#police abolition

[hussyknee]

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[sentientsky]

just a friendly reminder that, just because slavery was formally "abolished" in the so-called united states* in 1865, enslavement itself is still ongoing in the form of incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people

(*i say "so-called" because the US is a settler-colonial construction founded on greed, extraction, and white supremacy) recommended readings/resources:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

"How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended" by Daniele Selby

"So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist" by Mariame Kaba

"The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19, Racial Capitalism & Decarceration" from Democracy Now! [VIDEO]

[mionghairearracht]

....really fucking fed up with the amount of people ive seen imply or outright state that anyone advocating for police abolition has never experienced violent crime.

guess what, some of us have and for many of us a huge part of the reason we support it is because of how absolutely horrible our experiences were.

things police have done for me when ive come in contact with them

tell me that a person strangling a coworker wasn't a reason to call and then refuse help

get pissed when i called back because someone was being fucking choked and they were forced to send someone out

get pissed and accuse the staff of purposely attracting problems after we installed a sharps container to reduce the used needles we'd been dealing with for months when they saw them after we reported another assault....

which took them an hour to arrive at and then they got pissed the victim had gone with paramedics to the hospital and we hadn't somehow held the person who did it for them

harass two witnesses to an assault because the were homeless

harass me because i carry narcan and they overheard me say i used it to paramedics at an overdose

see the shelter van in a parking lot and come in to harass the shelter workers as they helped someone

and so much more

there has never been a situation where police have helped me when i experienced violence and there are a ton where they have made shit much worse.

if the police disappeared and none of the money was redirected i would be much safer, let alone if the money went to organizations and groups who actually gave a shit about people beyond using them as punching bags

who would i call if i needed help? definitely not the people who've repeatedly harassed me, refused to help when needed, and take a fucking hour to show up when someone is being beaten.

probably one of the community groups that's managed to do a significant amount more with a fraction of the budget without guns or harassing victims.

[needabetternamelater]

Most of those require police/prisons to exist which means they're not abolition - no matter how green the box.

okay but how do you even get to abolition if you're against all reforms??

lol that’s my bad, i wasn’t being fully serious in that post. abolition isn’t against all reforms; it’s against reformism, or reformist reforms. what that means is that abolitionists are critical of reforms which “subordinate their objectives to the […] rationality of a given system and policy” or which “reject those objectives and demands which are incompatible with the preservation of the system.” in other words, most reforms which claim they will fix police or prisons are simply validating those systems by pouring more time, effort, money, and resources into them. in the case of the #8cantwait proposal, a lot of the demands call for more training, which costs more money. this type of reformism and the movement for abolition are fundamentally opposed. abolitionist dylan rodriguez explains it this way: “liberal-to-progressive reformism attempts to protect and sustain the institutional and cultural-political coherence of an existing system by adjusting and/or refurbishing it [while] abolitionism addresses the historical roots of that system in relations of oppressive, continuous, and asymmetrical violence and raises the radical question of whether those relations must be uprooted and transformed (rather than reformed or “fixed”) for the sake of particular peoples’ existence and survival.”

so, reformist reforms don’t get us to abolition. how does abolition work? abolitionist campaigns do push for reforms, but a certain type of reform which DOES move us toward abolition: non-reformist reforms. these are measures which reduce the power of oppressive systems while illuminating their fundamental inability to solve the crises they create. these reforms return power and resources to the public while shrinking systems; they move beyond the logic of the prison-industrial complex to prefigure a more just world. they often involve taking money and resources AWAY from the system. in the case of police, this might look like making it easier to fire police, making it so that the settlements for their lawsuits come out of their salaries rather than taxpayer money, reducing police budgets or the size of police forces, etc. these don’t get us to abolition in one fell swoop, but they do get us a little bit closer to a world without police.

it can sometimes be hard to tell whether a given proposed reform is reformist or non-reformist. in the wake of the murder of mike brown and the subsequent protests, many cities adopted body camera legislation. when these measures were passed, many believed they would lead to increased police transparency and make it easier to get rid of cops who used excessive force. however, abolitionists point out now that police departments received new equipment and increased funding, while the public gained little as people continued to die at the hands of police. there are a couple different tools i use in organizing to evaluate whether a given reform is reformist or non-reformist. the first is a set of questions from abolitionist erica r. meiners:

who benefits from this campaign, initiative, reform, form of resistance? who doesn’t, and why?

