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Florida deputy Jesse Hernandez screamed “shots fired,” and frantically fired his gun after an acorn fell onto the roof of his squad car, making him jump.
Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.
I don’t think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.
We need to figure out what we want cops to do.
To my knowledge:
Cops have no duty to protect citizens
Cops can steal our property (in traffic stops)
Cops can murder us with minimal justification and expect minimal consequences. Indeed even lawsuits are paid by the city and not the police budget
Cops are immune to prosecution in most cases.
So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.
I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven’t done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from “things” and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don’t think we can fix the current system.
I think it’s a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, and to what extent that’s been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.
In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it’s still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they’re immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they’re an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.
We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That’s their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it’s whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.
Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.
I don’t think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.
We need to figure out what we want cops to do.
To my knowledge:
So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.
I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven’t done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from “things” and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don’t think we can fix the current system.
I got off on a tangent, my apologies.
Currently the police nationwide live up to the saying ‘police exist to protect home prices, not lives’
I think it’s a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, and to what extent that’s been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.
In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it’s still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they’re immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they’re an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.
We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That’s their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it’s whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.