I’m tired of people talking about systemic injustice, systemic cruelty, being silenced by language of the individual.

Nobody cares that your uncle Carl is “a nice cop”. The system is rotten. The institution is rotten. It’s built on violence.

I’m tired of hearing “well I’ve never—“ okay, look outside of your own head. Stop saying the forest isn’t on fire because your branch hasn’t yet burned.

Good policing cannot exist within a bad system. I’m going to try to put it into an example even a child could get:

If I bake a cake with nuts in it, and you are allergic to nuts, it does not matter how good I tell you the frosting is. The entire thing is garbage.

You can’t reform a system that is designed to be violent. You can’t reform my cake by taking the nuts out. It is contaminated. Do you get it?

Individualism cannot fix the problem with policing in this country. You can’t pick and choose when the entire institution is corrupt by its very nature. The very foundation of the way we think of policing is rotten.

We have to throw it out and start over.

And it’s not about “new police”. When I say throw it out, I mean all our preconceived notions of what a successful society looks like. Of what community care looks like. Drug addiction treatment, mental health care, an end to poverty and suffering.

I’m done ranting because I’m taking up space on the TL but just please understand and internalize that we must fight for and achieve societal change. We must dismantle the racist and violent institutions that keep people oppressed. It’s a system.