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Defunding My Mistake
Confessions of an ex-ACAB
Until about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to abolish the police and prison system. I had faint inklings I might be wrong about this a long time ago, but it took a while to come to terms with its disavowal. What follows is intended to be not just a detailed account of what I used to believe but most pertinently, why. Despite being super egotistical, for whatever reason I do not experience an aversion to openly admitting mistakes I've made, and I find it very difficult to understand why others do. I've said many times before that nothing engenders someone's credibility more than when they admit error, so you definitely have my permission to view this kind of confession as a self-serving exercise (it is). Beyond my own penitence, I find it very helpful when folks engage in introspective, epistemological self-scrutiny, and I hope others are inspired to do the same.
How Did I Get There?
For decades now, I've consistently held plain vanilla libertarian policy preferences, with the only major distinction being that I've aligned myself more with the anarchists. Whereas some were content with pushing the "amount of government" lever to "little", I wanted to kick it all the way to "zero". There are many reasons I was and remain drawn to anarchist libertarianism, and chief among them was the attractively simple notion that violence is immoral and that government is violence. The problem with moral frameworks is that they can be quite infectious. To pick on one example for demonstration's sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth. There's a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you're liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications. I suspect that happened to me with prisons, for example, where because I felt immediate revulsion at the thought of the state forcing someone into a cage, I was unwilling to entertain the possibility it could be justified. Ceding the ground on this particular brick was too threatening to the anarchism edifice I was so fond of.
Obviously if you advocate getting rid of the government, people naturally want to know what will replace it. Some concerns were trivial to respond to (I'm not sad about the DEA not existing anymore because drugs shouldn't be illegal to begin with), but other questions I found annoying because I admittedly had no good answer, such as what to do with criminals if the police didn't exist. I tried to find these answers. Anarchism as an umbrella ideology leans heavily to the far left and has a history of serious disagreements with fellow-travelers in Marxism. Despite that feud, anarchist thought absorbed by proxy Marxist "material conditions" critiques that blame the existence of crime on capitalism's inequalities --- a claim that continues to be widely circulated today, despite how flagrantly dumb it is. As someone who was and continues to be solidly in favor of free market economics, these critiques were like parsing an inscrutable foreign language.[1] I was in college around my most ideologically formative time and a voracious reader, but I churned through the relevant literature and found nothing convincing. Instead of noting that as a blaring red flag, I maintained the grip I had on my preferred conclusion and delegated the hard work of actually defending it to someone else. I specifically recall how Angela Davis's 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? (written by a famous professor! woah!) had just come out and the praise it was getting from my lefty friends. If this synopsis of the book is in any way accurate, Davis's arguments are so undercooked that it should come with a health warning. The fact that I never read the book all the following years could have been intentional, because it allowed me a convenient escape hatch: whenever pressed, I could just hide behind Davis and other purportedly super prestigious intellectuals as my security detail. Back then, I carried the incredibly naive assumption that any position held by prestigious academics couldn't be completely baseless...right?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn't logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do. I navigated the social scene by prioritizing shared political values --- let's not discuss how I don't support the minimum wage, focus instead on how much I hate the police and on how much I love punk rock. That worked really well. Putting "ACAB" on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing. Announcing at a party that you are so radical that you're willing to eliminate prisons is an effective showmanship maneuver that few others have the stomach to challenge. There was plenty of social cachet motivating me to ignore niggling doubts.
How Did I Leave?
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized. At least about five years ago, I found myself in a conversation with a very normie liberal lawyer on the question of police/prison abolition. It was one of the first times I encountered serious pushback and I quickly realized just how woefully under-equipped I was. I distinctly remember how unpleasant the feeling was --- not from the fear of being wrong about something, but rather the fear of being found out.
There were instances where I pulled bullshit what-I-really-mean defenses of ACAB and tried to pontificate about how it's less about whether individual officers are per se "bastards", but rather how the institutional role is blah blah blah. I played similarly squirmy motte-and-bailey games with the abolition topic when I was confronted with undeniable rebuttals. I found an example from almost 10 years ago of one of my most common responses, where I'd highlight some police scandal (e.g., cops seizing more stuff through civil forfeiture than is stolen from people by burglars) and accompany it with the eminently lukewarm "on net, society might be better off without police". The argument is as abstract as it is unconvincing; soaring at an altitude too high for effective critique yet also too remote for anyone to care. Tellingly, I wouldn't and couldn't address the more pressing questions of how to deal with more serious crimes.
It was bizarre watching the discourse unfold during the 2020 BLM riots/protests. Almost overnight, the normie liberal demographic that previously was willing to push back on my inanity was now hoarse from screaming for police abolition. My younger self would've been thrilled watching the populace fully adopt radical anarchist sloganeering, but my actual self was aghast. I couldn't believe these people were speaking literally (yep!) or whether they somehow discovered the elusive magic elixir that transformed police abolition into a viable policy proposal (nope!). I'm someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM's policy proposals, and I even defended burning down a police precinct building in Minneapolis for fuck's sake, and yet I didn't join the defund chorus.
Still, there's a noticeable bend to some of my writing from that time where I consciously mirrored some of the language du jour --- such as making a bog standard argument against mass incarceration while aping abolition language, or responding to a DTP conversation by discussing police overcompensation. I haven't changed my mind about anything I wrote there, but nevertheless it's fair to accuse me of indirectly "sanewashing" the DTP issue. I took my boring, wonky arguments and adorned them with the faintest slogan perfume. This let me carry my hobbyhorses on the attention wave, but it also contributed to rehabilitating (however slightly) the totally crazy slogan position.
Now What?
I know it sounds crazy, but I think effective law enforcement is a vital component of any well-functioning society. Tons of cops are perfectly decent people who try to do the best they can at a difficult and unenviable job. There are bad people out there who can be prevented from doing bad things only when they are physically restrained with chains and metal bars. Unless we develop some revolutionary new technology or fundamentally modify the nature of man, this is the reality we're stuck with. I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have, but abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality. Radical stance, I know.
Regarding the anarchist responses to the topic, the only coherent proposals I've ever encountered are from David Friedman and others on the anarcho-capitalist side (a variant thoroughly detested by left-wing anarchist thinkers who think it's an affront even to consider it "real" anarchism). Friedman's response is essentially a cyberpunk future with competing private companies offering insurance, security, and arbitration in one package. Friedman's proposal is unusually thoughtful and coherent (the bar is low) and yet still remains largely a thought exercise reliant on some generous game theory assumptions. Who knows if it will or can ever work.
