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One thing I keep coming back to when it comes to national discussions of police and policing is the basic question that we appear largely unable to answer: what are police *for*, and who should be policed?
It seems fairly clear to me that many Americans have an understanding of police in which their job is to police *other people*, not them. Other neighborhoods, other Americans, just not them.
There are neighborhoods and communities where crime is *supposed to happen*, and neighborhoods and communities where it isn’t. There are people who are supposed to be overpriced, and there are people who aren’t.
(This gets into a cultural discussion we don’t need to have, but contemplate how many true crime books/stories center on a “nice community” where “these things don’t happen,” despite many crimes happening within personal relationships, not as a result of crazed serial killers.)
If the law is not enforced equally, it’s useless. If some crimes are treated differently depending on who committed them, those laws are essentially useless. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/jaywalking-while-black-jacksonville-florida.html
(By the way, you could see this unspoken agreement made, uh, spoken here:)
Some think that police are the one thing standing between us and the barbarians, other people think of police as the people who couldn’t solve their kid's murder but were more than willing to fine them for a broken tail light.
That’s a giant problem.
That’s a giant problem.
Some people are exposed to a policing in which quotas for arrests matter most of all, other people exist in a world in which the police only come when specifically called. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-brooklyn-cop-arrest-summons-quotas-lawsuit-20200617-poyi2e7ubfdthakr7yvclzs6o4-story.html
There’s a reason why some commentators keep talking about how police are supposed to protect “normal people” from “criminals,” as if both of those groups are immutable and you’d never, say, have a well reputed gymnastics doctor who turned out to have abused hundreds of children.
I do not believe people *are criminals*, I believe that people *commit crimes*, and many of those people seem perfectly nice and normal and their “criminality" is not a physically observable characteristic, contrary to popular belief.
I don’t support police abolition, I support police enforcing the same damn laws in every damn community as if every community is worthwhile and not as if some communities should “expect” crime because they’re “bad neighborhoods.”
I also support a reduction in the number of laws that require enforcement with the implicit promise of state violence, and the police not acting like a protection racket. “Nice neighborhood you’ve got there, would be terrible if we stopped doing stuff.”
(This is where “unbundling the police” make sense to me: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/unbundle-police/612913/)
