Fuck Ted Wheeler.
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except if you read that piece closely:
The best officers use the law like a scalpel rather than a bludgeon.
the author isn’t recommending changing the policing structure, only the minds of officers.
that’s a tried and failed route.
when you give people a lot of power, and the flexibility to choose how and for whom they enforce it – there’s no good way to keep those people from inflicting their implicit ( or worse, explicit ) bias.
moreover: police are using their power like a scalpel. nationwide, police departments target people of color with the skill of a surgeon. and the politics support that because the people with money are mostly white with their own implicit ( or worse, explicit ) biases. white people only even see the scalpel by a) watching videos of attacks on poc, or b) going out and protesting police violence.
i firmly believe we have to get the guns out of policing and reduce the power of police. since we can’t do that directly ( police unions ) we have to attack it sideways: force the people with guns to do less things.
broken windows policing? it shouldn’t even be possible. we should take that power away by empowering new unarmed response for the everyday things. it will cost less ( police get paid a premium ) and we can spend that money on actually fixing the windows.
[ edit to add ]
in that same vein:
that’s not how mafia work. they scare the bespoke jesus out of people to get them to comply. when the city council starts making noises at supporting change, they’ll stop responding to calls, they’ll dig up the lawyers, or as they did in new york with de blasio: they’ll arrest and dox your children.
they are in this to win. and if they do win, they will have won. for many years after, no one will be able to touch them.
for other examples of this technique in practice, please see bunkerboy.
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that’s incredibly powerful. did the city government do that, or did organizers?
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Agreed it’s not the best source. What I found is that a lot of the content that floats to the top in searching for the role of a peace officer has been published by police officers and associated organizations. On top of that, there are different definitions and training initiatives in various states.
What we need is something defined by the public, not the police. Hopefully, these protests are another step in the effort for the citizens to take their power (and money) back.
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I honestly don’t know, I only saw the pic with a location.
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I kind of hate this piece because it makes an assumption about the intentions of those calling for removal that simply doesn’t exist. Nobody is saying they want to do this to “erase the past”. They’re doing it because they want to stop reifying it, which is fundamentally different.
Also this:
Certain charmless totalitarian ideologues have enjoyed obliterating evidence of their predecessors—think of Wahhabi grave-leveling, the denuding of churches by Protestant zealots, the erasure of enemies of Stalin. Not wanting to be like Stalin is good.
is just a bafflingly bad-faith argument. “Don’t be like Stalin, continue to revel in the glorification of shitty people” so completely fails to comprehend that similar actions can have wildly different intents and power dynamics that it’s hard to take anything they say even remotely seriously.
tl;dr, no, dump them all in the sea.
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I’d also argue it’s about correcting our misconceptions that are part of that reification. The many confederate statues across the south were put up specifically to celebrate white supremacy and to hide the reality of what the civil war was about, which was slavery.
Leaving these up is precisely wanting to be like Stalin, since the statues and monuments are built on a lie in the first place.
Correct!
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Piers Morgan was in the Bush Administration?
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they’ll have to take a position now
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I didn’t know the federal government controlled city budgets.
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Think of Trump as a toddler who occasionally vocalizes identifiable words
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Yeah, The Atlantic often publishes insightful work, but it also publishes a lot of, as you said, bad-faith arguments. I’m always cautious now before reading anything there.
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That spoofer gets everywhere. The gammon must flow.
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They could be smashed into gravel and melted down for a path and some fencing for a garden - but then some asshat would probably come along and fuck it up so as much as I’d like them repurposed I guess the best thing really is just to irretrievably dump every single one of them somewhere deep and wet.
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David Simon had Officer McNulty hint at this in 2006 :
Baker, let me tell you a little secret:
A patrolling officer on his beat is the one true dictatorship in America.
We can lock a guy up on a humble; we can lock him up for real; or we can say, fuck it-- pull under the expressway and drink ourselves to death, and our side partners will cover it.
So no one-- and I mean no one–tells us how to waste our shift.
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