In terms of lessons learned, I should first note that introspection of this kind, spanning across such a long time period, will have significant blind spots and would be particularly prone to flattering revisionism. The most obvious mistake I made was in burying those unnerving moments of doubt. Instead of running toward the fire to put it out, I did my best to tell myself there was no fire. I had already arrived at a conclusion in my mind and worked backward to find its support, and I suppressed how little I could actually find. Whether intentionally or not, I fabricated comforting explanations for why my position was right even though I couldn't directly defend it, often citing evidence that was more aspiration than reality. My ideological isolation kept me safe from almost all pushback anyways. And magnifying all of this were the social dynamics that rewarded me for keeping the horse blinders on.
I'm likely overlooking other factors of course, and there's the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I'll be better equipped to unearth it.
[1] This isn't really on point or even about crime, but to give just one example of the "vibe" I encountered from left-wing anarchists, Voltairine de Cleyre in one of her essays makes a very Kulak-esque argument about how to best guarantee freedom of speech:
I checked the book, and that Twitter thread's summary of the final chapter, "Abolitionist Alternatives", is completely accurate. Davis complains about people asking what should happen to honest-to-god violent criminals, and then goes on to waffle for 13 pages without actually answering it. Then the book ends.
The only point in that chapter where she gets concrete is when she mentions the idea of making all or most crimes into pure torts, to maintain deterrence without incarceration. Unfortunately she balks at asking the obvious next question: what if the criminal can't or won't pay the fine? What if, for example, the guy who committed an armed robbery has no worldly possessions except for $12 and some meth? The historical answers have usually been some mixture of slavery, outlawry, and/or exile, and I doubt she'd be too keen on any of them.
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While I disagree on the object level towards ACAB, I have some sympathy towards people who dismiss all cops as being bastards as I have a similar attitude towards all mainstream journalists. The rationale for that attitude is that even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, as a group my observation is that they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession, and when outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. I can easily imagine someone making a similar argument against the police, that they are unwilling to truly clean up their profession in the eyes of the public, that there is a culture of silence and an anti-snitch mentality within the profession. As with journalists, they are performing a duty to society that is sacred and requires the population's absolute confidence so they cannot afford in-group loyalty when it clashes with their duty.
I guess one distinction could be that one could argue that cops are not always aware of specific actionable, denounceable action by bad apples in their group. I don't think journalists can use that argument.
I actually more-or-less still hold this position, it's just that resorting to the slogan does a very poor job of conveying the specific concern and assumes that every officer is equally and uniformly responsible.
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It worked for millenia in clan and tribal societies, all anarchism leads back to the good old Viking times.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/winner-the-derek-chauvin-defund-challenge
Now reinvent blood feud and wergeld, and utopia ensues.
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I appreciate the serious and thoughtful essay on the topic. My first impression was a fearful "oh no, is this one of those crappy converted libertarian essays". You might have seen the kind ... where the title and content of the essay amounts to "As a libertarian, I use to think poor people were evil and horrible, now as a liberal I see how wrong that idea is." I'm glad this was not that kind of essay.
I have to admit as a bit of an anarchist libertarian myself it challenges me more than most essays would. I am however of the anarcho-capitalist variety of libertarians, or as some anarchists would describe it "not an anarchist at all". (I started writing this right before I got to the section of the essay where you talk about anarcho-capitalists, so you beat me to the joke, but I'm keeping it in)
I did not have your starting position of ACAB. Though I was very suspicious of cops that would defend the "thin blue line" when corruption came into play. I had multiple personal stories from former cops of the insane corruption and shit that cops got away with. One that stuck with me was an economics professor at a local community college. He taught the class between his extended golfing sessions. Former New York Cop, with a very hefty pension. He explained he was doing the class mostly to have something to fill his time. I liked him, but jeez did he have some stories to tell. Pedophiles left on rooftops to either jump or freeze to death. He told the story in a way that gave plausible deniability that maybe other cops had been doing this, but there was also a degree of bragging and agreement with the practice that suggested he'd done it himself. There was also a story about a bomb investigator that got permanently put on desk duty when his wife and the man she was cheating with were blown up under mysterious circumstances that no one could figure out.
My starting position on cops was something like "probably mostly not bastards, but this is definitely a corrupt state institution, and there are better ways this could be run with the right incentives"
I'd stick by that as the correct position, even today. And it might not sound extreme, but I take it to the extreme. There are certain levels of "defund the police" that I'd agree to. And I'd like to defend that position without vague references to thought exercises. Or to leave you as unsatisfied as David Friedman.
What is the problem with policing today?
In short: Too many laws.
A police officer today probably has more knowledge of the legal system than was ever required of anyone in 19th century America. Maybe 19th century supreme court justices would have been required to have more knowledge.
We have seen in moderation on this forum and in many other circumstances there are two semi-valid approaches to law:
These two things exist on a spectrum. But it is hard to disagree that America has been trending towards the codification of everything. Both systems have their downsides, but the main downside of the "codify everything" approach is that humans aren't so good at applying it. They certainly can't remember everything that has been codified, but even if they do, they can't help but injecting their own opinions into things and turning it into a vibes based system.
Cops are sort of the first entry point into the legal system, so its the first and most obvious place where you see these problems crop up. Even if they get fixed by later parts of the justice system, they are still the most visible. The top of the funnel is always the widest, and cops are at the top of the funnel.
There are many other problems with too many laws. It decreases trust in law enforcement in general. It splits valuable resources. It creates avenues for criminals to exist outside the legal system. Etc.
What is the solution?
First, Reduce the scope of policing.
Second, Split up what they do into different professions.
Third, stop trying to legislate goodness into others.
Fourth, allow private citizens to do the work of police.
To me, these are options are both the realistic approach in the short term, and the only viable long term solution. Policing is a bundled good. Any police precinct has many relevant functions and duties, and police officers are supposed to be generally interchangeable between those duties. (so interchangeable that I know one police district required officers to serve a prison wardens for a year before being allowed to go out on patrol).
This is bad, and dumb. Every industry specializes over time. Police officers directing traffic or making stops to give people speeding tickets do not need a full set of training. Police officers that go and apprehend murder suspects might need full swat training. Clearing out homeless people, securing a mall/shopping center, or patrolling a dangerous neighborhood can all be very different jobs that require different mentalities. Some of the worst "police are terrible" stories come from what I see as mixups between these professions.
