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1. Police are what protects the property of people who own things. In the US, this means something specific: white elites stole the labor and land of Black and indigenous people for centuries and then continued to break their own laws (with the help of police) to extract more.
2. White elites did this through the state violence of slavery, racial terrorism and lynching, busting organized labor, race-based lending and foreclosures, widespread academic and employment discrimination, prison labor, fines/fees, etc...
3. One of the main functions of modern US police is to preserve THAT distribution of wealth, land, and resources that resulted from THAT pillage.
4. Police are the mechanism by which some people can live comfortably with a spare bedroom or three, knowing that if a houseless person showed up at their door, they could bring down metal handcuffs and a jail cell on that person if the person refused to leave.
5. There are more vacant homes in Los Angeles now, for example, than people who are houseless. Such inequality would not be possible without the threat of police violence.
6. One of the most important functions police serve is enforcing who can be where and with what. If police were not willing to enforce wealth hoarding, people who own things could not maintain their claims to land.
7. Restaurants and grocery stores who sell food could not deny it to the hungry, and our society would be forced into a different set of relationships.
8. This is a violence of a kind, and it is the constant threat of this state-sanctioned violence that allows for so much more structural violence associated with poverty and inequality to exist. But this isn’t what the media talks about when discussing police.
