Again— there is no separating the violence of policing & the deliberate economic starvation of the communities that experience police violence most acutely. This is why calls to defund—the only real reformist measure—ignited such backlash from the neoliberal establishment...

Any examination of local, state & federal budgets reveals that the choice to fund militarized police forces—and occasionally make payments when they harm people—while simultaneously cutting funding for social services is the basic scaffolding for structural oppression.

This is the basic infrastructure of racism that must remain untouched for the system of white supremacy to sustain. The establishment prefers we address racism in ways that are shallow & less concrete...

...There’s a constant effort to act as if racism is unquantifiable & abstract— a matter of our feelings toward one another, an issue of “hate v love” or “understanding v ignorance.”

The reality is racism exists as concrete laws & practices enforced daily by armed police forces.

Those who ID as reformists & are still wedded to the idea police can be transformed into an anti-racist institution typically never frame things this way. They prefer to treat police brutality as an isolated legal matter (ex. should the officer be charged w/ manslaughter?)

They refuse to confront the role of police w/n a larger system of racial capitalism—a system that forces people into poverty & then criminalizes them for it, for example. They refuse to address how violent encounters w/ police occur b/c *police are the enforcers of oppression*

That’s why the reformist approach to this issue—which at best is lacking in systemic analysis & at worst is a deliberate avoidance of any real change—will never bring an end to decades upon decades of police brutalizing & murdering Black people with impunity.

We can never resolve policing as an isolated issue w/o addressing all the other forms of economic & racial oppression in this country which police forces were historically created to uphold.

And that’s exactly why any attempt to do so is met w/ such violent force from the state.