Oh crap. This is one of the problems with the back end - long thoughtful posts get timestamped based on when they were initiated as a draft, and then they're posted underneath the quicker, breezier post that was started after and finished quicker.

I am thinking about taking mine down and postponing it, but since it's Friday and conversation will drift in and out all weekend long, there's probably room for both over all.

As long as all of you stay comfy in your navels.

Don't sweat it -- given that I post something maybe every three months, you shouldn't be worrying about scheduling around me.

It's hilariously cowardly that 3 is anonymous. Could be accidental - the timing and style is a little bit Flip.

On topic: when we talk about abolishing the cops, I just had this dystopian image of this being hijacked by the right, charter-school or private-prison style, and a bunch of private cop forces being established.

RoboCop was an optimist.

3 was me.

Is that Mossy Character using an unexpected inititialism, or are you a distinct lowercase "mc"? Moving from giant social problems to my own minor pet peeves, this is why short sets of initials suck as pseudonyms -- they make it really hard to be sure who's who. I think I've noticed an "mc" around, but not to be sure you were a distinct person.

I've been assuming mc = Mossmoss char.

You've been saying that for 10 years but I haven't come up with anything better.

Mary Catherine is retried as a pseud.

Mossy Character does occasionally go by MC, but upper case. mc, I think, is different.

RoboCop was an optimist.

The idea of a huge US corporation investing billions into completely rebuilding and revitalising the centre of Detroit doesn't seem quite as awful now as it perhaps did in 1984.

Similarly, I noted elsewhere that Idiocracy now looks like a utopia: imagine having a president who, though admittedly of limited intelligence, was honest and sincerely wanted to do his best for his country, who recognised the severity of the crisis he faced, and who had the humility and good sense to seek out the best possible brains as advisors and follow their recommendations. Camacho 2020: second-class intellect but first-class character.

You've been saying that for 10 years but I haven't come up with anything better.

This is a cry for help! Supple Prognosticator, we hear you. Sort of Porridge. Song Pird. Soylent Pink. Soup Poop. Soy Pedro. Stand Proud.

1. Compose in Word, Libre, whatever, then when you want to post paste it into the template?

Pros use LaTex.

Wait, mc is not Mossy? This shit has got to stop.

For years, I thought "Halford" was a guy using his own name.

Espy.

On topic because of my navel.

17: I started the crabbiness, but there's nothing actually wrong about using a confusing pseud, it's just, you know, confusing.

mc=MC=me

Oh, hey, I have been not mentally crediting you with your "mc" comments for years now.

Anyway, back on the post -- I have an unsupported belief that the two things I brought up aren't universal in other countries, at least not as bad as they are in the US. Does anyone who knows more have an opinion?

I have almost the opposite sentiment: that it's rare and fragile to have countries where the hiring of bullies and internal loyalty aren't the norm.

I don't know about the prevalence of bullies being different, but I am pretty confident the cultural acceptance of casual and/or misplaced violence is different in different countries. By this I mean I have seen in other countries police intervene with each other for actions that I suspect would usually be ignored if not joined in the US. I also suspect the threshold for "its time to physically manipulate this person" is lower.

Sampling bias definitely exists in this, but still.

Thinking about 26, here is a possible confounding factor. Bullies by definition punch down. They are clearly most comfortable with their excesses when they feel there is little or no chance of negative consequences. What if the composition and attitude of police forces between countries were not that different, rather the difference was the percentage of interactions that occurred where the police officer felt comfortable that any unnecessary violence or other abuse they deal out is unlikely to result in any negative consequences for themselves? How much of this is more broadly cultural, in other words?

Why is it that in the US most people would consider a cop extracting small bribes from (some) people they interact with daily to be beyond the pale, but roughing them up a bit isn't? Or is that characterization inaccurate?

I have the ex recto impression that some of these issues are universal but policing in the US is worse than in other OECD countries due to lack of gun control, racism, federalism, and so many officials being elected that are appointed or hired in other countries. Details vary obviously.

If there were a chance of hiring people to perform what are now police functions from the much bigger part of the population that doesn't fit the above description, there'd be a lot more people to choose from.

Periodic reminder that we could also easily just have non-cops perform a large number of what are now police functions.

There's an alligator meme twitter account that, a few days ago, started posting videos of alligators being mean to cops; in one of them, an alligator on someone's yard is being moved away, and it looks mostly sedate, until it suddenly slaps someone to the ground with its tail. Too bad for that animal control worker, right? No, it was a cop--because animal control is so badly funded, the cops do that work.

Right, exactly. If something doesn't need to be done by an armed person with the authority to use violence on behalf of the state, it shouldn't be done by the police.

27.last: I'd imagine that both of those scenarios are roughly equally bad. A key difference, though, is that in a lot of the "cop roughs someone up for fun" scenario, it's not a habitual thing between any two people. All the stop-and-frisk style roughing-up isn't being done by a neighborly beat cop harassing the same guy on his front porch weekly. When you call 911 about someone bird-watching suspicious, chances are very slim the dispatcher will send the same officer who responded to your call a week earlier about someone loitering who looked like they were selling drugs. Police and their supporters can easily fool themselves that each individual instance of roughing-up was necessary or at least justifiable.

