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What pisses me off about the fireworks/outside agitator psyop theories is it represents a mindset determined to avoid the stakes of seriously challenging the social order 1/10 https://twitter.com/JackKaplanNY/status/1273449121156927488?fbclid=IwAR3y3XYlugTYB-4lGe7hTpVirukpNFgF1c7H9UTpGYkNJOIGztTOBonHWfg
some seem to believe that carceral society is the origin of social ills, that police and prisons alone cause the trauma and anxiety that cause crime and inequality, and removing them would suddenly lead to harmony. It’s naïve at best, bourgeois utopianism at worst 2/10
When police fall-back there will be more disruptive crime, whether it be the shootings that are allegedly spiking in several cities, or “quality of life” issues like vandalism, fireworks, and parties in the streets 3/10 https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/06/20/nyc-shootings-june-20/
This should be obvious, because this uprising kicked-off with the people of MPLS running the police out of their neighborhood. Parties, looting, fireworks, and arsons followed. 4/10 https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/10/the-siege-of-the-third-precinct-in-minneapolis-an-account-and-analysis
Many decided there were “good parts” of the movement, communal celebration and noble resistance to police, were real, and all the “bad parts” were white nationalists, white anarchists, or the police themselves. 5/10 https://www.justsecurity.org/70497/far-right-infiltrators-and-agitators-in-george-floyd-protests-indicators-of-white-supremacists/
Now in NYC a far more benign challenge--neighbors setting off too many fireworks—is being met by similar theories by people who now know it is wrong to call the cops on their neighbors, but also want to assert how disruptive the fireworks have been 6/10 https://hardcrackers.com/fireworks/
Challenging the social order is a struggle much bigger than just getting rid of a group of bad actors—whether they bad police, the police in general, bad protesters, bad neighbors, etc. 7/10
This is why serious abolitionists recognize that their project is largely about building effective replacements for carceral society, not simply getting rid of it and expecting life to be smooth in aftermath: 8/10
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-abolitionist-movement-alternatives-cops-chicago/Content?oid=23289710 https://lausan.hk/2019/reading-guide-police-prison-abolition-hong-kong/
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-abolitionist-movement-alternatives-cops-chicago/Content?oid=23289710 https://lausan.hk/2019/reading-guide-police-prison-abolition-hong-kong/
Imagine if instead of police and town councils filled with bourgeois politicians whose primary job is to protect the economy, our neighborhoods and workplaces were run by the people who live and work there, with a common mission of caring for and protecting one another 9/10
It is only when everyone has an equal say in their self-governance, when institutions are trusted to any degree, when black lives matter, that we can deal with “quality of life” issues without either blaming a “bad element” or invoking the racist violence of the police 10/10