what are the logics, languages, and “common sense” discourses that initiatives validate and/or reinforce? are these logics liberatory or punitive?

who is working on this initiative? who is not? why them? why now?

is this something that we, or others, will be organizing to undo in five years because it is used to cage or dehumanize people?

looking at these questions and thinking about the #8cantwait campaign, i think it becomes pretty clear that those measures are not worth supporting. police departments and governments benefit if these measures are adopted by the movement because the revolutionary energy which has resulted in calls for police abolition gets co-opted into proposals that will actually give more money to police. the proposal assumes that more police training will fix police brutality, and that a 72% decrease in police brutality is an appropriate goal when the rest of us won’t settle for anything less than a 100% decrease. the organization behind #8cantwait is campaign zero, whose website says it spends donations on "the analysis of policing practices across the country,” “research to identify effective solutions to end police violence,” and “the development of model legislation and advocacy to end police violence nationwide.” analysis, research, modeling; none of those things actually concretely reduce the size or power of the police. 

the other resource i want to mention is a graphic from abolitionist org critical resistance that can help evaluate proposed reforms as well. reformist reforms are in red and non-reformist reforms in green. most of the #8cantwait fall under more training, highlighted in red. 

[fiercynn]

okay, if you have ever made or reblogged a “hold your nose and vote for biden” post, this is for you.

here’s the fucking thing about these kinds of posts. i've been seeing them since i first returned to tumblr in, I think, late 2022? they've certainly increased in frequency since october 7, but they were there before too, ready to counter any kind of opposition to biden that has cropped up. many of them are not just trying to educate people about what positive things biden has done, which, like, at least I can understand the motivation behind those ones? but so many of them are directly in response to people criticizing biden, and their only real point is “sure you’re upset at this thing biden did, but have you considered the election?” starting YEARS before the next presidential election, mind you.

and october 7 only made that clearer. i don’t think it had been a week before i saw these posts cropping up. can you not see how fucking ghoulish that is? to look at the rightful pain and anger of those whose relatives and communities are being slaughtered with active american support, to respond to one of the few pieces of agency most americans have in influencing what their governments do – their vote – by saying “yes but trump would be worse.” as if the primary people you’re lecturing – palestinians, muslims, arabs, black people, indigenous people, disabled people, other marginalized people – don’t remember exactly how bad it was under trump!

and even if you think not voting is an empty gesture – something i, who studied political science at a mainstream american lib college, who has worked as a field organizer on a previous democratic presidential campaign and for several policy campaigns, who currently works in public policy in america, used to believe, but have absolutely changed my mind on – what is in no way an empty gesture is saying publicly that you will not vote for someone. the arguments people usually have about why simply not voting is bad are that you can’t tell why someone is not voting, so it is as likely to be apathy or disenfranchisement as it is a political statement. but saying publicly that you will not vote for someone, and why you will not vote for them, absolutely is a political statement, and potentially a powerful one! but you choose to negate and/or ignore that by trotting out the “lesser of two evils” bullshit.

and then there’s the whole “yes but people will DIE under trump”. PEOPLE ARE DYING NOW. even if you’re fucking racist and have decided that palestinian lives don’t count, have you forgotten biden’s ongoing covid minimalism and dismantling of the CDC’s covid research and prevention infrastructure? have you forgotten his increase in spending for law enforcement scant years after the murder of george floyd and his administration's surveillance of protesters, including cop city protesters? have you forgotten his recent ramp-up in deportations of undocumented immigrants, including the active continuation of many trump-era policies?

maybe you have forgotten all those things and do purport to care about palestinians, but you just think that biden is doing his best to influence netanyahu and is getting nowhere! but then you must have forgotten all of the things that biden and his administration themselves have done to further this fucking genocide, including:

continuing to send arms to israel

putting together a military task force within days of yemen’s red sea blockade and attacking yemeni ships

bombing yemen

bombing syria

bombing iraq

vetoing three ceasefire resolutions at the united nations

testifying to defend israel and its genocide and occupation at the international court of justice

refusing to rescue palestinian-americans stuck in gaza

halting funding to the united nations relief and works agency for palestinian refugees (UNRWA) based on israeli claims that 12 of UNRWA’s over 30,000 staff were hamas agents, even though u.s. intelligence has not been able to independently verify this