Not exactly on-topic, but Jordan Peele needs to buy the movie rights to this story.

I won't be satisfied with anything less than abolition, frankly, but:

Violent acts against police are treated, with some actual reasonable theoretical justification, more severely than other violent acts. As agents of the democratic state charged with enforcing order, attacks on them are attacks on the democratic state itself, in a real sense.

If this holds, then it must equally hold that criminal acts by the police must be treated more severely than criminal acts by citizens who are not acting as agents of the state. Stripping them of the shield of qualified immunity is the barest of starts on redressing this imbalance.

Practically, there's no way to do it with the existing police cultures in most municipalities. Following the Camden, NJ model seems like one path to follow.

But seriously, abolish the police.

I wish I knew more* but the RCMP is an alternate policing model that might be a good comparison. They're a national service and members are move through posts during their career. They do much of the policing in rural areas where they are apparently hired by towns or counties**

AIASIHMB the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary only got permission to carry weapons in the early 2000s. But we know that you can kill people without guns (exposure by Saskatchewan police).

*what I do know is they have an extremely sexist culture including sexual harassment and fought against letting Sikhs wear turbans. I'm forgetting the anti-Indigenous examples that I'm sure exist.

**they were hired by the county that the NS mass murder happened in and it's come out that the officers don't live in the area and no one is on duty between 2 and 6 am. Apparently the county couldn't pay for the increased level of service. Eventually an inquest will be held into their response but the feds and the province have been fighting about who pays/leads it for weeks. Also apparently the RCMP didn't get the memo about dude wanting to murder police that went around years ago because they aren't connected to the other police forces in the area.

I did think it was very unlikely that there was a second poster with initials mc who was also very concerned with Chinese policy, history, and Taiwan in particular.

32: That's really scary.

I don't even want to make the obvious joke about now having two reasons to avoid Forks, Washington.

34: there are a lot of first nations people in Canada who have problems with the RCMP, part of it historical and part of it experiential. I don't know if the RCMP are worse in this regard than other forces (e.g. OPP) but they are responsible for a lot of the FN land as it is outside of municipal jurisdiction. One complaint about the model I've hears is similar to the complaints leveled at suburban (esp. white) cops policing urban US areas - since the RCMP posts change often these officers lack any real connection to the communities they are policing.

32: I saw that story, but the report I read missed out one crucial adjective that in retrospect I should have known was there ("multiracial").

Very good thing in retrospect that the county sheriff's office was not staffed by people who were locally recruited, locally connected and sensitive to the concerns of the community they were policing, but by people who were, in fact, sane.

Honestly, that Buffalo thing is pushing everyone towards abolition.

Everyone saw that 57 cops quit to protest the guy who cracked the old man's head on the street having been disciplined? I mean, I'm belaboring the obvious, but that's the terrifying level of in-group loyalty they have going. Disciplining a police officer for hurting a harmless member of the public is absolutely intolerable to them.

I did not.

The general point stands, and it's astounding that this is the hill they're choosing. But, "Quit" is a somewhat misleading role, they quit from the special "emergency response team" but are still working full-time as cops, there's just no "emergency response team" anymore.

Oh, I misunderstood that. I thought all the cops from the team quit, not that all the cops from the team quit the team.

Now I know why I didn't.

I wonder which two cops got suspended. There are clearly 3 directly involved in the incident: the two talking to the victim, and then the third cop who comes up behind them and pushes them forward. One of the two cops in the front then pauses to check on the guy and the cop behind him again pushes him forward. I'd guess it's the two cops in the front who got suspended, but if you're going to suspend exactly two people it should be the cop behind and the cop in front who didn't stop. If the cop behind isn't suspended at all that's infuriating.

Totally agree, but can we please not use the word 'abolition' for this? It's not what it means -- 'abolish slavery' doesn't mean firing the old slaves, hiring new and better ones, and reforming the system so that it fulfils its stated objectives. And yes, I get that the word 'reform' sounds comically tired and mild at this point.... But *literal* abolition of all police would be a utopian and widely terrifying plan, and so the word is a huge gift to the bad guys seeking to push back.

I dunno. There have been activists working on this for a while, and that's the word they're using. And I have to admit that reform doesn't sound like much to me -- "reform" happens every couple of years someplace and doesn't change anything much. I think the cataclysmic tone may be necessary. But my sense of political tactics isn't worth much.

'Lustration' is such a beautiful word, I keep waiting for its moment to arrive. And there's always 'denazification'.

If we need to reduce the number on the force with Irish ancestry, there's De-Finn-estration.

Someone show Moby the window.

The Forks, Washington story is what policing activity would be like if police were actually abolished: Neighbors get together to act as detectives and patrolmen when they perceive a threat to the community. Naturally, the most enthusiastic neighbors may not be the most empathetic to strangers. Perhaps professionals aren't such a bad idea.

