Gonna break down this response as clearly as possible.
The origins of the police are evil.
It has been shown repeatedly that the police were formed to oppress the working class and (1, 2) and enforce white supremacy (1, 2, 3). In fact, the early U.S. police grew directly out of slavery.
The police aren’t the people you think they are.
The police don’t care about you – they don’t even have a constitutional duty to protect you. They’re allowed to take your property without your consent (the NYPD seizes so much property they can’t even log it in their computers). In fact, cops are more likely to steal your property than burglars are. They commit hundreds of crimes and human rights violations against people like you & me and get away with it because they cover for each other.
Cops tend to be unusually aggressive, authoritarian, and secretive (Greene & Heilbrun, 2011). They are more than twice as likely to commit domestic violence than the rest of the population, and (once again) they cover for each other when doing so. The police are on the side of neo-Nazis (1, 2). In fact, many times the police themselves are the neo-Nazis/klansmen (1, 2, 3). And even besides all this, cops do all kinds of other shady shit – for instance, undercover police are used to instigate fights during protests and rallies.
The police terrorize those of us who are marginalized.
The police disproportionately arrest Black people for drugs even though white people use drugs more often. They disproportionately pull Black people over for traffic stops. The police terrorize people with disabilities.They are viciously anti-indigenous – and always have been. Police terrorize sex workers. There are countless examples of police brutalizing homeless people (1, 2, 3). The police have a lengthy history of brutality against the LGBT community (1, 2). They terrorize women of color and get away with it (1, 2, 3). They kill massive numbers of people each year – and a disproportionate number of their victims are Black and native. On top of that, recent data suggests cops may kill up to twice as many peopleas we even thought they did. And while police love to defend themselves by saying they have the most dangerous job, that’s not even close to being true.
The police’s best kept secret: We don’t need them!
A world without the police is completely possible (1, 2, 3, 4). We have resources for resolving violence as communities without the need for state intervention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8– as some examples). We as communities are better capable of resolving violence than the police are, because we don’t have the vested interest in the status quo that they have. Even if a few cops are well-intentioned here or there, it doesn’t change that the role of the police is to work against the vast majority of us in the interests of the (white) elite few.
Why are you so invested in the police when they are complicit in your dehumanization?
