the liberal assumption that the police are meant to protect and serve the whole u.s population and that if they weren’t so racist or didn’t carry out stop & frisk policies or werent so afraid of black people and shot us less they could be good is laughable and blatantly false.

this is basically a blunt way of stating a very nuanced truth, but its the truth regardless. ill elaborate a bit in a second

b4 the 19th century there were basically no police forces that we would recognize as such today. in the northern u.s there was basically a system of elected constables and sheriffs and in the south the closest thing to a police force were basically just slave patrols

so as northern cities grew and filled with immigrant wage laborers who were both physically and socially separated from the "ruling classes" for lack of a better term, wealthy elites ran various municipal gov's & hired ppl to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods

ofc this created conflict in late-19th century u.s cities like chicago which actually had lotsa major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. the police attacked strikers with extreme violence

so long loooong story short, the aftermath of these uprisings led to police increasingly presenting themselves as a sort of "thin blue line" that was protecting civilization from the disorder of caused by working class ppl and general members of society

thats why i worded my initial tweet the way i did. you don't "reform" oppressive systems, you do away with them completely. individual rebellion - while definitely a good thing - is rarely a truly revolutionary thing here in the states