I can't get on board with abolition (even in the sense that is apparently intended here) on the basis of the examples of psychopathic criminal police that we've seen in the past week and the past few years, some of whom have been criminally charged. Based on many personal interactions over the years, as well as following news reports, I'm convinced they are aberrations. Ted Bundy, Richard Nixon, and William Barr were all lawyers, but I don't support abolition of the legal profession.

From a cop

Current images of militarized police in a 'war' with a protesting public are not just snapshots of where we are right now; they are also polaroids taken years ago, only now slowly coming into focus, of a police mindset of choosing to be at war with their neighbors.

https://twitter.com/SkinnerPm/status/1268719326602944513

but I don't support abolition of the legal profession.

That would be even more popular than abolishing police.

But really they go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

The first thing we do, let's kill abolish all the lawyers police.

Perhaps professionals aren't such a bad idea.

The professionals aren't exactly covering themselves in glory right now, you know?

"Reform" to me suggests "making it illegal to cover your badge number" (it's already against the rules) and expecting that to magically solve something. Strong slogans wins allegiance and I don't think it's super hard to mentally add "as currently constituted" after "abolish the police". If they were reconstituted as something new, then that would be an abolition of policing as we know it, n'est-ce pas?

This reminds me (distantly, it's not remotely that bad) of arguing with Ken Taylor on facebook about the "green new deal", where he basically seemed mad that "green new deal" was not an entire policy proposal packed into three words, and especially that there were still many details to be worked out. Exaggeration shows you're serious and I would be very surprised if even the greenest recruit to the cause that it was literally a matter of just waking up one morning and bam!, no police.

53: I start thinking about odds, when you see multiple cops tolerating bad behavior. That is, Chauvin seems to have been the one who wanted to kill George -- the other three weren't part of a plan, they just went along with it when they saw it happening. So, if being willing to go along with casual murder is unusual in the Minneapolis police, what are the odds that Chauvin got lucky enough to happen to have gone out with three killers on the day he wanted to kill someone? Either he was super lucky, or his odds that a fellow cop would go along with murder were pretty high.

53: not just the two cops who pushed the old man over and kept walking, but all the cops who saw it and kept walking, aberrations? the very large numbers of cops who terrorized Adrian Schoolcraft, and the even larger numbers of cops who didn't stop it, aberrations? The cops in these 300-plus videos, and the other cops around them who don't intervene, aberrations? Bob Kroll, whose psychopathic letter you may or may not have read, who occupies a position to which he was elected by his fellow cops, an aberration? This sure is a system that tolerates a lot of aberrations! One rather gets the sense that cops like Schoolcraft, or Frank Serpico, etc., are aberrant, and the rest, even if they don't personally yearn to crack skulls, aren't terribly fussed about the skull-cracking their peers do. Even if they've been nice to you. You've heard, presumably, of the blue wall of silence?

As for the news, I can't imagine why anyone would continue to believe that the deference they show to the police is remotely justifiable. You may have seen that the report from the Buffalo police said that someone was injured when he tripped; of course they knew it had been recorded. The cops who beat up the Australian news crew said that the crew had been in a dangerous area; of course they knew that incident had been recorded as well. I mean, we all surely knew already that cops lie all the time. They don't even care to stop lying when they know that we know they're lying.

Ted Bundy, Richard Nixon, and William Barr were all lawyers, but I don't support abolition of the legal profession.

No, just prosecutors' offices.

58: and, you know, his other fellow officers, beyond those four, don't seem to have cared a whole lot about it afterward!

I was just looking at a thread breaking down the fatal flaws of the #8can'twait package of reforms. It's a bit tendentious (it takes for granted that all rules will be ignored all the time, which is of course an essentially nihilistic argument when we're talking about governance) but I'm nonetheless convinced.

But the writer also points to various components of police abolition, and honestly, they mostly don't look like solutions that will stick either. Defund the police? Boy, that certainly can't be reversed seconds after the next election, especially if a white woman gets raped during the election year. Cap overtime accrual/pay for military exercises? That is, if anything, more toothless than the #8 items.

And honestly, it doesn't feel like any of them get to the core of LB's question: how do you completely rebuild the broken culture of American policing? Reducing its scope (which is what defunding looks like until you zero out the budget) doesn't change the culture even a little. It's just incrementalism of another sort.

I'll take what I can get, and right now it feels like I can get more than would normally be possible. But there's a certain "your incrementalism is short-sighted and doomed, while our incrementalism is the vanguard on the march" that makes me doubt that the strategy is sound.

What it all adds up to, IMO, is that unless you can enforce strict accountability, nothing else matters. If it's the same assholes with the same CBA, it doesn't really matter how few they are: they'll fight for, and get, bigger budgets than you want, and they'll brutally Black and the rvulnerable people every chance they get.

BTW, I should be clear that there are 100% police abolitionists out there who are thinking in terms of accountability and fixing CBAs--I don't think this is my own insight. But this very popular chart doesn't include a single thing that would meaningfully change cop culture (with the lone exception of making cops liable for misconduct settlements, but I've seen that framed as taking it out of their funding or pensions which, meh. Unless it leads to individual penury, it won't matter IMO).

Let a thousand Camden, NJ,s bloom?

