This "getting people fired is Being A Cop" bullshit is tedious but it also makes me furious.

Firstly, because the timing is terrible - we've just seen yet another person murdered by the cops with no personal consequences for them because racism is built into the design of policing.

It isn't directly comparable (I don't wanna derail what should be a conversation about violent antiblackness) but it's pretty upsetting that the two topics atm are "cops keep killing black people and face no consequences" and "people wanting bigots to face consequences are cops"

"people who do harm to others should have their power to do so reduced" isn't the same thing as "people who are a threat to hegemonic order should be violently punished" or even "people who break the rules should be punished." It just isn't.

The fact that you think community accountability is the exact same thing as policing makes me think you don't understand what the problem with policing and retributive justice models actually is.

Policing is a method of upholding hegemonic power through the threat (and execution) of violence. It isn't applied equally, and that's by design and by nature.

Policing is NOT equally applicable to any form of accountability. Accountability is necessary - policing is not.

A lack of accountability, in a system which teaches bigotry from birth, allows bigotry to flourish. Calling for consequences for bigotry is being framed as an act of violence, but it isn't about "should we create consequences" but "who bears the consequences?"

I can't believe that in a week where multiple people have been caught consciously using police racism against black people as a tool to evade social consequences (and in which the police have murdered ANOTHER black man in the street and met protests about it with mass violence)..

... we're meant to understand "holding people with social power accountable for targeting marginalised people" as unreasonable, cop-like behaviour?

I understand that most people who are arguing that "getting someone fired for transphobia is Being A Cop" probably wouldn't argue that Amy Cooper should not have been fired, but what's the fundamental difference between those two arguments?

Fundamentally the argument "if you get people fired for being bigoted you're a cop" includes the thousands of instances where people use their power in their jobs, or their privileged relationship to state power, to put lives at risk directly or indirectly.

(this isn't a good thread, nor is it what I actually intended to talk about which is that I'm sick to the back fucking teeth of people using the language of pacifism and anticarceralism to argue that nobody should ever face consequences for anything or fight back)