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I'm less concerned w whether the officer was panicked & intended to inflict a different kind of potentially deadly force (tasers are not hugs y'all) than I am with the fact that this shit keeps happening because the system is built to make it happen a hundred different ways.
I get why the distinction matters to people who are concerned with punishment, but that's not where my concern lies, because that is not a path to upending the mechanisms that make these killings so constant and so inevitable. Abolition is that path.
I don't need the cop to have acted with some kind of excited, super-villainous malice to understand systemic murder when I see it, just as I don't need to debate the choreography of each death. Was the victim innocent enough? When will people stop falling for these games?
The system is engineered to deliver these outcomes. Sometimes people struggle, sometimes they don't. Sometimes people are armed, sometimes they are not. Sometimes the cop is flustered, sometimes they are stone cold. But the outcomes are engineered in a much bigger way.
It's all rigged.
Everything about our society is designed to generate these outcomes. The oppression of Black people, the engineering of poverty, and the fundamentally racist nature of policing – that's why all of this keeps happening. But they keep us quibbling over the details.
We need to stop fixating on the wrong questions. Did the cop mean to reach for their taser, instead of their gun? I don't fucking care. The whole damn system is guilty as hell. It always has been. It must be undone. That's the issue.