The thing about the 8cantwait thread that really worked for me was that lots of the "reforms" have already been enacted in places that don't have a great policing record. Like, I think it's seven out of eight for Baltimore. So while it may be indeed be nihilistic to assume that the rules will be ignored all the time, the rules ... do seem to be ignore a lot of the time.

"brutalize Black and vulnerable"

I don't think they use that slogan officially.

63: I mean, it comes down to consequences, right? "Warn before shooting" is weak tea, but if failure to do that meant instant termination and strict liability, it's a game-changer. And like I say, I don't see how using police funding to build housing instead is going to stop a cop from shooting with or without warning.

The amount of defunding you need to make the police force small enough to drown in a bathtub isn't going to be achieved*. Louisville cops have killed 2 people in a month. Cut the force in half and you get to... one shooting? Sounds like an incremental improvement to me.

*again, absent a complete reconstruction like what I suggested in the other thread.

65: It's probably on official Border Patrol t-shirts.

Exaggeration shows you're serious ... to comrades competing for in-group credibility. To outsiders not yet on board, it has the opposite effect. And anyway, I just think people should say what they mean. When I say 'Abolish ICE' and 'Abolish DHS' I do mean it literally, and it's perfectly intelligible how that could be a doable thing and why I would endorse it. 'Abolish the police!' is completely different, and so far as I can tell the people saying it aren't even sure what they mean by it let alone the far broader community that would have to be brought on board. How is that a positive? How many conversations on the doorstep do you want to have in November beginning 'S/he doesn't really mean 'abolish', here's a pamphlet with a ten-point plan...'.

I agree that 'reform' without enforcement is useless. I just don't see how you fix that except by saying it over and over to each and every Dem mayor and DA as you vote them out of office each and every time until you finally get some who genuinely get the message. I mean, this is very hard -- it's like anti-Mafia campaigns in Italy, or anti-government corruption in Ukraine. The cops are the biggest gang in town, they have kompromat on everyone who might take them on... most politicians will lose that fight even if they start with good intentions, but I don't see another path.

I'm pretty sure that strict liability for, say, obscuring your badge number would mean that anyone seen documenting such obscuring would discover that they were "resisting arrest" somehow.

*again, absent a complete reconstruction like what I suggested in the other thread.

But isn't that part of the goal, and what differentiates it from other kinds of incrementalism? Not "this is basically working, but you need to warn before shooting too", but "this is fundamentally misconceived and we need to do the whole thing differently". Build housing rather than criminalize vagrancy. Have more social workers and fewer people with guns (I didn't even know this before but apparently the term of art is "violence worker", which, you know, apt!).

So here's a thing: on the one hand, I completely agree that complicit cops aren't "good" cops in the sense that they aren't a problem. But it's also the case that 5% of cops are responsible for 80% of the violence (or whatever the exact numbers are). The essential strategic question is whether there are achievable reforms that could convince the other 95% to stop supporting the 5%. And presumably that's where tying settlements to police funding come in, but unless the 95% see it coming out of their paychecks, there's no incentive there. Otherwise it's almost like stupid Cass Sunstein and his stupid "nudges"--as if cops will notice that the vending machines aren't kept full as much and will draw the conclusion that they should rat out their partners.

I don't actually know how you break unity like the cops have. The examples I think of are the mafia and disruptive classrooms, which don't seem helpful.

The alternative is not to rely on the 95%, but to change the CBAs so that the 5% can be rooted out, and to change certification so that 1 strike gets you to permanent nationwide decertification.

Flight attendants are resolved that, among other things, "we will push for and support efforts at all levels including in our local, state and national Labor Councils and Coalitions similar to those put forward by the King County Labor Coalition demanding law enforcement unions immediately enact policy to actively address racism in law enforcement and especially to hold officers accountable for violence against citizens, or be removed from the Labor movement".

The essential strategic question is whether there are achievable reforms that could convince the other 95% to stop supporting the 5%.

I think this is a good question, but I also think the answer is clearly no. That's why I'm talking about breaking organizational continuity -- police forces as constituted now, the psychos are backed up by the team players. In a different organization, the team players might be fine, but I don't think you can get them to behave well without a fresh start.

69.2: I guess my point is that they mostly seem like small steps that *also* don't make much difference in the short term. If I want to walk to Cleveland and you want to walk to LA, neither one of our 8 step plans meaningfully advance our goals, and pointing out that LA is a better destination is beside the point.

I mean, look, a lot of this stuff doesn't work without comprehensive overhaul--prison/police abolition both require radical overhaul of at least 3 other areas of American life, and realistically radical gun control as well. Just because that overhaul isn't on the immediate horizon doesn't mean you don't push better rather than worse changes. But unless your changes are efficacious in the absence of other radical overhauls, then they're not really great first steps.

Personal EVs are part of a decarbonized future and stinky diesel buses aren't, but more buses are a higher priority

I have the general sense that the "abolition" language was carried over into the police discussion at some point from the prison discussion, where it's more established and makes more obvious sense. (There are lots of ways to punish people, and no inherent reason that incarceration needs to be one of them.) I at least had never heard the term "police abolition" until the past few days but had heard the term "prison abolition" lots of times especially in the past couple years. There's a lot of overlap in the activist circles working on both of these issues, so it makes sense that people would tend to carry over the terminology.

