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What I saw boils down to this: The protest was angry but entirely peaceful. The police wanted physical space, and because of the dominionist posture that all American police operate from, they had no reason to ask for that space. The protestors refused to cede it. Then 
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I think it& #39;s important to say this clearly because a lot of Americans operate under the same dominionist preconception: that police have an inherent right to any space they want in their city of employ so the (peaceful!) act of refusing space to police becomes itself provocation.
If you deny the premise that police have a right to whatever city space they deem necessary, you will find yourself in the position of asking "What other assumptions about the rights of police have I been carrying?" And police abolition will seem a far less radical proposition.
https://twitter.com/theresakost13/status/1266911597970284545
This">https://twitter.com/theresako... is exactly the kind of thing I saw today. The police didn& #39;t say "Hey, could you guys please move?" like you would to a co-equal member of a shared community. They just advanced, and when protestors didn& #39;t cede the space, the truncheons came out.
This">https://twitter.com/theresako... is exactly the kind of thing I saw today. The police didn& #39;t say "Hey, could you guys please move?" like you would to a co-equal member of a shared community. They just advanced, and when protestors didn& #39;t cede the space, the truncheons came out.
What this moment is about is that the people living in American cities are no longer satisfied with the fundamental premises of policing as such. And the uncomfortable truth that city governments need to grapple with is that American police do not want to give up those premises.
We have a cult of police here in America (how else do you explain all the iterations of Law and Order?), and many police identify their self-esteem in the privileges of their profession. They will not readily surrender to an ex nihilo restructuring of their identity. Would you?
This identity is reified in the real crux of our American problem with policing, which is police union contracts. So long as the dead hand of these agreements has no countermand, even an entire city council of police abolitionists would be unable to fundamentally change policing.
Hizzoner, @mayormcginn, had the right idea when he floated creating a Seattle Police academy, seperating out our public safety training from the outdated curriculum of the state& #39;s Basic Law Enforcement Academy in Burien. New officers->New culture->More progressive police+union?
Now, if you& #39;re in the camp that rejects policing as such because it& #39;s an inherently violent program of suppression and control aimed at marginalized communities, that& #39;s no solve to the problem. But electoral politics, like adulthood, is often about finding the least bad option.
Would a Seattle academy have worked? I don& #39;t know. I do think there are people who should be alive today and who would be if their first responders were grounded in the city& #39;s values as I understand them. But instead we have the same public safety apparatus every US city has.
What we need as a country is a from-scratch reimagining of how we manage public safety, and such a reimagining starts with no police and goes from there. I don& #39;t think America is ready for that. But how about us? Because... is anyone out there arguing that the system is working?