#Not even mentioning how much bullshit I've gotten in regards to antisemitism but at least the cops can't tell that I'm Jewish

[vamptastic]

It's just hard to feel like anything is ever gonna change. My dumbass town bought a 250,000 tank a few years ago. And we never fucking used it! A man in my town has been standing outside city hall passing out car stickers about the death of his girlfriend at the hands of the police for months. My friend's fucking elderly grandmother was killed in a mugging and despite video evidence the perpetrator was never arrested because they don't give a shit about poor black grandmas and the young white men that shoot them and then flee the state. The billboard with a picture of perpetrator and a tip line is still up. A black kid was tased by our school's cop (what a nightmare phrase) my freshman year and the cop got away scot free by lying and saying he had a knife (he did not). When I was in high school one of the school cops made it his personal quest to interrogate me every time he saw me about the declining patriotism in our youth and why I was wearing platform boots and a spiky belt, while calling me "sweetheart" and "young girl". I still get conspicuously followed by a cop every time I'm downtown because god forbid some trannies in black clothing patronize the goddamn ice cream shop, heaven forbid some of them may even be of color.

There's very low crime here. The crimes that do happen tend to be gun violence and a lot of them are motivated by white supremacy. Sometimes meth. Very few armed robberies, just every few years somebody gets shot, usually for drug related reasons, and the media goes crazy. Also there's constant school shooting threats and my old synagogue got several credible threats a year and also the KKK is still active. But everybody here is convinced that there's these rampant gangs recruiting the black youth and crime is skyrocketing and all the kids are doing crack and somebody's going to steal their lifted truck.

Our previous sheriff literally got fired for cheating on his wife on the job using squad cars and I still feeling like I'm shouting a brick wall every time I try to point out that maybe we don't need to drastically expand the police force in our low-crime small town and maybe with the extra money we could like, have a bus. A trolley even. Maybe just expand our 'equality committee' to have more than one city employee, or figure out who keeps drawing swastikas on the black history mural instead of having the community college kids repaint it every three years. The most radical idea I float to most people is "our city budget should maybe not be 60% police" and they act like I just told them I'm personally going to be sending my army of superpredators to their home in the name of Joe Biden. Just kind of exhausting.