Also, just have less laws. Sorry all you sim city players out there hoping to control everyone's actions. You need to back off. The scope of policing needs to be philosophically limited. Murder, rape, kidnapping, theft, etc are all clearly valid reasons for some group to exist that can use deadly force to respond to these crimes. But things between consenting adults need to be off limits to the use of force. People tend to want to legislate how to be a good person. But being a good person is a never ending process, and there are always minor improvements you can make. Once we started embarking on this journey of "police should make people be better" we entered down a path of endless laws and regulations.
As an example of areas where we have reduced the scope of policing, I'd suggest looking at any side job cops ever get. Private security for facilities, private protection for rich individuals, security guards at gated neighborhoods, private investigators, bounty hunters, etc. These are all often more specialized security forces than police, and they can often provide better services than the police. (we should not be surprised that private businesses can provide better services than a semi-monopolistic government entity).
Finally, private citizens are sometimes capable and more motivated to accomplish the goals of a police force. An easy example is a home break in. Police might be there in five to ten minutes at best. If you are already there, you can respond much faster to the situation. Perhaps you should be allowed to shoot to defend yourself. This is true in some states, not in all, and not in many countries outside the US. A harder example: I also can't go to the homeless encampments near my neighborhood and take many actions. I am restricted to calling the police (who luckily did something about it recently). But as a homeowner and father of two. I had much more to lose from a confrontation with the homeless. Even if I could have easily brought superior firepower and safety. A full set of body armor ammo and weapons, and hiring two professional bodyguards for a few hours is ironically cheaper than fending off any murder changes for the crazy homeless person that might have suicided themselves against this extreme use of force. Police have a measure of protection from liability that makes them the only viable path for rich people to deal with problems that might require the use of force.
I might be able to continue this tomorrow, but I'm running out of steam. Police are a modern invention. We have survived most of history without them. I think they are mostly a result of modern legislation. Specifically, too many laws, nanny stating bullcrap, and restrictions on what private citizens are allowed to do.
Well sort of, but not very well. Peel didn't create the Metropolitan Police just because he felt like it, law and order in the early 19th century and before was a disaster, precisely because so much of the burden was placed on private citizens to bring cases etc. and they weren't very good at it. Violent crime in inner London dropped by as much as 40% on the introduction of the Met, with smaller reductions for property crime.
We also survived most of history without modern medicine.
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I will push back slightly on the idea of private guards and the like. One of the benefits of having the police be a government agency is that they are bound by law. Constitutional rights are only in force when dealing with the government. Thus the government cannot impose censorship directly on social media. But since social media is privately owned it’s simply a matter of “convincing those companies to censor for the government,” at which point censorship has happened, but it’s legal even if the government is sending lists of topics to be censored. And if you’re doing “police type work” but are a prive group, i fear the same sort of dynamic at play. The NYPD has to read the Miranda warning, they have to abide Habeus Corpus, and must get search warrants. Joe’s private security force is not constrained in that way. Joe isn’t the government, so if he questioned you without a lawyer, it’s not illegal. If he keeps you in a cage for a month, he’s not in violation of HC which applies to the government. If he breaks into your house durning an arrest, he’s not bound to a search warrant, which, again is a protection from the government not private firms.
Police and government agents also have sovereign immunity, meaning they can't be individually sued for actions they carried out on behalf of the government, as long as they reasonably believed those actions were constitutional. It's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.
The legal system has also found many ways to work around the "protections" of the constitution.
So the restrictions on cops are not that strong.
Meanwhile you have ignored the main restriction on private security: getting sued. Bounty hunters exist and you can see how they perform arrests on YouTube. Many of the restrictions that exist for police are there because they would be too powerful otherwise. Private security does not currently reach that level of power.
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Personally I understand and appreciate the need for police to exist, they serve a valuable societal role and you get significant problems if you don't have them. But at the same time I side with a lot of the ACAB people because the police force where I live is shockingly, astonishingly corrupt - to the point that they actually awarded an "excellence in policing" medal to a famously corrupt cop who made the news later on because he murdered a young man in cold blood over a drug deal gone wrong. At the same time I've seen video recordings of a huge police officer bodyslamming an old woman to the ground, then trying to lie about how she "tripped" and pulled him down - and that same police officer coaching witnesses and committing serious offences in court (witness tampering). Another scandal that made the news recently was when the police released the private diary of a rape victim to hostile press in order to make sure that a politician friendly to them wasn't prosecuted. You're totally right when you say that the police force or something equivalent needs to exist, but I think that ACAB actually does apply, at least in my case (and I'm sure there are parts of the US where this is true as well). There's so much naked, visible corruption and abuse that I do actually consider all of the cops here bastards because they do nothing about the blatant criminality and corruption taking place right next to them. When your policing body says that incredibly corrupt cops who go on to become murderers are the kind of police officers worth recognising, rewarding (and hence emulating) then I don't have any problems making judgements about the people who stay in the role.
The assertions "All Cops Are Bastards" and "Some Cops Are Bastards" are vastly different. I don't think there's a man alive who would dispute the latter. The claim that all cops are bastards in parts of the US (i.e. certain jurisdictions) by definition implies that there are some cops who are not bastards (or some jurisdictions not staffed entirely by bastards).
My apologies for being unclear. I was speaking in terms of my local context - "cops" here meant exclusively the ones from my country, as my brain considered the local police force 'cops' and ones in America 'American cops'. I don't know enough about US policing to talk accurately about the subject given that I've never actually been to the place. Although with all that said, I absolutely disagree with a lot of defund the police rhetoric etc - I just think that there are serious problems with our current police force. I'd much prefer to have a complete and total lack of financial privacy for law enforcement agents (if they do not wish to make their finances public they can simply leave the force) than simply removing the police and not replacing them.
I think I understood you right the first time around, you think Australian cops are institutionally corrupt but don't know enough about the American situation to comment if it's the same there.
The word "all" is kind of interesting. Taken 100% literally, the slogan "all cops are bastards" means that literally every cop in the entire world is a bastard. But it could understandably be taken to mean "all cops [in this country] are bastards" or similar. I remember one instance seeing a person expressing some ACAB-esque sentiments on Facebook, and then having to hastily qualify that statement by assuring their friends that they were only referring to cops in the UK, not Ireland.
