so your community is filled with individuals who are armed with weapons illegal to use in war, who conduct their own oversight, whose every need is furnished by public money, who employ lethal force at will, and who cannot even be safely criticized without reprisal

oh and they're also frequently literal swastika-tattooed Nazis and use force against marginalized populations accordingly and there's no way to actually root them out because they understand solidarity in their own twisted way and they all protect each other.

well that's just a natural state of being right there. who could come up with a better system than that? if you get robbed, which is statistically a vanishingly small possibility, who are you going to call to stand around, track mud into your home, and accomplish nothing?

without police, who would fire illegal chemical weapons (tear gas! it counts!) into peaceful crowds of protestors, escalating the situation and inciting a response that makes them look like the good guys so they get bigger tear gas and baton budgets next year?

without police, who would fabricate narratives about crime whole cloth by planting evidence to make themselves look good? without police, who would kill black people for the crime of whatever they managed to come up with once people start getting angry about it?

without police, about 70% of american live action entertainment media would just fuckin vanish

please do not besmirch the good name of the bloodsoaked pillar of skulls. yes, some of the skulls will transfix a passerby with a baleful gaze and use dark magicks to slowly rip their bones from their body while cackling with evil glee, but many of the skulls do not do this

I know it's been pointed out before, but it's absolutely beyond the pale that the phrase "oh, it's just a few bad apples" is bandied about. the full phrase is the bad apples spoil the bunch. that's literally what it's about

as an apple rots, it releases gases that, in a confined space like a barrel, speeds up the rot of all the other apples. one bad apple. spoils the bunch. that's the metaphor. that's why it means what it means. you have to have no bad apples to have an unspoiled bunch

if the first reaction of so many people to a police officer attacking someone who got too close to them is that that's good and acceptable, maybe… that's bad? maybe there shouldn't be a group of people who are expected and encouraged to behave like rabid dogs?