The capitalist state and it's forces in the form of Police and Military primarily exist to protect the private property of the rich. All other functions are secondary.
Hell I’m a conservative and I want to see police reform. We should look forward to most police interactions. Well maybe not forward but we shouldn’t feel like it’s going to be a one sided abusive relationship.
Most interactions are way more negative than they should be. I’m fine with use of force when it’s needed but often it’s just used as a first step.
The "easiest" (in terms of selling it to the public) solution would be to heavily increase training requirements. Two years should be the absolute minimum, with the heaviest focus being on de-escelation and how to actually help the community.
Going back to requiring police to actually live in the communities they police would go a long way as well
As a german: Yes this will reduce the symptoms, but it doesn't remove the causes.
Of cause more training with higher standards will help, but the esprit de corps, the insufficent character tests, and the structurals problems will persist. Especially when some of the problematic elements are teached in the training.
I think you’d be surprise that most departments already have over two years of training or close to it.
Take a look at San Francisco. Their training along with Oakland’s is already over two years in length.
I believe LA PD is just under two years.
Now I admit this woke by hyper controversial but I think all use of force that result in any injury should be reviewed like a grand jury for criminal charges.
Once an officer receives x amounts of complaints. A citizen panel is formed to review.
Right now an officer will use force and the internal department decides if it was valid. If nobody is injured I’m fine with that. Someone gets injured. Let’s investigate to see if it really was reasonable.
Injury should include financially too. Let's stop the civil asset forfeiture bullshit where your assets are guilty until proven innocent, but they never try you with a crime.
When civil asset seizure first started to become popular. It was widely supported. It was a method to destroy drug dealers.
Quickly it just became a weapon of abuse. I personally am highly against it now. I didn’t like it much in the first place but I understood why it was being used.
Now there are just too many cases of abuse to justify it all.
My local PD has a 6 month academy. Make it 2 years minimum nationwide, and at least another yesr to move up both to sheriff's departments and state departments.
I should have been more specific, that's my bad. The academy alone needs to be 2 years minimum. The fact that the average first year pre-law student seems to know the laws surrounding policing better than most cops is an absolute joke.
Any reasonable "small government" conservative should. The sad thing is there aren't many of those left with any power now. There are mostly only big government regressives who grabbed the conservative flag and ran with it.
Too many conservatives are just religious zealots. They’re not really small government.
Police are essential to our society operating correctly. As such they should be well trained, well funded and held to a high standard. They’re should see it as an honor to protect society.
Right now we have a lot of cops who like to be bullies and that has to stop.
It's perfectly possible to create a law enforcement arm of government that's actually concerned with protecting vulnerable citizens, but that's not what the institution of policing actually focuses on.
To suggest that we can't have law enforcement without propping up a toxic system of professional predators is exactly the presumption they want you to make in order to preserve their jobs. We don't need to capitulate to a lawless fraternity to enforce our laws, we can replace it with something that isn't built on principles of oppression.
That said, their main job at the moment is to protect hoarders of wealth from the social consequences of wealth hoarding. Personally, I don't see that as necessary.
Nobody is advocating for zero police. It'd be better to move the police budget to more social programs to try and help people so they're not pushed into a life of crime. An ounce of prevention is worth of a pound of the cure.
You know, I hadn't thought about it, but I guess being against police brutality must mean I think there shouldn't be any law enforcement at all. Cause I certainly can't imagine a world where there are police who uphold the law but don't beat the shit out of people and kill them indiscriminately.
Your question is absurd. Pointing out that cops beat the shit out of people and kill them indiscriminately in no way presupposes that there should be no cops.
Well, if ACAB, then so are the ones that simply uphold the law without resorting to brutality. It's not SCAB after all.
So if that's the idea, asking for a alternative solution to law enforcement does not seem that absurd to me.
ACAB is a critique of the policing system as a whole, not individuals.
Good individuals enforcing a bad system are still as bad as the systems they enforce.
Law enforcement should truly be built around the idea of protecting and serving the greater public, but at this time it's really just legalized violence controlled by the rich, like a hit squad.
