ΣΧΟΛΙΟ ΙΣΤΟΛΟΓΙΟΥ : Όταν οι New York Times φιλοξενούν άρθρο υπέρ της ΚΑΤΑΡΓΗΣΗΣ της αστυνομίας (κάτι που ήδη αποφάσισε το Δημοτικό Συμβούλιο Μινεάπολης), καταλαβαίνει κανείς ότι κάτι πολύ σοβαρό συμβαίνει στις ΗΠΑ...ή μάλλον θα γίνει της κοινής εκδιδομένης γυναικός το κιγκλίδωμα. Στη Μινεάπολη, το δημοτικό συμβούλιο αποφάσισε να αντικαταστήσει την αστυνομία με "κοινοτικό σύμφωνο ασφαλείας". Το οποίο πρακτικά σημαίνει ιδιωτικοποίηση και οποίος μπορεί πληρώνει σεκιουριτάδες και οι υπόλοιποι την τρώνε. Να βάλετε ρομπότ παίδες , κάτι σε Robocop.
Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.
Enough.
We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is
to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There
is not a single era in United States history in which the police were
not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South
emerged from the slave patrols in
the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the
North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped
quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
So
when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck
until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a
police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as
his job.
Now
two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding
the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.
The
first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you
think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise
complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with
other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad
guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said
Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project
at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin.
But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police
officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of
the month.”
We
can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the
worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.
Second,
a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other
marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration,
violence and death.
I’ve been
advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your
view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or
simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all
make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half.
Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize
and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas,
Los Angeles and other cities.
History
is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in
the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the
future.
The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation
into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most
common complaint against the police was about “clubbing” — “the routine
bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or
blackjacks,” as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.
The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.
After
the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police
actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of
the 24 surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations,
like working to build “community support for law enforcement” and
reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by
police officers.”
These commissions
didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent
function each time police violence led to protests. Calls for similar reforms
were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney
King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the
killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report
of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century
Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training,
police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force
policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early
on.
But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists
and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any
more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose
chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved
to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would
back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.
Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.
Why
on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to
change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to
reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of
officers.
But don’t get me wrong. We
are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just
close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
We
should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward
providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this,
there would be less need for the police in the first place.
We
can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained
“community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs
help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing
people in prison.
What about rape?
The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the
inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual
violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are
often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.
When
people, especially white people, consider a world without the police,
they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without
law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so
indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and
caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and
the police as solutions to violence and harm.
People
like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision
of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism,
on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look
like if it had billions
of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This
change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show
that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and
justice.
When the streets calm and
people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or
create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the
times those efforts have failed.
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