You know what you are doing by posting like this here. It comes across as being deliberately inflammatory. EC culture is different to many imageboards where posters try to bump their thread to to the top by being deliberately inflammatory and by posting bait. Seeing that you didn't just create the thread and leave, I'll give you my honest opinion.
Firstly, I do not support black lives matter.
George Floyd was indeed not a very good person. However, I do think that the police officer in question used unnecessary force. This is where my sympathy with the protesters/rioters ends. I see the underlying (unconscious?) purpose of the movement as a whole as just the strengthening of progressive political power.
Actual police abolition (as some anarchists imagine) would be the abolition of the modern state. This would result in anarchy, vigilante justice, and revenge killings.
Now we can debate about this all we want, but I think any such abolition should involve a very gradual change spurred on by incentives (cultural, economic, etc.). When I went up north in the countryside to buy certain foods and goods in rural Canada, there was no owner on site, just a donation box and various goods labelled with prices. The owner of the farm had the expectation that I would pay the appropriate price for the goods, and not just steal the goods and money outright. There was mutual trust between me and owner, and an expectation of a general "good will" between people. The state has no role here. I cannot be punished if I break the law, and the law is essentially meaningless here.
If such a thing as a stateless society can exist in a real meaningful sense, this is the closest in modern society (that I have personally witnessed) that approaches it.
I do not see such a form of organization arising in Minneapolis from actual police abolition.
Needless to say, this won't happen. The establishment is not going to abolish the police. It knows it can't.
The movement of "Police Abolition" is simply a demonstration of how far the mainstream will go to lie to their base to convince people that what they are doing is "radical".
This being said, what is likely to come from this Police Abolition/Defunding movement and how does it differ from what I want?
I'm in favour of community control over discretionary policing. This means that community representatives should be able to control how police patrol their neighbourhoods when no crime is committed. I also think active neighbourhood watches are good to the extent that they are possible. The purpose is to increase community ownership over the people who police them. If discretionary policing is essential to keep crime low (as most middle-class communities think) they can choose this tactic. If they don't believe this, they can accept a possibly higher crime rate. The point, once more, is control and ownership. If communities have a problem with police policy they are empowered to directly reform such policy, starting with how the police patrol their own neighbourhoods. The most likely result, again, is that this won't happen.
How does this differ from what's likely to come from the Defund/Abolishment movement that we are seeing right now?
Well, there might be a name change, a change of uniform (to trick gullible activists), or maybe some tweaks on the rules of engagement, but otherwise, the change will largely be cosmetic.
However, if this is really the beginning of an actual restructuring of the police I see two directions in which it can go:
Firstly, an ideological remaking of the police force. The restructuring would allow them to fire political wrong-thinkers from the department and replace them with ideologues and loyalists. This would mark the transformation of the police into a kind of progressive commissariat. Most likely this reform would work towards directly decriminalizing certain property and drug crimes in certain geographical areas to artificially equalize arrests between black and white communities. I can't imagine this transition not resulting in a massive crime spike. Knowledge of which will probably be suppressed until it is impossible to avoid the fact that the reform movement killed more black lives than it saved.
This is likely lead to the second direction: the full federalization of the police force.
This is a good arrangement for Democrats since it takes responsibility from Democratically ruled municipalities and places it with the Feds who still have some Republican patsies to blame things on. Still, even without the Republicans, Federal bureaucracies will be very hard to be held accountable for specific abuses since problems that occur in inner cities will be attributed to policies and systems designed to control order on a national scale. I speculate here that bureaucrats will ramp up police powers across the board in the hope that they might fix things in the black communities where problems emerge. This in fact incentives police brutality. The members of police that are most willing to get involved in mass crime ridden zones are those who tend be more violent and sociopathic, instead of those who are peaceable and empathetic. This results in more action being taken against police brutality, then local police becoming more ineffective, then crime rates increasing, and so on. You see where this is going.
All in all, a very bad circumstance.
Progressive spokespeople want a homogenization of the problem with other abstract issues like "racism". They want top-down oversight where it is never clear who is responsible for anything, and where a solvable problem is converted into a driver for more spending and political capital. The red team is made accountable to the blue team, or replaced with the blue team altogether. The result: increasing progressive political capital, while restraining their ideological enemies. This type of political maneuvering would be admirable, if it weren't so scarily effective.
You know what you are doing by posting like this here. It comes across as being deliberately inflammatory. EC culture is different to many imageboards where posters try to bump their thread to to the top by being deliberately inflammatory and by posting bait. Seeing that you didn't just create the thread and leave, I'll give you my honest opinion.
Firstly, I do not support black lives matter.
George Floyd was indeed not a very good person. However, I do think that the police officer in question used unnecessary force. This is where my sympathy with the protesters/rioters ends. I see the underlying (unconscious?) purpose of the movement as a whole as just the strengthening of progressive political power.
Actual police abolition (as some anarchists imagine) would be the abolition of the modern state. This would result in anarchy, vigilante justice, and revenge killings.
Now we can debate about this all we want, but I think any such abolition should involve a very gradual change spurred on by incentives (cultural, economic, etc.). When I went up north in the countryside to buy certain foods and goods in rural Canada, there was no owner on site, just a donation box and various goods labelled with prices. The owner of the farm had the expectation that I would pay the appropriate price for the goods, and not just steal the goods and money outright. There was mutual trust between me and owner, and an expectation of a general "good will" between people. The state has no role here. I cannot be punished if I break the law, and the law is essentially meaningless here.
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