The cops are not inherently bad, it's just the system currently encourages and supports bad ones while driving away good ones. Change the system, cops get less bad.
Defunding or otherwise reducing the number of police is just a temporary harm reduction measure, since in a lot of places things are actively worse WITH police (as they stand now) than they would be WITHOUT police. That's not to say things would be great if we permanently abolish police. It's just a choice between two evils and, crazy as it is, actual criminals are the lesser evil in many cases.
Ideally, we would have police, but an entirely different set of police with an entirely different structure supporting them.
For example, make "protect and serve" a job requirement instead of a slogan, end qualified immunity, get rid of grand juries for police, etc
It's true. The good ones get purged and blacklisted, while the bad ones get hired at another station if they get fired for good cause. Just listen to the stories that the actual good cops tell when they're forced out for actually being good.
The system can be fixed, but it would have to be remade from the ground up with a select group of trustworthy people who would have to be very scrupulous about background checks and creating a culture. We might be able to bring in outside consultants from places with better cops, like Europe or Canada.
For starters you don't actually need to enforce law a lot of the time, it's sufficient to simply verbally reprimand or do a number of other non-law-enforcement things to correct bad behaviour.
This is why german/nordic police are famous for how not terrible they are, they're more likely to help you out rather than punish you.
German Police will still harass you (even physically) if a swearword aimed at them slips your mouth. And if you don't look German or are a POC, mentally ill or are otherwise causing problems they are too incompetent to deal with, you are muuuuch more likely to get murdered by them.
I think what you maybe are referring to is the "Ordnungsamt" which is kind of like a community task force
German police will still put a boot on your neck if you dare engage in non-violent civil disobedience to protest the objective destruction of our environment for example
No, I really think you've seen too much unrealistic information. Or project American news onto Germany.
Nobody in Germany is likely to get murdered by police. Check the statistics. The numbers are small enough (around 10/year) that you can look up every case in a year. I won't deny that the police got some big problems. But coming up with completely wrong arguments isn't helping anything.
And I will stay with my argument that you are more likely to get murdered by the Police if you belong to one of the groups I mentioned, the statement was relative to the usual chances of murder by cop.
I don't believe this post is saying that we should fire all cops, and a good cop is a cop that is fired.
What it is saying is that good cops are often fired for speaking out against bad cops. There are many examples of whistleblower police officers being terminated.
What this meme is saying that to identify a cop, the good cops were fired, and the bad cops are beating people up.
It's advocating for a shift in policing where the good cops and retained and model good behavior, where currently, the bad cops are the ones that are retained and model behavior
Nothing in this posts says "remove all the cops" but by using the logic of this meme we could remove all the cops by training them to a point of professionalism in which they get terminated from it.
Do cops even enforce shit? By the time you have to call em it's too damn late. Not to mention so many stories of cops not doing shit when needed. Go ahead and report something stolen and see how useful they are. Ask the parents of that one Texas elementary school how useful their cops were and if they still have little Timmy around.
Honestly cops can replaced with self driving cars that roll around with dummies inside that pretend to be enforcing shit but do nothing but burn gas. Most people are civil if they think they might get arrested/pulled over. A criminal is gonna criminal. A cop has never saved anyone in realtime unless some dumbass decided to start shit right in front of one and well we can 2nd amendment for the rest.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, my local PD has several arrest warrants for a guy a block away from me and they refuse to go get him at his house, so they drive around hoping to get him while hes out. He simply drives or walks through the alleys in broad daylight and they never see him. this is only one example of all the nothing they do here.
I would suggest a citizens militia made up of local residents, mostly tasked with keeping their community orderly. Not armed with guns but with Batons and Tasers for diffusing situations and self defence.
Serious deescalation and psychological training and only special units being allowed to bear arms which would only be used reactively.
ofc this would only work in a society which has alleviated social inequalities
In Germany we have something called "Ordnungsamt" (lit. meaning: Orderdepartment) imo smth like that should take over most tasks of current police and current police (in the way they are equipped) being reduced by a lot and used more rarely