Yes, please realize that this IS policing in the U.S. This isn't "bad apples" or "a glitch." Cops ARE VIOLENCE WORKERS. This is what they are. If you're finally convinced, don't just passively allow 50 to 60% of your municipal budgets to be allocated yearly to violence workers.
the public has a very skewed understanding of what cops do because of copaganda tv where beautiful moral characters are daily involved in solving crimes and shooting bad guys. in reality most of the job is ticketing and harassing innocent citizens just trying to get thru the day.
Yep. The power infrastructure of policing doesn’t allow or encourage cops to do the right thing, it only facilitates and reinforces that they do the expedient thing:
We're trying to reduce this budget here, but the propaganda telling every one how unsafe it is means ppl want to see more policing, especially against the unhoused. What they miss is if we reduce the police budget, we can put that $ into things like housing & actually start solving the issues.
Ppl see homelessness & active addiction as morality thing & therefore, those struggling with it as bad ppl. Many have no real desire to make things better for them.
I would really like to see someone or some local party try to actually make an election or a referendum about "the police are grifters and look how much taxpayer money they're wasting". I don't know if it would work, but I think you need to find SOME way to subvert the aura the police have
You can't get anywhere with "The police are monsters" because a lot of people like the idea of monsters who do bad things to the bad people, but I wonder if you can get people to understand that actually the police are lazy jackoff assholes and they're ripping you personally off
We're trying, but our provincial govt is creating the conditions that create more homeless & visible addictions. We were starting to make some head way, but our city councillors caved to the pressure.
To add: that same provisional govt has just tabled legislation that would allow them to remove elected municipal officials if it's "in the public's interest" among other things.
They're full on fascist at this point which means we're not getting any kind of good change any time soon.
Yep. Only protecting and serving the establishment, the status quo, the owner class—to the detriment of anyone who would challenge that power and its inherent violence.
I think this is where “vote harder” absolutely 100% applies? There are local and municipal elections twice a year, every year, everywhere in every locality.
Theoretically, we could elect new legislators and change the law. But the Texas GOP has run DPS, prison administration, and Border Patrol as essentially a patronage operation for decades now. You can raise a family on the salaries and you don't need a college education. People vote for that shit.
It would be naive were anyone doing that. Upsetting a machine like American Law Enforcement will be the work of many many years and will require many many things, *one of which* includes voting in local primaries and then staying engaged to hold officeholders feet to the fire.
Both times I’ve been attacked by a police riot at an otherwise peaceful protest it was under a democratic mayor, a democratic governor, and democratic representatives all the way down. Capital’s jackboots work for whomever is in charge.
I also hate to point this out buuuuuuuuuuuut Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul (mayor of NYC, Gov of NY) are both Democrats.
What is voting supposed to do in that case, hm?
Oh, I just checked: the mayor of Boston and the mayor of Cleveland (both cities we've seen police violence against protestors) are both Democrats, too.
Huh. How about that.
Which party should people vote harder for to defund the police?
Obviously not the GOP who love police violence but surely not Democrats who ridiculed the concept of defunding the police and sharply increased police budgets instead?
I’ve seen more local candidates elected on progressive platforms that follow through on none of it than I can track. They’re almost worse than the state and national ones that way. Few people are immune to the self-preservation mechanism that sets in once in a position of power.
This is a hard thing! The cops are politically better organized (They Vote Hard) than everyone else and they have a codependent relationship with the local media. Also, they’ll kill you. It is a hard thing to be their enemy.
But municipal budgets are decided by local elections anyway!
Elected officials are pretty ineffective at ringing in cops because the cops are not afraid to threaten them and their families over protecting their funding. In my city the government simply didn’t raise the police budget and in response the cops have been refusing to do their job for three years.
Bill DeBalsio ran for mayor of NYC on a platform if reigning in the NYPD and they kidnapped his child over it. He backed down and became compliant for the rest of his term.
They are a hostile occupying force, in America the state monopoly on violence in day to day life firmly rests the hands of pathetic police departments rather than the elected local governments that are supposed to over see them. They have too much power and too little oversight to be controlled atm.
And then the cops will go "Nice family, be a shame if something happened to them..." at whoever got voted in on a promise to do something about them, negotiating with terrorists ensues, and no positive change occurs
Or the cops say, I love your community revue initiative! I’ll set up a committee to look into it. Meanwhile, you have a donor complaining about kids skating in the parking lot? I could park a cruiser there, no trouble at all!
Breaking that machine will be really hard!
But locals are part of it.
And also, city council is often 2-4 hours a month. Most cities live-stream now or use a public access TV station. It’s not a major time commitment to watch, listen and participate, and it is the most effective political work around.
Voting, sadly, doesn't work for this.
The instant any city tries it the state removes the right for the city to decide it's police budget, it's happened multiple times in the last century.
See also: Kansas City. The state just decides what % of our city budget goes away, we legally have no say.
After BLM protests the ruling class didn’t defund the police, they actually increased funding. So when university students are being beaten by cops for protesting genocide, Remember Biden is a chief architect behind militarization of police, mass incarceration & 100K more cops.
Annoyingly a lot of power-jobs tend to attract people with ASPD traits. Banking, Police, Politicians, etc.
Bank programming is kinda a dream job for those types of people. It's a lot of silent power over the lives of a lot of people.
