The Riders Come Out at Night by @darwinbondgraham and Ali Winston is a highly detailed, highly local recent history of Oakland PD. It's essential reading for abolitionists. So many of the arguments against police abolition are based on abstract ideas about the police that just don't match up with real experience. So many opponents of abolition are deeply invested in theoretical and false ideas of what police do. This book is loaded with reality. It's really good -- I highly recommend it!
Watch the watchers is a website set up by Stop LAPD Spying where you can look up LAPD officers by name or serial number and see their official headshots. It's incredibly useful for cop watching and other activism and it's one year old today!
Since it came up in another thread I thought I'd post a link to About Face, an anti-war, anti-cop veterans organization.
We are Post-9/11 service members and veterans organizing to end a foreign policy of permanent war and the use of military weapons, tactics, and values in communities across the country. As people intimately familiar with the inner workings of the world’s largest military, we use our knowledge and experiences to expose the truth about these conflicts overseas and the growing militarization in the United States.
Capitalists are lion tamers and the working people they exploit are the lion. Capitalists provide us with food, shelter, education, and other goods, and in return we perform for their profit. Lion tamers feed and shelter their lions for the same reason. Without those needs being met we and the lions would rebel and kill them or else die and not profit our masters.
Without education, without training, we and the lions wouldn't be of use to them. Capitalists and lion tamers meet the needs of their victims that are expedient for them to meet. In neither case are the interests of their victims a motive. But we're not lions. We can at least potentially figure out what's going on and act on our understanding.
Lion tamers whip their lions to make them perform and capitalists have the police to keep us in line. By the time they're trained lions only need to see the whip to know what's best for them to do. Without violence or the threat of violence we'd rise up and rebel.
Just following on from my post bout my brother getting jail time. Y'all got realize as young black men we always got keep our eyes open fo the police. No cap they always looking at a way to book us !! Fact .
Smallest lil thing , fk looking the wrong way and they get those cuffs out you feel me?
They circle round us istg like vultures ready to swoop down.
We need keep BLM alive . Ain jus a fashion thing after George Floyd . This shit real NOW. #blacklivesmatter#blackmastodon 👊🏾
@Jaden3 100% agree #defundthepolice#policeabolition I highly recommend reading the book Becoming Abolitionists it helped me learn a lot about why we really need to abolish the police and how it is a matter of racism, ableism, classism, and more
If you want to know the level of extreme violence police are capable of just look at what people will do to avoid it. Homeless people will literally die of exposure on the street in front of a vacant building rather than breaking in and saving themselves. What kind of terroristic threats would it take for you to make that choice? That's what police will do to you.
Police violence is more than just physical assault, more than just shooting, killing, beating.
Every day unhoused people die from living on the street. Police stop them from building themselves houses on the hundreds of millions of acres of unused land, from living in the millions of vacant units in the US. This is also police violence.
Every day millions of people go hungry in the US. Police stop them from eating the millions of tons of wasted food. This is also violence.
Anarchists don’t have to agree on a best way of doing things or to find single answers to questions about the future. Anarchism won’t come to pass when enough people agree on how to live anarchically but rather when enough people feel the price for any other way of life is too high, too bloody. It’s not a single best way of doing things, it’s what’s left when the cops are gone. It’s what free people can build on that foundation.
Here's a problem I have trying to explain to people why I want to abolish police, abolish prisons. No matter how I phrase things many people hear a moral argument. That police are evil, prisons are evil. But this isn't at all what I mean. In fact seeing the issue that way, as a matter of good and evil, completely obscures the explanation. It brings it into the realm of opinion. It lets people nod their heads and stop listening. Of course people can disagree over things like this!
Dichotomies like that, good/evil, moral/immoral, work this way to cover up truths about the world that are impossible to face and still go on normally. The two poles of such dichotomies immediately conjure up a continuum between them. If something is evil or immoral it can be made less evil or less immoral and that's some kind of progress. Not accepting this kind of incrementalism makes one a moralist, a perfectionist, an idealist, a purist, someone who can ultimately be ignored, someone they can agree to disagree with, like we all do in order to get along with people with so many matters of opinion. There's no need to listen any more, it's just another extreme theoretical position among all the others.
Imagine buzzards eating corpses on the road with their heads deep in the guts of a rotting deer. The stench of death, the slimy putrid ooze on their bald heads. It's not evil, it's how they live, but it's not how human beings live. Being seen by other people willingly, joyfully, smearing one's body with corpse juice, reveling in putrefied rotting dead goop, eating gobbets of rotting flesh, would be shameful, inhuman. It's beyond good and evil. It's not the kind of thing that invites accepting, polite disagreement. No one wants to hear that person's explanations about why wallowing in rotten corpses is good, actually. We want to run far away.
This is what the police are like, what prisons are. They thrive on the bodies of murder victims, they blossom on fields soaked with human blood, rotting corpses. Cops, jailers, their supporters, are willingly swimming in pools of rotten stinking death, joyfully breathing its vapors. This essence is very, very well- hidden inside whitewashed mausoleums by ideologies, social narratives, cultural handshakes, and so on.
I saw this all of a sudden a few years ago and I can't unsee it, the corpses swinging in the wind hanged by the tens of thousands and left to decay, but it's not so easy to explain to people. It's not a matter of stating the right facts, measuring the right statistics, it's a way of looking at the world. It can't be explained quickly, which in practice means often it can't be explained at all.
A great deal of discussion about police abolition concerns non-police responses to violent crime, but most police work is unrelated to violent crime. Most, maybe all, of this is economic in nature – designed to keep working people from using productive property to meet their own needs directly – to keep the commons enclosed. This work means the police are inextricably integrated into the economy in surprising ways that are largely undiscussed in the context of abolition, which would trigger monumental, almost unimaginable changes in how we as a society meet our human needs through work. It’s likely that the end of policing would mean the end of capitalism, which suggests that it won’t be easy to achieve given the magnitude of what’s at stake.
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.
The police are abusive and murderous; they daily use violence to preserve an unjust status quo.
And sometimes, sort of as a side note, they respond to abuses by non-police, usually when the victims are important to them and the perpetrators lack power.
When I advocate police abolition, people will often respond “but what’s the alternative?” as if the police meaningfully provide a service that we’d need to provide some other way in their absence.
The Nazi state also kept “order” of a sort in the territories they ruled. The Nazis fielded police who committed abuses and murders and atrocities and used violence to uphold an unconscionable status quo.
And sometimes, sort of as a side note, they responded to what we might colloquially think of as “normal crimes.” Murders. Robberies. That sort of thing.
The world didn’t need Nazi police to address those crimes. At no point should the world have stopped and asked “but what’s the alternative?”
Wie die #Polizei für „#Sicherheit“ sorgt (also nur ihre eigene natürlich):
Polizistinnen zerschlagen in #Leipzig Flaschen auf einer Wiese, die von Kinder und Hunden genutzt wird, weil sie zu dumm oder zu faul sind, sie einfach einzusammeln. Als Anwohnerinnen sie deshalb zur Rede stellen, werden die Beamt*innen ausfallend, sprechen Platzverweise aus und drohen mit Gewahrsam.