If I was going to steelman the ACAB claim, it would be something along the lines of "There is enough police corruption and malfeasance that it is not plausible that any individual cop would be unaware of it. Hence, all cops are aware of corruption and malfeasance but refuse to do anything about these problems. This means that even cops who are not themselves personally corrupt are tacitly endorsing and supporting those that are, and hence deserve disapprobation."
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Yes, evil bastard cops and good noble cops are very different. The bastard cops are doing their bastardly deeds, and the good cops look the other way and close ranks to defend their brothers at any cost. Such great difference.
Why do you assume that the good cops are even aware of the corruption? It's not like the corrupt cops are telling the other cops about their misdeeds. And if an accusation of corruption appears, it's appropriate to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. If an accusation of inappropriate force comes to light, the appropriate response is usually "Look, I wasn't there. I'm not gonna Monday morning quarterback what he did based on hearsay. If the investigation reveals misconduct, then by all means he should be held accountable."
People seem to think corrupt cops are telling all their cop bros about the shit they're getting away with and they all snicker together about it or something. And they think that the non-abusive cops hide and protect the power-trippers (for reasons that are seemingly never specified by ACABers - somethingsomething brotherly solidarity?) Do they not realize how much harder it is for cops to do their job when a power-tripping asshole shows up at the scene? Cops hate those sorts of cops!
I could see isolated incidents in very small departments (e.g., tiny towns and counties) of things like this happening, but mostly because of the tight social and kin networks in places like that and the far more limited resources and oversight. But it's rarely those departments that ACABers express issue with; it's almost always the big city departments.
If the good cops aren't aware of the naked criminality that is so publicly well-known that it is a major news story and there are entire netflix tv shows being made about it, they're bastards anyway because they are so manifestly incompetent and unfit for the duty they've taken on that they're effectively defrauding the government. A lot of this stuff is front-page news and despite the ugly conclusions this leads to about police bastardry, it is actually more insulting to assume that they're blind idiots who are unable to read newspapers or even listen to public news broadcasts. This stuff doesn't even have a figleaf to protect it - the head of a heavily politicised police department can just have footage of undeniable witness tampering posted to youtube and nothing happens. Sitting senators on government commissions into police misconduct can bring it up and nothing happens!
No, the reasons that get brought up are simple - professional retribution(how eager are you to report the person who decides whether or not you get promoted for being corrupt when there's a decent chance his boss is also on the take), the culture of policing(thin blue line, brotherly solidarity as you mentioned, etc) and mutual blackmail (you aren't going to report me for being on the take because I will then report you for being on the take).
Actually this happens in the larger state and federal departments here and that's where all of the stories I've been talking about have come from. Very small departments have, in my experience, been slightly better (my intuited explanation for this is that those ones tend to be more strongly tied to their local community).
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Because it's ubiquitous. In many cases they've literally seen it, because it was done in their presence. And yes, cops talk -- look at the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, every cop in the department knew what a "rough ride" was and that it happened.
There might be isolated instances of small departments which don't have brutal cops, or only have one who keeps his mouth shut about it. But any sizable department has significant brutality and essentially all the cops know about it.
I strongly dispute that. I don't know a ton about the Freddie Gray incident or the Baltimore department, but my understanding is that neither state nor federal prosecutors allege what you have about Freddie Gray.
More importantly, while I think isolated examples of brutality like you're alleging do occur, given the tens of millions of annual police encounters, I would fully expect that even an America full of the most perfect police forces our fallible world could ever muster would nonetheless still present an endless number of examples of egregious misdeeds across the country.
The point is that it's not a systemic problem (I argue). The conduct of these abusive officers is not tolerated by their fellow officers and superiors (why would it be? It makes their job that much harder and opens them up to criminal/civil liability). Further, these abusive officers are are regularly fired, as well charged and convicted, with the obvious caveat that it's not always easy to pass the bar of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt (just look at non-cop criminals!)
However, I don't expect the vast gulf between our intuitions and experiences about this problem/nonproblem is going to be bridged within the limits of the intersection of our patience and free time in this already waning comment thread, I think you'll agree.
It's not so much a systemic problem as it is an intrinsic problem. Any group of enforcers will develop an us against them mentality. They have to, enforcement isn't possible if the enforcers give their opponent's arguments the same weight as their allies. The corrupt ones don't have to brag about their excesses, they just have to deny them and ask the clean ones if they are really going to believe this meth-head/loser/nazi over them.
And even if the loser convinces one clean cop of his innocence it doesn't matter, because the whole department needs to be convinced. A department which is a mix of corrupt and clean no less - the corrupt will never believe him, so the department will always be weighted heavily against him. A clean cop who took a stand would just get fired, so they reason they should tolerate a small amount of corruption so they can help the greatest number of people.
This happens at every level of society, at every level of enforcement.
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The point is exactly the opposite of this. Abusive officers do whatever they like. Everyone knows about it -- other cops who may not be so abusive themselves, defendants, defense lawyers, supervisors, prosecutors, even judges. But defendants aren't considered credible, and cops support each other unconditionally in the "blue wall of silence". Occasionally there's physical evidence and maybe a cop gets fired (and then later quietly re-instated with back pay when the union sues), but they nearly always get away with it.
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Obviously you believe that All Cops are Bastards. I'm not even arguing that that's not the case. I'm arguing that what /u/FirmWeird is describing explicitly contradicts the assertion that All Cops are Bastards. If the assertion "all cops are bastards" is only true in parts of the US (as they said), that logically implies that there are parts of the US in which that assertion isn't true i.e. NACAB.
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Where do you live?
I don't like getting too specific but I've already revealed that the answer is Australia. The police officer I mentioned is named Roger Rogerson, there's actually a netflix series about the murder.
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I really think people like your former self who have a bit of a cop problem could really stand to do a few ride-alongs and watch a few dozen hours of police footage. As you say, it's really illuminating. American police are overwhelmingly incredibly well-trained, professional, and cordial, even when dealing with jaw-droppingly disrespectful citizens.
Indeed, it's always astonished me just how ill-informed and prejudiced so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be about police. I suspect it's for a few reasons:
Anyway, it truly did make my day to hear that how you (and @Amadan) changed your minds about policing. There are few topics that makes me despair quite like the topic of policing when I see it come up in spaces like this.