And of course in both cases the use of the word "abolition" is a very strategic decision to reference the slavery issue and the fact that the abolitionists were both the most extreme of the various anti-slavery movements and the one that in retrospect was obviously correct.

When I say 'Abolish ICE' and 'Abolish DHS' I do mean it literally, and it's perfectly intelligible how that could be a doable thing and why I would endorse it

ICE in particular is an interesting case, actually, because while the agency is new the function is old. Probably a non-trivial number of people who want to abolish ICE want 100% open borders, but do they also want no investigation of international money laundering, which is technically also in ICE's remit? Presumably not!

If I want to walk to Cleveland and you want to walk to LA, neither one of our 8 step plans meaningfully advance our goals, and pointing out that LA is a better destination is beside the point.

I think the apt analogy (oops) here is "if I want to walk to LA, neither one of our 8 step plans substantially advance my goals, but it helps to be facing the right direction". (I subbed "meaningfully" for "substantially" because I think getting started, even if only barely, is actually meaningful, even if the real payoff is a long ways off.)

45: At least we know which 57 should be fired first.

28: Anecdotally, I had a cop neighbor in Switzerland. He was just some dude. He wasn't scary, the way cops in the US are. One difference is that crime in Switzerland is much lower (the worst crime he ever had to deal with was the occasional stabbing). Another difference -- and this is an entirely accidental product of Swiss history -- is that social spending is much higher. Part of it is the usual welfare spending, but part of it is because in Switzerland you declare a religion, and then you pay a religious tax. You can declare yourself an atheist, and then you don't pay the tax. But most people pay the tax because most of the money goes to charity, and people like that.

Here is something I've wondered before: if you take all initial training, ongoing training, exercises, range time, etc. for an average mid career police officer: what percentage of that has been in de-escalation and mediation, and what percentage has been in the application of some sort of force? Anyone have the numbers?

Getting asked my religion when I registered my address in Germany was one of those experiences that reminded me that I really am American. I don't want the government to know my (lack of) religion!

54 He's got a good op-ed in the WP.

78.1 Or at least the 78 you absolutely don't want on a critical emergency response team. This reminds me of an interview I once read (AIMHMHB) with a former progressive police chief who was speaking to weeding out the bullies and bullying behavior where he said if he was forming a SWAT unit he'd ask for volunteers, then not take any of them.

"one of those experiences that reminded me that I really am American. I don't want the government to know my (lack of) religion!"

Americans, of course, famously reticent on matters of religion.

76 is a good point - if you mean "literally abolish ICE and DHS" it is a sign that you don't actually know what those bodies do. FEMA and the Coast Guard come under DHS. You literally want to abolish them.

Some people are litetally anarcho-syndicalists, ajay.

Agree with the weirdness of state sponsored religion when you're not used to it*. In Spanish public school our kids had to leave class during Catholic lessons and go to another room for "social values" class aka morals for heathens. I think they usually just watched videos that didn't have anything to do with social values.

*Sure there are all kinds of unofficial versions in the US but the public schools don't have an explicit religious class.

I'd be behind abolishing the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. They've been a ludicrous farce ever since they were set up. But deciding to address police violence by abolishing air-sea rescue is ludicrous and no one, whatever their political stance, should be taken seriously who suggests it.

I presume Edna means breaking up DHS as an organization and giving the Coasties etc back to which cabinet department had them before Bush invented the agency? This, however, is dead right:

Exaggeration shows you're serious ... to comrades competing for in-group credibility. To outsiders not yet on board, it has the opposite effect

"Abolish ICE" is catchier than "Devolve border protection functions to their pre-Bush bureaucratic structure" but necessarily omits some level of detail.

24: Back in 2015 four Swedish police officers on vacation calmly de-escalated a fight on the subway in NY - you surely heard of that incident? Sweden's police training takes over 2 years and they weed out bullies and sadists. The failure rate at the academy is so high they are currently thinking of importing some Norwegians.

That's the answer, I think: psychological screening to let the right ones in, and extensive training. A 50% tax on every million after you make your first billion should do it!

I had not, and it is both impressive and incredibly funny. Come to think, wasn't there an episode of Brooklyn 99 playing something very much like that for laughs?

Has anyone here posted recommendations recently of organizations to donate to, or give material support to, for people far away who want to do something? This seems to be somewhat radicalizing for my mother, and she just forwarded me a "list of organizations to follow and support" (no idea where it came from), asking me if I have any recommendations among them:

(The list: Black Lives Matter; George Floyd Memorial Fund; For Freedoms; Vera Institute of Justice; The Loveland Foundation; Campaign Zero; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.; Community Bail Funds; The ACLU; Color of Change; Reclaim the Block; Communities; United Against Police Brutality; The Equal Justice Initiative; Fair Fight; The Brennan Center For Justice; The Committee to Protect Journalists; The Southern Poverty Law Center)

is 89 an intentional echo of Wilkinson's "I'm told "defund the police" is bad framing. Yet it's undeniably more bracing than "reduce police funding to standard OECD levels and re-allocate the rest to social services.""

