A lot of people would probably say that we “need” some sort of Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). In the US, the DMV manages the critical process of licensing people to operate motor vehicles on American roadways.
Considering that there are nearly 300 million cars and over 4 million miles of road, it’s very important that we have some kind of minimum standard of skill and ability to keep all those people safe as they hurtle their multi-ton boxes of metal, plastic, and glass at high rates of speed in very close proximity to each other and people walking or cycling.
Even with the DMV managing this process, 46,000 Americans still die each year from traffic collisions. So you can only imagine how bad it would be if there were no DMV!
Now let’s imagine that we were to discover that, in addition to licensing drivers, employees of the DMV were, in their official capacity, routinely killing people and stealing millions of dollars from them each year. Let’s imagine we discovered one DMV was rife with gangs that commit serial murder and another had set up a torture chamber where DMV employers spent years torturing DMV patrons.
@HeavenlyPossum In the UK, where we have 67 million people and 33.2 million cars, we had 1,695 road accident fatalities in 2022. That's 2.9 per 100,000 people compared to 12.9 for the US.
Mind you, Sweden had 2.2, and Norway had 2. But the US doesn't look very good on this.
(I know this is pulling your thread off topic, but I think the US relationship with cars is very like its relationship with guns)
Absolutely. Driving in the UK is absurdly safer and easier than driving in the US. Politely taking turns? Letting people merge onto the carriageway? It’s like a fairy tale.
@HeavenlyPossum@simon_brooke The roads around me regularly (like multiple times a week) see screaming processions of marked and unmarked copmobiles, running full lights and sirens. I only very rarely saw anything like that in all my years in NYC. But even civilians just fucken whip around corners in my ends, motorcyclists burn rubber at intersections, etc. It may be different where you are, it’s a genuine issue for us.
@HeavenlyPossum@simon_brooke LOL!!! Come drive in London or Birmingham some time. Every time I go out on my bike or in my car some perfectly normal otherwise probably sane person does something dangerous and illegal.
We have a very strange phenomenon in the US where people tend to pride themselves on the idea that they are particularly free. It’s the national myth of the US—brave patriots fought for their freedom from a tyrant king and set up the most perfect government to preserve that liberty in perpetuity, and you should not Tread on Me because Americans are ready at a moment’s notice to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, etc etc.
But also, at the same time, armed bureaucrats called “the police” routinely tread all over Americans. The police routinely abuse Americans, shoot them, assault them, rape them, torture them, spy on them, and kill their dogs. And most Americans shake their heads and blame…a few bad apples.
To explain this discrepancy, we should consider that Americans are inundated since childhood with propaganda to the effect that the police exist to protect innocent people from aggression by other people—what we might colloquially think of as “crime.” Murders, assaults, robberies, rapes, that sort of thing.
So how do American police spend their time? A huge amount of it is devoted to stealing from the American public in processes like “civil asset forfeiture” or extortionate traffic stops.
But more importantly, they spend their effort ensuring the preservation of the status quo from even the mildest, most legal and ostensibly constitutionally protected criticism.
In 2020, two people stole jewelry and hijacked a UPS delivery truck in Ohio. They took the driver hostage. Anything they had stolen was insured. The truck was being tracked and they had no meaningful way of escaping. So 19 police officers decided to shoot at them on a crowded road, killing both suspects, the hostage, and a completely unrelated bystander.
They did this because one of their other most critical roles is the preservation of capitalist property and enforcement of capitalist property claims.
I feel like I’m talking to an alien when I encounter someone who thinks police are good or necessary for us, as opposed to our capitalist and state elites. I try to imagine a world in which the DMV routinely behaved like this and was just accepted as a necessary part of society. What level of violent abuse is necessary to admit that violent abuse is the purpose of policing, and that “fighting crime” is at best a tangential byproduct of their enforcement of stability and property claims?
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