Civili asset forfeitures are hard enough to contest, and have few enough checks and balances, that they provide huge incentives for the police to become bandits, even though there can be legitimate civil forfeitures. Don't mistake "isn't written to be X" for "isn't in practice X", especially when incentives rear their heads.
Prosecuting the police depends on prosecuting them by a system that is sympathetic to the police, leaving civil suits as the only way to get justice. If you can find prominent examples of qualified immunity abuse where the police actually received serious criminal punishment, I'd like to see them.
* Qualified immunity abuse: examples where most people would say "it's blatantly obvious that police aren't supposed to do that".
A lot of what you describe might reduce the danger to the police from guilty suspects, while increasing the danger to innocent suspects. It's not as if innocent people are trained in the proper ways to make themselves look non-dangerous to police.
The cops and their apologists give out such advice all the time. Most of it is humiliating, because what makes you look non-dangerous to police is an abject display of submission. Some of it is actively dangerous legally because it involves answering their questions.
Can you elaborate on this? Generally, police just want you to:
Is standing/sitting there with your hands casually at your sides (or on your steering wheel) until the conclusion of the interaction so humiliating?
For the very small proportion of encounters with police that involve the officers' guns drawn, they may ask you to walk backwards and get down on your knees or get flat on the ground with your hands out to the sides. Do you consider that humiliating? This is done to minimize the subjects' ability to put up effective resistance. It's to decrease the likelihood that they have to fucking shoot you! I'm terribly sorry if you feel like you're playing the hokey-pokey for that brief moment that the vast majority of the population will never even encounter in their entire lifetime.
I never have been in such a situation, but I imagine that I would in fact find it quite humiliating to be forced to kneel or prostrate myself in front of my assailants. The fact that they are (presumably) insisting on it to assuage their own fears wouldn't really factor into my emotional reaction.
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I described in my comment one facet of American police training which is specifically designed to reduce the danger to innocent bystanders at the cost of increasing the danger to the person the police officer is targeting.
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This one in particular infuriates me. I've spoken to so many otherwise intelligent people who seem to think "why didn't they just shoot him in the arm/leg?" is actually an effective or useful suggestion. I've tried to explain to them, very patiently, why this is nonsense, but it never seems to sink in.
I'm sure most of the people reading this already agree with me, but I'm going to reiterate it anyway:
For all of the above reasons, American police officers are trained to aim for the torso rather than the limbs in the unfortunate event that they determine gunfire is necessary. You might disagree with the priorities of the training, but you can hardly blame the officer himself for reverting to his training in the heat of the moment.
It’s TV and movies. Which I think is the truest statement you can make about the way most Americans understand worlds they have not personally entered. The TV or movies show things being a certain way, and unless the given American has significant experience or knowledge that teaches them otherwise, they assume it’s true.
And movies love to do leg shots because it’s dramatic. They’re not worried about the realistic problems with doing that. They care that it looks cool and therefore sells more tickets. Most movie and TV fights are generally fantasy based on looking good and not based on the method being realistic to the type of fights depicted.
The same could be said of almost anything. Ask any computer programmer about the ridiculous hacking scenes, doctors about medical shows, or scientists about any depiction of working scientists in their field, or what can and cannot be done. But because of the way most people live without interaction with those things outside of personal friends or high school, most people just assume the movies are accurate.
This is another reason why Terminator 2 is such a great movie. The T-800 abides by his directive not to kill any humans by shooting them in the legs instead, but then again you'd expect an advanced robot assassin to have that level of firearm precision.
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I agree with most of your points and would particularly prioritize the availability heuristic. Police encounters are heavily lopsided where the vast majority of people can go through their lives and never have one (aside from maybe the occasional speeding ticket) while a small minority are frequent flyers. There's about 10 million arrests every year in the US, and even news savvy folks would probably be aware of a couple dozen.
I disagree with a lot in point #4. Cops still have quotas, though they get more creative about hiding it. Here's a recent example from this year from Maryland State Police who were expected to conduct at least 100 traffic stops a month. There's also an ongoing scandal in Connecticut State troopers creating thousands of fake traffic stops, although it's not clear if they were motivated by a quota or if they did it to pad out the race statistics of the people they stopped. I don't know what you meant by cops acting like bandits, but the Institute of Justice stays very busy litigating civil forfeiture cases, like this one from Detroit where the cops had a pattern of seizing people's personal cars and keeping it in legal limbo for months. It's true that QI only applies in the civil setting but there remains significant institutional biases against criminally prosecuting any police. You speak of police "investigating themselves" as if it's a myth but barring this trial exception in Washington state, that's how it works everywhere else as far as I'm aware.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you wrote, but the examples you highlighted don't seem like the best way to make the case that the public has a skewed perspective on how policing is actually conducted (I point I actually agree with).
Part of me is tempted to respond to the individual complaints you cite (e.g., regarding quotas, apparently MSP expected 100 stops per month per trooper. That's 5 per shift. Let me ask you something: how do you think police supervisors should deal with a trooper who, upon review of his shift, has been sitting under an overpass all day making zero stops and playing Angry Birds on his phone?) But I hope you won't begrudge me for instead getting at what I think is the core of the disagreement. Let me explain.
In general, I've never been impressed by examples like what you're citing. Here we have an institution - police departments - who, unlike corporations, churches, NGOs, etc., are public-facing, held accountable by the public, and have a significant degree of open records. Along come actors (people working at leftist/libertarian publications) who are extremely ideologically and professionally motivated to find fault in this institution and its members, whether or not fault exists in general or in any given instance. And they have 18,000 police departments to sift through for ammunition, with all the evil and human failings that go along with the approximately million fallible people in those departments, and little to no motivation to identify innocent explanations or exculpatory context.
Given that background, don't you therefore agree that our baseline expectation should be that there will be virtually endless examples scattered throughout the year, for every year in perpetuity, of something that officers or departments are doing that's shady, abusive, corrupt, or (perhaps more often than not) merely cast in that light when framed a certain way, with certain information omitted, and with the author guiding the reader (who lacks domain-specific knowledge and context) to squint a certain way to see the optical illusion pop out? And, most importantly, would you not agree that the fact that there are perpetually frequent examples should mean virtually nothing for the layman who just wants a general impression of police as an institution or wants to know what to think of his home city's department and its officers?
To put it another way: Wouldn't it be astonishing if there weren't such frequent articles of alleged police misdeeds in these publications, given the trove available to reporters to sift through, the evil and imperfections inherent in any group of a million people, and given the reporters' ideological biases and the eagerness to click on those articles by their readers who share those biases?