91: I have been dvr-ing all of Brooklyn 99, I'll look for that episode. Would love to hear from those four Swedish police officers now, wish some reporter would ask them for their perspective on policing in America.

93- I don't recall that one specifically but it's based on other variants I've heard.

92: Good for your mom. I'd skip SPLC, choosing one from the rest depends on your pet issue. I mean, ACLU is pretty evergreen. I sent some money to the ActBlue combined bail fund here:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd

if you mean "literally abolish ICE and DHS" it is a sign that you don't actually know what those bodies do.

This is not true. Many people who want to abolish ICE (and some who want to abolish DHS) want to dismantle the agency that was created in March 2003, following the Sept. 11 attacks. It doesn't mean that they believe that no other agency should ever handle any of the existing functions of ICE. It means that they think the agency itself has such a poisonous, toxic culture that there is no re-forming possible, and that if any of its functions need to survive, they should do so within an entirely separate organization and be created from the ground up.

ICE does a lot of different things. In my personal opinion, some of them are important and necessary. We might want to continue them under Justice or Treasury or some other department. But ICE as an agency is so deeply poisoned that I am sympathetic to those who say there is no fixing it. If you haven't read any of DHS's CRCL reports, those are a good start. It's been rotten from the beginning, and has only gotten worse in the past 17 years as its hiring practices have continued to select for some of the worst traits you can imagine in people whose job it is to enforce the law.

84 is almost too trollerific to bother with, but obvs what Alex and Witt say -- DHS was created in 2002, ICE in 2003, both as post-2001 do-something security theatre, both have always been toxic and dangerous. Whatever worthwhile functions were rolled in to legitimate them should be liberated and given a sensible bureaucratic home asap -- they're an argument *for* abolition.

I favoured the abolition of the Soviet Union too, and it didn't mean the metaphysical annihilation of Ukraine or Kazakhstan. Strictly speaking it did entail the abolition of the component Soviet Socialist Republics *as* component Republics, so yes I guess I do favour the abolition of FEMA-as-a-part of-the-DHS. See if you can figure out for yourself what that does and doesn't entail.

Admittedly this brings out that even *literal* abolition language leaves a lot up in the air, and that seems to me another strike against it. Ilhan Omar is talking about 'disbanding', which seems to me preferable -- reasonably concrete and accurate for what a lot of people urgently want. (I haven't looked at the details of the proposal, though.)

I don't have a problem with bumper-sticker sized slogans, so long as everyone understands that the bumper sticker slogan is meant to be taken seriously but not literally.

Lots of people, though, have been falling into the place where they compare similar but not identical bumper stickers, and get wound up about the differences.

(40 years ago, I had a bumper sticker that said Split Wood Not Atoms. Yes, the climate catastrophe is actually my fault. Sorry everyone.)

I think the point being made, or at least the point I'd like to make, is that the analogy with abolishing the police is better than you thought it was (I mean, banned, as an analogy, but I'm forging ahead anyway.) There's stuff ICE and DHS do that should keep happening after both agencies are abolished, just as there are tasks now done by the police that are going to have to continue to be done in some form. It just doesn't necessarily have to be ICE, and it doesn't have to be the police.

There's a particular dueling bumper sticker war that has sometimes annoyed me. Black Lives Matter is great branding. Racist assholes respond by saying 'all lives matter' which is obviously not contrary (that would be the actual policy in the US: Black Lives Don't Matter) but then the choice of responses to that are (a) correctly telling the racist asshole that they're a racist asshole and (b) 'of course they do, and that's why every time the police shoot anyone at all it should be thoroughly and independently investigated.'

The people who respond with Blue Lives Matter should be asked, each and every time, 'so are you saying that no one is investigating or punishing the deaths of police officers? Because that's what this conversation is actually about.'

I don't have it in me to argue on social media, but a friend asked my advice on an "all lives matter" type response. I recommended that she switch to policy. "Great! Here's a bunch of police reforms, and they all look consistent with "all lives matter" to me. Could you point out any that you disagree with?"

It depends on the good faith of the ALM person. If they're good-willed but just an idiot, it might be worth getting into explaining that the precipitating issue is that people, police specifically, are treating black lives as if they don't matter. So the slogan is intended to convey "Black Lives Matter (as much as white lives)", and ALM doesn't make that point clearly.

But most people aren't good-willed idiots. They may be idiots, but malign ones. At which point dropping straight to "OK Boomer" works too.

I think the advantage of my response is the effect on a third party lurker. They're also invited then to read over the proposed policies and look for one that they'd be willing to argue against. It flips the argument so that "passive" means "agreeing to reforms".

Yours is definitely productive -- I was only thinking of how to explain the problem to someone whose heart was in the right place but just didn't get it. But that's not many people, and yours works well for the commoner situation.

You can surely entirely abolish local police without needing an anarcho-syndicalist revolution. It seems both less unrealistic and less utopian than the current discourse would have it because state governments will surely just step in and take over even if they won't be happy about it.

