I linked to that good interview with Alex Vitale about his "End of Policing" book, and it turns out the book is currently available as a free ebook.

I'm told that Gay Twitter is all abuzz about Lindsey Graham. Here's the gist of it:

It's not that Senator #LindseyGraham paid to have sex with dudes, among whom he was known as Lady G.
It's that being blackmailed (by Russia, maybe?) about it prompted him to embrace Trump in all his awfulness.
And that he's been steadfastly anti-LGBTQ.

— Rick G. Rosner (@dumbassgenius) June 5, 2020

I mean, who among us is the least bit surprised, but the Russia bit is plausible, as is the timing that it might go down now...

Could you look into your crystal balls, please, and tell me how the summer is going to go? Are we going to see protests regularly, or if not, what would cause the energy to extinguish? When is Covid19 going to intersect with the political unrest? (I'm guessing this one has an easier answer - in two weeks.) But when I think about Covid19, I mean more about the current momentum of treating it like something that is over. When will the seeping realization kick in, on a large scale, that it's not over and taking precautions are not just something for people with excessive anxiety or health concerns?

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 23.

I'm talking blithely in comments about abolition, but it's not because I'm opposed in general to the concept of policing -- I wouldn't have a problem with a police force that was actually run according to Peelian principles. But I'm coming around to abolition because I've started to believe (I have kind of believed for a very long time, but I am becoming more firmly convinced) that American police forces generally (there are so many local forces that possibly some are fine) are so culturally sick that they can't be fixed without being destroyed thoroughly enough to break cultural continuity before something else that serves what policing functions are necessary is formed in their place.

First, the existing culture/hiring process is selecting for bullies. There's probably something inherent in the core policing job that you're going to need people who are more comfortable with violence than the norm, but American cops are consistently not just comfortable with violence, but specifically ready to demand obedience to whimsical or unimportant orders, and enforce obedience by escalating violence to an insane degree. In a healthy society, you don't have to obey the police because you're afraid they will hurt or kill you, and the police aren't giving you orders (as opposed to polite requests which may be freely disregarded) unless the orders are necessary for your own safety or the safety of those around you, or unless the police officer would be legally entitled to curtail your freedom. The cop ordering Sandra Bland to put out her cigarette was doing something conventional for an American cop, but it's the mark of a sick relationship between the police and the people -- in a healthy society he wouldn't have given the order, or he would at least have taken no for an answer. Every American talking to a police officer knows that perceived disobedience or disrespect to a police officer is physically dangerous -- even the kind of middle class white people who don't actually get abused by the police maintain that by being able to avoid police contact and being carefully polite when they do.

The second big thing is the internal loyalty of police to each other and against the public, coupled with an expectation that the public treat police as more valuable and trustworthy than members of the public. Every big police violence case has been characterized by police, particularly police unions, closing ranks behind the wrongdoers, rather than rejecting the wrongdoers as damaging to the status and credibility of the police as an institution.. And even more than that, nothing other than unambiguous video evidence is ever accepted as proof of police wrongdoing. If it's not on video, the police version is true, and even if it is on video, if there's any possibility that there is some police story that could be told about the events off camera that justifies the events on camera, then that story, however implausible, should be accepted as true. When a black homeowner gets arrested during a mistaken burglary call, you have to really take seriously the possibility that the arrest was somehow justified, because police testimony that it was is worth more than everything anyone knows about the probabilities of the situation. Further, police enforce this loyalty viciously against each other. When a police officer breaks ranks and tries to act against police wrongdoing, they get immediately and harshly punished.

If these problems could be eradicated, it'd go a long way to making recruiting easier. Right now, the only people you can hire to be police officers are people who don't mind the idea of being police officers: either vicious bullies; people who don't mind working with vicious bullies; or people who are naive about the sort of people they'll be working with. And they have to be either fine with tolerating and supporting wrongdoers among their coworkers; insanely heroic about the possibility of standing up to wrongdoers; or again, completely naive about how that dynamic works out. 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.

Has anyone run with the thesis that because there are no sports, people who don't normally pay attention to politics are now doing so, and the result is mass discontent?

The unrest seems overdetermined, so I think this would be a tough case to make, but I'd like to read someone trying.

It's hard for me to tell these days whether we're seeing the beginning of the end of Trump, or the transition to full fascism. I suppose this is as yet unknown.

This would have been so timely when DQ sent it to me on Sunday, and I let it get buried, and I apologize. Details on ten policy solutions towards ending police violence. They are all things consistent with what we usually discuss, but it's a good resource with details.

On the first point, ending broken windows policing, I found out that this is the original Broken Windows article, from the Atlantic in 1982.

(Link via. )[I deleted a large chunk of original post here.]

Anyway, I really appreciate concrete policy reforms that I can advocate for locally, where I feel like I am most likely to be able to tilt the conversation.

U.S. police have attacked journalists more than 100 times in the past four days. Trump is basically threatening to unleash the military on protesters.

Are we looking at a long summer of protests and violence? Are we looking at martial law? I saw someone assert elsewhere that we should interpret Trump's words as though martial law has been declared. How is this going to play out, with such a vacuum of leadership? On the protesting side, is there a single entity that is emerging as an organizing force? Or is it still a local patchwork?

(Remember when we were worried that the election was going to monopolize the news all year long?)

In all seriousness, the combination of the protests, the pandemic, the shit-for-brains president, and the upcoming election is a pile of coincident events of stress and uncertainty that exceeds anything I've lived through, I think. The economic stress on the country should be in the list, too.

I did just hear that today is Black Out Tuesday, right before I posted, so I hope this isn't a breach of solidarity.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 22.