Now, it would be very fair for you to point out in response to the above that my reasoning would seem to preclude ever finding widespread fault in any institution. I wouldn't take my reasoning that far, though. Let me use an analogy to help explain how I think about this.
Consider academia. As someone who's been in The Motte for years, I hope my memory is not mistaken when I identify you as someone who, like myself and many people on The Motte, believe that academia is ridden with systemic progressive bias. How do we know that academia is actually systemically biased towards progressives, and that it's not just a bunch of conservatives scouring the thousands of universities in the Western world for isolated examples of bias like I claim that Reason et al are doing with police departments? While there's no slam-dunk proof, I think one major difference comes down to just how blatant, widespread, all-encompassing, top-down, and officially sanctioned the examples are from the firehose we have to draw from. We can see the universities' curriculum, hiring/tenure process (e.g., DEI loyalty oaths), official policies, statements by leadership, actions by strongly adjacent institutions like major academic journals, political donation records, etc., and it all points in the same direction and has a very strong magnitude. If you were parachuted into a few random social science classes for a few hours, you could expect to be positively nauseated by the intensity of the leftist bias.
By contrast, if you watched a random few hours of body cam footage, it seems you agree that you would not be similarly steeped in a display of corruption, abuse, and other malfeasance. And if police misdeeds were higher up the chain than mere body cam footage could reveal, we should expect a putatively widespread problem to be in evidence in vast quantities of large departments, with extensive networks of mutual corruption at the top levels, not these frankly pennyante, chickenshit, and/or extremely isolated examples that Reason et al restock the shelves with every so often. But you know where we can find that? In Latin America and other corrupt countries in the present, and in American departments generations ago when organized crime was a much bigger deal. So we know what to look for. We know how rancid is smells when it's a problem. It's just not there anymore, thank goodness. (Of course, that's not to say that isolated examples of misdeeds shouldn't be remedied, and they usually absolutely are. It's just that those examples should be be given approximately zero weight to someone trying to form an understanding of what a given police officer or department is like.)
By disciplining him for not working during his shift, which has nothing to do with the number of stops and everything to do with him ditching work to play games on his phone.
You might object that measuring this is unreasonably hard and that measuring stops is a reasonable proxy to check for that. I disagree.
You can check electronic surveillance, which many police departments are already moving to for other reasons. Body cameras, car cameras, and car GPS systems are a lot more common and any one of these should make it trivial to check if a police officer is doing nothing all day.
If for whatever reason you don't think these tools are sufficient to identify police abandoning their jobs, there's another option that works for any job where workers have overlapping skill sets. You can switch up who does what work. Put the officer who think isn't working on a route where you know other officers regularly make many stops. Rotate a few officers who you know do good work to cover his route. If the pattern of few stops follows the officer who you're suspicious of, that's good evidence that he's not doing his job well enough.
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Going back to your original #4, if you had written something like:
...I wouldn't have a problem with it. My interpretation of what you originally wrote (correct me if I was wrong) was to argue that people have a skewed perspective of how policing is actually conducted, and you did that by presenting various statements of fact as a way to demonstrate how ill-informed folks are (e.g. "police don't have quotas but the public thinks otherwise" presumably).
But as I pointed out, much of what you presented as evidence of the public's ignorance turns out to be actually grounded in reality. So it seems to me that what you're actually disputing is how much weight those examples should get, but that's a very different argument to make.
[Also, whether I think police quotas are an appropriate way of dealing with lazy cops is a completely separate discussion from whether or not police quotas even exist.]
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Much of the problem in academia has to do with things that people say, things that people are told not to say, and firings and hirings. These are inherently hard to hide from the public, so there's a lot of evidence that academia is doing them.
Other kinds of institutional problems are much easier to hide, so you should expect correspondingly less evidence.
And the anti-police sentiment you see here on themotte is a lot more nuanced than the political slogans on the news. It's more "the police have serious problems". Pretty much nobody here really thinks that all cops are bastards, regardless of how many do in the activist left.
The police literally have body cameras! Much of their activity is also observed out in public, and their records are often public or released on request. It's hard to imagine an institution/occupation whose activities are harder to conceal than policing in the 21st Century.
I'm not claiming that the sentiment here on The Motte and in similar places is anything like the hysterical, lowest common denominator, activism-soaked ACAB stuff. My problem is that I think the more nuanced takes are egregiously false, too.
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I think it’s a pretty normal thing really. Things like government are really easy to hate on simply because no one living today in a modern city has ever lived in the state of complete lack of government. As such, you see the state of the world where men have at least some fear of the government, of the police, or other authorities and simply assume that this is the state of nature. It’s not. Places that are really truly lawless end up being places full of gangs, thieves and tribal and clan warfare simply because that is the state of nature. Humans are quite capable of taking advantage of the people around them and thus you live in a state of distrust of anyone not in your group. I don’t think this is controversial, we are animals just like all the rest of them, and evolutionary history is such that it’s the law of survival of the fittest with red teeth and claws.
And likewise I think a lot of arguing about policing gets stuck in the same ruts. Most of us have never had to face what cops do, and have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t know about the risks of hidden weapons, the drug users who don’t feel pain because of the drug, the need to prevent the person they’re arresting from getting their weapon. Cops can and have gone too far. I’m not saying that. But I’ve always found the demands of the activists to be silly. You cannot expect a criminal to submit to arrest because you asked him nicely, or assume that a person reaching for something isn’t reaching for a gun or other weapon.
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I’m reminded of the sidebar content or /r/antiwork which was truly shocking when I first read it:
Such a society is incompatible with one that has things like housing, running water, electricity, heating, plumbing, medicine, any form of transportation or sufficient food to keep its population of 300 million from starving. It would also not have any computers or software so turn the dial back to the 40s before your trip to the Middle Ages. It would be incapable of trade to get any of these things. It would be incapable of producing even art, because that too takes a huge amount of work. Committing to the is plan is commitment to genocide in a Great Leap Forward sort of way.
Beyond genocide, and outright impossibility, it strikes me that the author had all the aspirations of a 13 year old. A world of frivolity is not a utopia. A world with no responsibility is a world devoid of purpose.
I remain unclear how anyone engages with this writing seriously.
Right until we're fully automated, which isn't going to be that far in the future. Of course, these people are jumping the gun quite a bit.