lying that he’s personally seen photos of babies beheaded by hamas when he hadn’t because they didn’t exist (and even when his own staff cautioned him that reports of beheaded babies may not be credible)

questioning the number of palestinian deaths reported by the gaza ministry of health (when even israel has not questioned them, since they are in fact proud of those numbers)

perpetuating lies about hamas having committed the attack on al-aqsa hospital

questioning united nations reports of adults and children raped by israeli soldiers while claiming to have proof (that no one else has seen) of hamas doing the same

honestly so many more things that i can’t remember them all but others feel free to add

or maybe you haven’t forgotten any of that, and think that you’re still justified in lecturing people about why they should vote for biden, because you genuinely believe trump would still be worse. if that is the case, you have still failed to see that by saying you will vote for biden no matter what, you are part of the problem of biden continuing to act like this. because biden is counting on fear of trump to win him this next election no matter what else he does. despite his appalling polling numbers, despite the knowledge that he is losing the palestinian-american vote, the arab-american vote, the muslim-american vote, the black american vote, the youth vote – despite all of that, he is secure in the idea that he will still win because he is better than trump. can you not see how that allows him to act without impunity? how it becomes increasingly impossible for his base to influence what he’s doing if he thinks that they will be with him no matter what? this is how you make yourself complicit to biden’s actions, by not affording anyone even the slightest power to hold him accountable for anything.

and in most cases, the “hold your nose and vote for biden” thing is the response of people who aren’t even being instructed by others not to vote for biden. it is their response to people saying they themselves are choosing not to vote for biden. fucking ghoulish.

[dandelionjack]

my vision for a utopian future is a britain where the police have long since been abolished and replaced with non-carceral social services but doctor who is still running and when kids see the TARDIS on screen they ask their parents “what’s a police” and it becomes the only living memory of a bygone age of oppression and control. kind of like how the blue telephone boxes themselves are extinct now and more associated with the tv show itself than the cops, but this time with the police force as a whole. no more pigs in uniform only dr who

[eyes-stiched-open]

Executed a pregnant mother for $20 worth of items.

This is too much.

[newsfromstolenland]

If your reaction to hearing calls to abolish the police and prisons is "but then who will protect people?", you're missing the point.

Cops and prisons exist to maintain white, colonial systems. They exist to keep power in the hands of the privileged.

They don't protect marginalized people, they persecute us. Maybe you're lucky enough to belong to one of the groups that police exist to protect (white people, the rich, etc.), but if you've been paying attention you should know that they only protect you because of your privilege.

So when you say "without police and prisons, who will protect people?", what you actually mean is "without police and prisons, who will protect privilege and the privileged while actively harming everyone else?"

When your instinct is to ask who will help people if not cops and prisons, you need to take a minute to reflect on why prisons and cops protect you in particular. And ask yourself if that protection is really worth the lives of the people of colour, disproportionately Black people, that police and prisons kill.

Because it shouldn't be worth it to you, and if it is then at least admit that you think your life is worth more than the lives of people of colour.

[thoughtportal]

[thrashkink-coven]

I really don’t like making predictions or fortunes because it’s really embarrassing whenever they’re wrong but whatever, I feel quite confident in this one.

To my American Luciferians and Satanists, I’m so so sorry. The dawn of the rebel star is now. If you were waiting for your sign that the revolution is neigh, here it is. Things are going to get very dark, that’s the time when he shines the brightest.

These next two or so years are going to be very intense. I don’t talk very much here about my work as a police abolitionist, but I am very very serious about systematically deconstructing the colonialist systems of supremacy that have historically kept all working people as slaves to the oppressive capitalist regime. I have involved myself with my local police abolitionist groups in my community and we are making active attempts to undermine our reliance on police in my province, especially in situations where they are not even remotely needed. We’ve created things like a crisis hotline. Our community aid efforts have seriously changed the trajectory of many people’s lives, and prevented the unjust murders of many folks from police.

My work as a revolutionary has been commanded by Lucifer. It’s not optional to our relationship. Being a devotee of the rebel star means forever following in his footsteps, liberating the weak and upholding the right to freedom. Which is often scary and risky, but mandatory. I don’t have plans to go to school or get a fancy job. My purpose for the rest of my life will always be the pursuit of liberation and the creation of art.

