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.)
(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& #39;s murder but were more than willing to fine them for a broken tail light.

That’s a giant problem.
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.”
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