How far is "that far"? Have you ever worked in robotics or automation? Outside of tasks that are purely software I mean.
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We'll never be fully automated, the maintenance requirements on the robots will prevent it.
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It is a lovely idea, and if all humans were perfectly virtuous, we could try it. But there's a lot of us who don't give a damn about anything except ourselves and are happy to use violence against others to take their stuff. What do we do with these people? That's been a problem for about as long as humans have existed, and "put them in prison" is the solution we've come to most recently. It's certainly not a perfect solution, but "let them go about in society just so long as they attend a meeting once a week to have a finger wagged at them about being naughty" is not going to work, either. We've been so busy doing away with shame and then guilt that we forgot those emotions have a place; if you are ashamed of having behaved unworthily, you have an inducement to amend your ways. If you admit guilt about being in the wrong, you show you realise what you did was bad and that you can work to avoid doing the same in future.
Easy. Watch them.
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"Hang them" was a solution that has gone out of fashion in our modern society, but it definitely had its merits. As is commonly commented on, there isn't much of a sliding scale - most people do nearly no crime and a small number do a huge amount of crime.
I'm anti-death penalty, because courts get it wrong sometimes and the occasional innocent person being executed is a price I'm not willing to pay. But I do sometimes wonder how different society would be if we just strung up the scumbags after their first couple of crimes.
Lots of people do lots of small and/or technical crimes. If you tried to implement "hang them", you'd have con men and pickpockets working the public executions of jaywalkers, speeders, and people who took home an office pencil.
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From Foseti's "Review of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' by Steven Pinker":
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Honestly, if I can get a community I trusted to go with me I’d consider moving to a society founded in Tierra incognita to try running off those principles.
And that seems like the crux of the matter- anarchocapitalism is, for groups of functional red tribers with community ties, probably not that bad and likely cheaper than a conventional government. For lumpenproles it’s almost certainly a terrible deal, and that’s almost exactly the opposite of what left wing anarchists want- which in practice is basically a society that benefits the lumpenproles at the expense of red tribers with community ties.
This also doesn’t seem like a society that runs off of David-Friedman-Esque principles in practice, either, except for the cartoonishly wealthy, so I doubt this is likely to be a paradise for the people who actually propose it either.
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I would be curious if cops acting professional after someone does something stupid but is now a controlled environment is because they have seen so many normal people do something stupid but 99% of the time be functional adults. I know there is a psychological bias for when my outgroup does something bad it’s because they are evil but when myself/in-group does something bad it’s excusable from circumstances. Perhaps, a lot of cops have so much experience in these settings that they more easily adopt in-group bias.
I clicked thru to one of your links and you made two points:
“5. Community Representation: recruit police officers who represent the demographic characteristics of their communities and use community feedback to inform policies.
Are these two things even mutually possible? I’ve seen data that more community members equals better policing but I’ve also see data that things like more education (easier to train etc) leads to better policing.
It’s just reminds me of killer king hospital where they tried to get “representatives” of the community working there but then a lot of bad care happened. Perhaps, policing isn’t as complicated as medicine.
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/11/08/the-hospital-of-the-future-000572/
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1679970523013615618?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This just reminds me of a lot of things on the left that just feel unrealistic. I agree better training is good. And closer cultural connection between police and community are good. It sounds smart.
Now go build me a West Baltimore police department with a bunch of college grads capable of being trained up from members of the community. (Realize I’m adding college grad here sort of as a proxy for train ability but I believe there is research around that qualification and it should correlate with ability to train so wanted a measuring stick with data).
I agree with your recommendations on policy but executing it seems near impossible. I guess I’m becoming a brutal realists as I age.
Edit: the 1. Under the 5. Should be a 7 and when I type it shows a 7 not sure sure how to fix.
I realize now that BLM's "representation" platform might be more of an affirmative action program, which I wouldn't be in favor of. Community representation to me would be avoiding a situation where officers are commuting exclusively from a distant suburb and have no nexus to the neighborhoods they're patrolling. The ideal situation would be where cops and residents know each other by name and see each other as neighbors motivated towards a common goal.
But yes, I can see a potential tension between recruiting from a limited pool while making sure the applicants are of high enough quality. It depends what's worth prioritizing at the margins, perhaps it can be accomplished by residency requirements?
Honestly, in a lot of these crime- and dysfunction-ridden neighborhoods, the suburban cops who commute are among the few functional, decent, and caring human beings that a lot of these people will interact with on a regular basis. I think we absolutely should want to be hiring all the officers we can who want to police these neighborhoods, even if they don't want to live there. Hiring exclusively from those problematic neighborhoods is not only going to be recruiting from a narrower pool of recruits, but I highly suspect it will lead to more incidents like the Tyre Nichols killing in Memphis where you essentially have the same thugs from those streets, just in a police uniform.
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When I looked into joining the Fort Worth police department it mentioned requiring applicants live ‘within 30 minutes of a police station’. I’m sure that most police departments have some sort of requirement along this sort.
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It is no hidden fact that black communities hate the black cops, because generally they have an excuse to be the worst hardass they can be.
I am not particularly sure how you'd be able to get a cop that is a community member of the bad neighborhoods, while not paying them enough to not live there. Certainly not someone degreed.
You would have to require that they continue living in the bad neighborhoods as a condition of employment.
This sounds like it would make it very difficult to prevent those cops from transferring to neighboring whiteflightville, which is always hiring experienced police officers, probably pays better, and wants extra patrols along its border with ghettoburg.
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I don't think how complicated it is matters as much as you're thinking here. I think the difference is subjectivity. The right way to police a community, fundamentally depends on the community. The point of policing is to have safe, happy communities. And if you don't, it doesn't matter how much objective criteria you've ticked off a list, you've failed. It's a very soft-skill heavy, squishy job. Or, as I've heard it said: "The most important thing for a police officer to know, is which laws not to enforce."
Medicine, on the other-hand, has a very obvious objective pass/fail standard. Did the patient live or die? This lends itself more readily toward standardization and academic knowledge. Biology works pretty similar within most bodies, and if it's not working that way, it's often the thing you're supposed to diagnose.