You might argue that it's harder to hold state politicians accountable and that they're far more republican leaning than cities, but it seems to me that you'd probably get a much more reasonable police budgets that way even in the long term, and that police wouldn't have nearly the same outsized power in state politics as they do in local politics. I also have a vague impression that current state police forces have less fucked up cultures and more professionalism, but that could be completely wrong.

There is a post deep in the archives, from before ogged left, with a video of a British cop talking to an angry protester who was maybe even trying to punch him, the point of which was how bizarre it was that this guy wasn't getting curb-stomped and the cop was acting like an actual sympathetic human.

If 'you' in 101 is me, then fair enough. (And I don't think it counts as analogy-talk, does it? We're discussing what 'abolish' means by considering different cases.) Literal abolition covers a pretty broad spectrum of possible outcomes, and I should have allowed for that earlier.

So I'll rephrase my worry: most people have a pretty good intuitive sense that the distinctive property of the police is that they are (as we are now saying) the violence workers: they are the organization charged with using force on behalf of the city govt so as to deter and apprehend criminals and keep the peace. And so if you tell people, especially people who are not already up to their elbows in these convos, that you want to abolish the police their first question will quite reasonably be: do you really want there not to be any organization charged with *that* function? Are you utopians who believe that the need for the threat of force to contain crime will simply wither away if the polis just does everything else better?? (NB this will mostly be phrased as: lol srsly?) So far as I can see the answer of *most* of the left is No no, don't worry, we just want the role of force minimized, and the tasks now associated with it redistributed and diffused, and 100% different personnel, and please let me explain how we can actually get surprisingly close to that utopian thing without your storefront being any less safe! But I take it a few people will answer Yes. And I don't think that either the ambiguity or the initial triggering of panic makes 'abolition' all that great as a starting-point for persuasion. If I follow nosflow correctly he thinks it does -- in this context you have to start by scaring the bejeezus out of people to get their attention. Well, maybe.

PS a bit of trawling on Twitter reveals that all sorts of sensible mild-mannered stuff which I would have expected to see called 'defunding' (though there's another ambiguous term) is now being branded as 'abolition', so I can only hope I'm wrong here: https://twitter.com/brownasthenight/status/1268288386936320002/photo/2.

What has brought me over to abolition as a term (extremely recently! I'm not claiming this as a long settled, well thought out position) is my belief that there needs to be a clear cultural break between police as they are now and what society sets up to serve the same functions. Reforms may help to a certain extent, but I think current police culture is very durable, and a big problem.

(And yes, 101 was to you -- the intervening comments went up while I was typing.)

I don't see how you "abolish" the police when there are literally thousands of distinct police organizations at every conceivable level government (not to mention transit police, campus security, mall cops, etc). Is the idea to fully federalize all law enforcement? Doesn't that just lead to ICE-ish outcomes?

I don't think the idea is to federalize police functions at all -- more to do the sort of moving what are now police functions to non-violent services that we've been talking about piece by piece, for each police force across the country. It's a huge lift, certainly.

IS there a reference for the Swedish story? Because that is not exactly the rep that Swedish police have in Sweden.

Also, the idea of hiring Norwegians for their sensitivity. Um. Along with a crack force of Finnish teetotallers and neurasthenic Danes.

The only stereotype I know about Swedish people, aside for the moroseness, is that they go to Denmark and get really fucking drunk. Something about cheaper alcohol taxes.

This is the Swedish polish in NY story. Of course you can find things like that with American cops, too, so no conclusions drawn...

It's weird that the guy in that video is saying he can't breathe. I recall hearing somewhere that people being detained by cops say that kind of thing all the time and cops nearly never take them seriously. (Similarly there was a viral video the other day of a handcuffed white girl asking for her insulin and being ignored. It's outrageous but I have to think fairly commonplace.)

Alcohol taxes in Sweden are insane. Also Danes are an astoundingly drunk nation. So it checks out.

Making it easier to fire cops is definitely something that has to happen, but it won't help in departments that fire officers for trying to stop police brutality.

The Buffalo cops who were actually charged were greeted by the applauding colleagues as they left the courthouse. Seems like more than just "team players" there; I dunno.

114 and 115: Yeah, that's how these things go lately. Reality isn't making a strong showing.

Or to put it another way, a lot of the dysfunction in online discussions seems to reflect the fact that Shaun King has over a million Twitter followers and Anthony Barksdale has less than 1K.

122:. Shaun King! Something that you and Black Lives Matter agree about!

123: Right? How is this scammer still around?

It's not that surprising to me, scammers are everywhere. If he were a Republican he'd be in the cabinet.

Does anybody have a credible reference for why everybody decided Shaun King sucks?

Is the joke that danes are or are not neurasthenic?

My town had a cop write a column for the Police Association newsletter about how cops should respond with violence and ignore the social justice warriors. He got put on leave but instead of trying to do the regular disciplinary process, they tried some restorative justice thing. Mostly, it looks like he pretended to be sorry and got to keep his badge. The restorative justice thing was private and involved a lot of circles or something.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/10/30/new-mass-police-organization-head-writing

https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/05/03/rick-pedrini-restorative-justice-controversy

He specifically said that de-escalation was BS, and he was a leader in the policeman's association.