Very soon, many of us that have been teetering on the fence will not have an option anymore. When I say that we are living in historic times, well, you already know. The instability of America Turtle Island specifically will be extremely significant to the rest of the world. Lucifer has been watching very closely for a very long time, and he has spoken about these events like it’s gospel.

Now is the time to seriously dedicate yourself to education. Seriously, look into your local police abolitionist groups, community aid groups, see how you can get involved. Build community. Start learning how to allocate medical resources, learn how to grow food, learn how to purify water. For the love of Gods learn how to handle tear gas, and learn how to make barricades. This will be at your front door. This isn’t behind a screen anymore.

In my conversations with Lucifer he is always confident, because he knows we possess the strength to succeed. He knows it, he’s seen it. Now is not the time to be paranoid and afraid. This is exactly what Lord Lucifer has always prepared his people for, and there’s a fire in his eyes. Many of us are starting to look around at everything, and we’re getting upset seeing how wrong things are, how much worse they’re getting. It’s not fair and it’s not right, you’re not insane yet. Hold on and take this time that we have left to learn.

Prepare.

[hussyknee]

Rundown of the current protests, rioting and state crackdown that have erupted in France over the police murder of a 17 year old brown boy.

I've seen way too many Europeans on here insisting ACAB is just a USAmerican thing. It's really important y'all know that it isn't. Cops as an institution is fundamentally fascist, and in the Global North, white supremacist.

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Rest in power baby boy.

*Correction: Nahel wasn't Black, but Maghrebi (of North African descent). Apologies for the mistake.

[nando161mando]

[barryogg]

How's that for a spicy take:

There are systems that, generally speaking, work. They might have worked less well in the past, but they've improved and can be said to fulfill their stated goal. They occasionally fail, and the failure cases are broadcasted very widely by unsympathetic media.

This leads to the situation where typical, successful results are "invisible" and taken for granted as a baseline fact of life, and the occasional dramatic failures are believed to be closer to the median case. This leads to people saying that they want to do away with the entire systems. Sometimes they have vested interest in some alternative, sometimes they believe that simply replacing it with nothing would yield superior results. Either way, in places where the removal succeeded, the results are harmful (including deadly) compared to the "normal" system.

What I'm saying is that

"police abolition" is psychologically very much alike the antivaxx movement

[fiercynn]

disturbed by the number of times i've seen the idea that calling gaza an open-air prison is not okay because "that implies that gazans have done something wrong", the subtext being unlike those criminals who deserve to be in prison. i'm sorry but we HAVE to understand criminalization and incarceration as an intrinsic part of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, because settler states make laws that actively are designed to suppress indigenous and racialized resistance, and then enforce those laws in even more racist and discriminatory ways so that who is considered "criminal" is indelibly tied up with who is considered a "threat" to the settler state. that's how law, policing, and incarceration function worlwide, and how they have always functioned in israel as part of the zionist project.

talking about prison abolition in this context is not a distraction from what's happening to palestinians; it's a key tool of israel's apartheid and genocide. why do you think a major hamas demand has been for israel to release the palestinians in israeli prisons? why do you think israel nearly doubled the number of palestinians incarcerated in their prison in just the first two weeks after october 7? why do they systematically racially profile palestinians (particularly afro-palestinians, since anti-blackness is baked into israel's carceral system as well, like it is in much of the world) and arrest and charge 20% of palestinians, an astonishingly high rate that goes up even higher to 40% for palestinian men? why are there two different systems of law for palestinians and israelis, where palestinians are charged and tried under military law, leading to a conviction rate of almost 100%? why do they torture children and incarcerate them for up to 20 years just for throwing rocks? why can palestinians be imprisoned by israel without even being charged or tried? why do they keep the bodies of palestinians who have died in prison (often due to torture, execution, or medical neglect) for the rest of their sentences instead of returning them to their families?

this is not to say that no palestinians imprisoned by israel have ever done harm. but incarceration worldwide has never been about accountability for those who have done harm, nor about real justice for those have experienced harm, nor about deterring future harm. incarceration is about controlling, suppressing, and exterminating oppressed people. sometimes people from privileged classes get caught up in carceral systems as well, but it is a side effect, because the settler colonialist state will happily sacrifice some of its settlers for its larger goal.

so yes, gaza is an open-air prison. that doesn't means gazans deserve to be there. it means that no one deserves to be in prison, because prisons themselves are inherently oppressive.

[memphisfoodnotbombs]

@radicalgraff

[whatbigotspost]