Only if the entire outcome is due to policing, which seems absurd. But I think it's capturing the instinct: the same assumption is what leads to teachers being hammered for bad childhood outcomes (or treated as besieged miracle-workers - as if, if they merely had everything they wanted, all of the outcome would then be in their hands)
The reality is that policing is one tool to help improve community safety. It might succeed and not be recognized because other things are going on and drowning it out. It might succeed in relative terms (if it reduces more harm than it causes it's a net positive) and still not make the community feel safe. But that doesn't actually mean that their problem is cops.
The root of ACAB/police racism is a motte-and-bailey on just how much power this one side of government policy and this one set of employees has.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I think to do policing properly, you need to have the trust of the local populace*, and failure to earn that represents a very real failure.
That's before we get into the optimal level of safety, which is probably not maximum safety. I did mention "as safe as possible" in a separate post, but I probably should have said "as safe as is practical". That level of safety, and which kinds of safety (e.g. the difference between unsafe worksites and muggings in the street) to prioritize aren't decisions that I, or the police, can make for a community. That's a decision that the community has to make for itself.
*Note: Does not apply if the police in question are controlled by a far away power center. That's better modeled as an occupation force, rather than a self-governing community.
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I don’t think any of that disagrees with my point.
Soft skills are academic to an extent. It’s one reason we teach the humanities so people can understand social situation almost in the third person to see how others are thinking. Some of this is sure just socialization. Training helps a cop understand which situations matter and which situations don’t. When a person is a threat and when a person is not a threat.
A lot of the underclass problem is that they don’t understand why people are doing things and that behave poorly when they are feeling cheated.
My point was that you can't objectively say that policing failed without consulting the local community, unlike with healthcare. Which makes the comparison you were trying to make really squishy and not very useful.
I don’t know what squishy means sounds like inconvenient fact to me.
Most of the how to fix policing recommend things like more people from the community or atleast same race but also recommend things like more education. But it’s very tough to hire both qualities in the communities with the most policing issues.
If the requirements are mutually incompatible, it’s worth looking at if they’re both necessary, and at least ‘more education’ is probably a dumb recommendation.
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My meaning was that the comparison breaks down when any pressure is applied. My apologies for the shorthand, I was in a rush. I probably should have just held off. That one's my bad.
How about devolving autonomy down to these local communities? It inherently deals with the first half. Worst case is that these areas end up being horribly dangerous and known as the place you don't go after dark, and the communities around them place extra police presence just across the boarder. That is to say, roughly the same situation as it is today. The best case is that the new cops that were raised in the community can actually make some sort of difference. Seems like mostly upside to me.
I don't buy the education side of this being a problem though. The average IQ in the areas we're talking about is what? 70-75? Because of the Flynn effect, that's roughly what the US as a whole was working with around 1900 or so, and the US, and each of its cities, managed to recruit plenty of competent police officers. Might have to back down from really abstract crimes and focus on the basics like property crime and violent crime, but my guess is that's what these communities need.
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What if the community is not safe or happy, and no known system of policing can make it so? Do we accept that the point is to make it as safe and happy as possible, understanding that it may not be very safe and happy in an absolute sense? Do we simply abandon the concept of policing, regardless of how much worse this makes things?
This is a fair distinction, as there is no absolute safety or happiness. Utopia isn't coming, regardless of what the police do.
Yes, the point would be to make the community as safe and as happy as possible. And if the community as a whole doesn't feel that the police are doing that, then they've failed regardless of how many regulations they followed.
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A good essay. I was never as cool and radical as you, but I did use to be very liberal - I never counted myself an "SJW" but I mostly agreed with them, just thought they were kind of extreme. Eventually I realized that in recognizing they were "extreme," I was actually recognizing that their arguments were disingenuous and incoherent and made in bad faith, and that the frequent conflicts I had with them despite being "on their side" were because, well, they were wrong, and I was interested in what is actually true and practical, and they were not.
On the subject of prison abolition and ACAB - I have mentioned to you before that I watch a lot of YouTube channels showing police bodycam footage, and also parole hearings. (I don't know why, I just find them interesting.) I realize these are mostly curated for what will look interesting on YouTube, but in all the police bodycam footage I have watched, it's almost entirely dysfunctional idiots behaving like criminals and children, often escalating routine traffic stops into full-on brawls with multiple cops having to hold them down. I have seen perps screaming, spitting, kicking, hurling abuse and screaming "I can't breathe!" and "You're traumatizing me!" and everything else they can think of, and 90% of the time, the cops are impeccably polite and professional and even kind to them despite having just been kicked and spit on. I'm sure the fact that they all know they have bodycams which people now file FOIAs to put on YouTube has something to do with that, but however it happened, I have really moved to Team Blue over the last couple of years. Sometimes you do see cops acting more aggressive and antagonistic than the situation calls for, when it's clear they are out of patience, but only rarely have I seen cops really behaving like "bastards" or taking down someone who didn't need to be taken down or using unnecessary force.
Between these clips, and the parole hearings I have also watched, it's clear to me we have a substantial population of outright dysfunctional people who are at best self-centered entitled narcissists, and at worst, sociopathic predators. These are not criminals who were created by capitalism and/or wealth inequality. Many, many of them have drug problems, but not all. Maybe a better, more just world would create fewer people like this, being raised in fewer dysfunctional environments, but I think we will always have some very bad people who will prey on anyone around them given a chance, and the only solution I have ever heard from the "restorative justice" crowd appears to be a sincere belief that a guy who sexually molested his six-year-old daughter and three other neighborhood children can be rehabilitated if put in a proper therapeutic environment with community support. (Would this "community support" include keeping him the fuck away from children, I hope? And if he decides he doesn't want to stay away from children, how will they enforce that?)
Freddie deBoer has written several articles about this. Despite being a Marxist who hates cops himself, he has pointed that those who want the Brock Turners and Derek Chauvins and Kyle Rittenhouses of the world locked up forever are frequently the same ones who claim to want to abolish the "carceral system," so... ¯_(ツ)_/¯?
It's good to be aware of the selection bias. Unlike a curated YouTube channel, my casework is ostensibly a random sample but even those cases had to be filtered through whether the police requested any charges, and further whether the prosecutor agreed with them. Despite these disclaimers, my impression of my own casework mirrors the impression you have from YouTube. We have tons of national statistics but those don't really capture qualitative data points like "was the perp a total dipshit?" unfortunately, so these slices are all we have.
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It's an interesting thing but many "Marxists" I run into online tend to loathe this stuff, despite (or because of) the Marxist trappings people throw on their anti-cop takes.
When they start on the "lumpen" they can sound worse than Republicans.
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