126: https://www.thedailybeast.com/shaun-king-keeps-raising-money-and-questions-about-where-it-goes-3

124: It is kind of amazing since just about everyone that has ever worked for him is doing their best to spread the word that he is a scammer. Part of it is that he originally was attacked so virulently by people on the other side that now his fans disregard anything bad anybody says about him.

126: https://www.thedailybeast.com/shaun-king-keeps-raising-money-and-questions-about-where-it-goes-3

124: It is kind of amazing since just about everyone that has ever worked for him is doing their best to spread the word that he is a scammer. Part of it is that he originally was attacked so virulently by people on the other side that now his fans disregard anything bad anybody says about him.

126: https://www.thedailybeast.com/shaun-king-keeps-raising-money-and-questions-about-where-it-goes-3

124: It is kind of amazing since just about everyone that has ever worked for him is doing their best to spread the word that he is a scammer. Part of it is that he originally was attacked so virulently by people on the other side that now his fans disregard anything bad anybody says about him.

I'm doing my part to spread the word.

116: Don't the Danes all go to Estonia to get cheaper liquor? Precarious-living-taking-in-one-another's-washing situation there, or else everybody ends up drinking adulterated methyl alcohol out of truck coolant systems in Siberia perhaps.

It's so weird to think that, 25 years ago, we thought we were doing *great* at an anti-police brutality demonstration in Minneapolis if we got 50 people to show up. And now there's throngs of people who work in marketing at Target HQ yelling for police abolition. I really wish my friend joel were still here to see this, he'd be tickled pink.

Just watched the footage of the protest sending Jacob Frey home. Man, there must be so many mayors wishing this hadn't happened on their watch.

68: I dispute the idea that exaggeration necessarily drives away folk that don't yet share the belief in question. At a certain low percentage of adoption, I think it's true, but there's another threshold at which enough people are seen to be adopting what sounds like an extreme position, so the unconverted start to have to take it seriously. Like the idea that lowering taxes raises revenue, or that it's necessary to fight Al Qaeda by invading Iraq.

The Overton window isn't going to expand itself, in other words.

Right, so, obviously trolling to think "abolish" means anything more than "keep all the agencies as they are but change the headed notepaper". We could abolish ICE by putting it under, say, DOT or Interior and renaming it CEI.

133.1: That's Finns. Estonia is about 90 minutes away from Helsinki by boat. There doesn't seem to be a direct ferry link from Denmark to Estonia, which might take more than a day anyway.

I've never figured out exactly what police and prison abolitionist acivists envision, but it's definitely something different from what more moderate people who've lately embraced the term envision.

"I joined the police to beat up Communists" a crescent-mustached officer once told me, and he was talking about arresting Kurdish protesters.

Liquor is easy to buy in Denmark, while hard to buy in both Norway and Sweden. Norway and Sweden both have government alcohol monopolies. Vending machines in Denmark sell beer (Carlsberg, natch).

Carlsberg is pretty good. I never tried Natch.

The thing about cheap booze in the Baltic was always that once you were on the ferry the alcohol taxes did not apply. So the first thing that you saw, going for a piss on the ferry between Stockholm and Helsinki, was an enormous porcelain shoulder high bidet to be sick into, right behind the door. The EU put an end to that racket, tragically.

But I have never in my life had a worse hangover than after cruising along the 12 mile limit outside the Baltic republics with a bunch of anti-Soviet dissidents. Christ. Never drink with a Russian dissident.

There is a Fodor's guide to Denmark, which has an essay on the Danish character that starts "Denmark is a fat man's country", so, yes, that's the joke.

141: Natch is the traditional snack food that Danes have with beer.

That sounds better than "small, dry, eye bread."

I knew about the Finns, I thought I'd seen something about Danes being ferried somewhere for liquor too. Carlsberg's okay, kinda reminds me of Rolling Rock. Supposedly Tuborg is better? Never seen it for sale around here.

Of course Denmark is a fat man's country - you can bike across it in a day, they don't get the exercise. Around here you can bike all day and still be in the same county.

Danish culture started going downhill when they stopped eating øllebrød every day.

Are we not talking about the Minneapolis city council anywhere?

146: Maybe in Minneapolis?

I always preferred Tuborg, but that may have been simple snobbery. And there are many varieties of both beers available in Denmark. Now I am getting all nostalgic.

Natch is the traditional snack food that Danes have with beer.

Later marketed in Texas as Natch-Os.

149: But if they're not from the Danish region of Øs, they're just sparkling chips.

That sounds better than "small, dry eye bread."

But the salt from the tears adds flavour!

The eye is dry.

This is fucked up. Gangsters and thugs. Defund them.

114, 115 The comments have moved on but here is a link to the BBC story about the long training for Swedish police officers and looking to Norway to fill their ranks:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48314442

It's a year old but I doubt if much has changed since then.

I've worked with enforcement officers for a U.S. federal agency and their training seems much more rigorous than that of the state agency enforcement people I knew.