is one such tool and I think it should be used to help people to not bring harm to themselves and other people.
I personally believe that people should have autonomy over their own bodies, and that no one else in society should have a say as to whether or not my particular hobbies are "too dangerous for my own good." However, even if I didn't believe that, I would still believe that the prescription here (heavily fining people or putting them in prison) is significantly worse than the risk posed by recreational drugs, and that other non-violent crimes such as immigration through non-legal channels truly are victimless. Furthermore, even a person truly concerned about others in society harming themselves through their own lifestyle would have to acknowledge that the current legal system is not consistent whatsoever in matching punishment to risk. Food manufacturers put all kinds of harmful substances that are banned by other countries into their products, and not only are they not arrested for it, they're rewarded with mass profits. Meanwhile, tobacco and alcohol are legal, while marijuana (considerably less harmful in essentially every way) are not.
So basically:
1. I should have autonomy over my own body, and it is not the government's place to protect me from myself.
2. Even if it was the government's job to protect me from myself, they would be doing an absolutely terrible job of it right now, since the criminal justice system punishes things that are relatively harmless and actively rewards things that are extremely harmful.
I can respect that. I think this is a common misconception. I think the difference here is that to me there is a clear and reasonable distinction to be made between private and corporate property. I don't think it is acceptable to do harm to the property of the citizens you are trying to help. If you burn down a Target, yeah whatever. That doesn't affect Target at all, but the people who work there might not be able to provide for their families after you've destroyed their place of employment. That only makes you look bad to people who might otherwise be persuaded to understand and help you if you just explained it to them. But when you destroy local businesses and cause damage to your city, you do real harm to the people who live there. I'm not sure how that is supposed to help. If I'm missing something here, then let me know.
Property damage helps because those in power care more about money than lives, so creating a vast expense is one way of getting their attention and forcing their hands. When peaceful protest has been ineffective (as it has in the case of people being murdered by the police), the next escalation above that is property damage. Property damage is frequently compared by the law and those in the media to violence against people, and the comparison I don't think is on any solid ground whatsoever.
You mention that burning down corporate stores hurts the people employed there. First of all, stores like Target guaranteed the jobs of people who were employed there, and the stores are usually completely insured. Secondly, even if that weren't the case, these corporate chain businesses usually drive away small businesses when they open, so the very existence of those stores threatens peoples' livelihoods, and the people who work there are often not paid enough to feed their families on one job regardless.
Finally, what's the alternative to property damage? There's "peaceful protest," aka marching around chanting with signs - that accomplished next to nothing, in part because the only way it's even allowed is if it's easy to ignore. Take Colin Kaepernick, for example. Kneeling for the national anthem was just about the definition of peaceful protest. It just happened to be on a platform that had a lot of attention. And he was blacklisted from the NFL. Or let's look at blocking roads - again, non-violent, just inconvenient (emergency vehicles, the go-to response of most people, have alternate routes for blocked roads, otherwise they'd be in trouble here in construction season), and the State responded by arresting hundreds and making examples of them by hitting them with extreme penalties and referring to them as "terrorists." Finally, after years, it became clear that this was ineffective, as the police continued to shoot people down in the street (or in their own beds) with no repercussions.
Well then, how about voting? The fact that nearly all of the cities with the most heavily militarized police forces, and the cities where most of these shootings occur, are under Democratic administration should show the futility of that idea. Both the Democratic and Republican parties support massive police budgets and have no issue dispatching the cops to deal with any problematic citizens under their rule. Joe Biden directly stated that he wanted to INCREASE police funding in response to shootings, to pay for a number of miniscule reforms that have been tried before and have not led to any decrease in police brutality.
When peaceful protest and voting have both failed, and people are continuing to die, what is to be done? To put things in perspective, significantly more people - about a thousand - were killed in 2019 alone by police than have been killed in every school shooting in American history. This problem is not going away without drastic action. And the next escalation above strictly peaceful protest and electoralism is property damage. I have my own thoughts about the ethical ways to go about this, but obviously groups of angry people are not always rational, and their anger is more than justified.
Sources:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/20 ... clearances (Crime clearance rates)
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html (Incarceration rate by offense)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnenjI ... rDemocracy (The Communes of Rojava: A Model In Societal Self Direction)
https://theoutline.com/post/7423/no-mor ... i=j5bqorr7 (Decent article, also considerable secondary sources on re-offense and the ineffectiveness of additional policing)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics ... ings-2019/ (Police shooting database)