Yet another police abuse thread in which the pro-cop voice has the single highest comment count of all commentators here. Whenever it comes to defending police or capitalism, it’s always like that on BB. But to be fair, nearly every other discussion space displays the same pattern, which only makes sense because it’s repeated by the camp defending authority and privilege.
Reading through this conversation and others like it, the necessary functions that police perform always come up in some form or another (like the crowbar scenario above). I believe that it was Henri Lefebvre who said (not 100% sure), “Capitalism and the State excel at creating problems to which only they can provide the solutions.” We see this dynamic play out in every sphere of life–perhaps most notably for this conversation, in crime/policing, drugs/drug war, terrorism/war on terror, etc. In each case we can see capitalism and its imperialist manifestations creating problems and then providing “solutions” that guarantee their longevity, all the while failing to even bring up the source problems–capitalism and the state.
So to answer ol’ 44’s classically miscreant crowbar scenario, one can be anti-police and still take a position against crime–starting with the biggest and most powerful criminals of all, capitalists and governments. The scenario unfortunately begs for an answer that escapes from the narrow confines of the question; the answer is quite simply that the solution to the problem of the police has to address systematic flaws like the fact that even though society and technology are increasingly productive we still have rampant inequality and long work hours, right in the middle of the society of over-abundance. Or that “democracy” is and always has been a total lie, right from the very beginning, and all of the freedom that it promises is constantly withheld or even overthrown by the very governments that proclaim it the loudest; I’m speaking of course about the US and other complicit governments’ colonial habit of denying the world’s revolutions their due, most recently in supporting dictators in response to the Arab Spring, but also including the meddling in Syria and the way that every single major social upheaval is crushed by state violence, maybe even given some token trophies that make it harder to see that many of the same old problems are still there (Civil Rights and the end of segregation in the US, the defeat of Apartheid in South Africa, even the passage of labor laws as a way to cover up barbaric labor practices the world over).
It’s hard to talk about what that cop did to the little girl without raising our gaze to the state that empowers him and the capitalist system that the state manages and protects over and against the interests of the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. Why are police in schools? Ostensibly because of problematic student behavior (nevermind what we suppose to be the “real” reasons). Such behaviors, where they actually exist, start in the home, the nucleus where all of capitalism’s problems come into clear focus on the people who live together in it–problems that they can’t solve, like being over-worked and stressed, or being misled by ads and ideology about what would bring them happiness, problems that they can’t begin to solve for the simple and practical reason of having limited time, because it is their time that is owned by capitalists and the state, and they have so little of it left over from the daily grind (much less other resources, usually). Never mind that the revolutionary infrastructure that we need in place in order to transform society isn’t allowed to develop, is even actively destroyed when it becomes a threat, and its defeat by violence is always used after the fact as a resounding judgment of its merits.
When these problems manifest in a single instant of police brutality, we should avoid the temptation of narrowing our focus and leaping into the endless and futile circus of reforms and debates about them. There is no grand, rational solution, only us.
