Are Police Even Necessary?
This existential question most often has the knee-jerk reaction
of course they are, who would protect us!?!”
But there are rising calls for the abolition of police.
This topic deserves more than a quick & scornful dismissal, considering Epidemic levels of Violence by agents of the state have become the status quo.
Police are under no obligation to protect the public they putatively serve
The Supreme Court‘s series of decisions over more than three decades indisputably establish this as fact.
So then… The question of “Who will protect us?”
Is now of non sequitur to the case for dismantling police departments around the nation.
Police Kill
Hurt
Intimidate
Harass
&
In General Brutalize
the common citizen with alarming frequency & rarely if ever face repercussions beyond a paid vacation comically termed ‘administrative leave’ for their transgressions.
Rather than fighing & solving violent crimes, police act as little more than heavily militarized code enforcers or… “Bureaurocrats With Weapons” Keeping us safe from dangerous broken tail lights, deadly missing front license plates, & vicious lane changes more often than from
Robbery
Homicide
&
Rape
The amount of money collected from fines lines up almost exactly to that needed to meet municipal debt“
The Long Arm Of… Wait! The Long Hammer Of The Law
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
The Law Of The Instrument, Abraham Maslow 1966
Give the police weapons of war under the premise of fighting terrorism; when terrorism is all but nonexistent,
& predictably, they will go to war.
We The People… Are not nails to be violently & forcibly hammered into subservience over the smallest of nonviolent & unimportant infractions.
Whether or not you’re going to admit it, this is our current situation!
The War On Cops !?!
Or A War On The People ?
With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
How has this police state cinched a noose-like grip on the nation.
While solutions from individual officer liability insurance to the use of body cameras, forcing an on-call policy akin to that of fire departments to an overhaul of training policies, as it becomes clear & apparent nothing will be done, the larger previously mentioined existential question comes into play.
Are the police a necessary element in society?
In short The answer is no, Absolutely not
Police spend a small amount of time policing things other than the ludicrous laws concocted solely for the purpose of generating revenue & to justify their own existence.
The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals — indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you.
The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force — even, death — into situations where it never would have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”
David Graeber writes:
This overcriminalization of living has exploded prison populations & adversarial policing to a profoundly negative effect.
In 1980, the General Accounting Office was tasked by Congress to determine how many Federal laws existed. By 1984 they hadn’t yet received a response. When asked why this was the case, the G.A.O. stated that they were still counting. At that point they were up to about 3,000 and had only just touched the tip of the iceberg, as they say. It was estimated, at that time, that at the rate at which Congress was passing laws, by the year 2000 there would be in excess of 20,000 laws.
Current estimates on the number of Federal laws in America range anywhere between 15,000 & 50,000.”
As of today, the sad truth is, nobody knows how many laws have been passed by Congress. To be sure, many laws currently in effect negate older and outdated laws which may still be in effect. For example, there is an old Federal law which outlaws taking a bath in the nude. Today, we would find such a law as ridiculous. Yet, as far as I can tell, it is still an active law.
It’s estimated the average American unknowingly commits 3 felonies every day!
The problem the G.A.O. had with determining laws is that there are so many that refer to other laws, it is hard to define whether any particular law is a law unto itself or if it is actually part of another law. Some laws passed by Congress refer to as many as 12 other previously enacted laws. So the G.A.O. has to determine if this law is its own law, if it is actually an extension of one or more of the other laws or if the other laws are part of the new law.
Current estimates on the number of Federal laws in America range anywhere between 15,000 & 50,000. But, no matter if the actual number is closer to the lower end or the higher end, it is a commonly held assumption among most think tanks (whether they be liberal, conservative or libertarian) that the average American cannot go through his/her day without unknowingly violating at least three Federal laws.
How does it feel to know that you are very likely a felon and don’t even know it?
Ignorance Of The Law Is No Excuse… For You!
But Yet The LAW ENFORCERS Have In Large Part Become Exempt From Prosecution. Excusing Away Their Crimes Due To Their Ignorance Of The Law…
“Oh Sorry Was That Wrong? If I Knew That Sort Of Thing Was Frowned Upon…”
Frank Castaza
The
Are Spreading‼️
Given these numbers, and given that police are now exempt from the “ignorance of the law is no excuse” adage, it is time to either force Congress to reduce the number of laws to a reasonable number or accept that the above adage no longer applies to Americans in general.
According to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “our nation’s addiction to criminalization backlogs our judiciary, overflows our prisons, and forces innocent individuals to plead guilty not because they actually are, but because exercising their constitutional right to a trial is prohibitively expensive and too much of a risk.”
These purported crimes, however, largely have nothing at all to do with true harm committed against another. Even though Brutal Responses by Police & Prisons Filled Beyond Capacity would have you thinking otherwise.
& It All Starts From Youth!
This apalling over abundance of criminal law, coupled with the government’s military equipment giveaway to local law enforcement agencies which have no real need for it, has put the population in a very real & very dangerous position!
Once somenone has a criminal record, their future encounters with police become a risky & all too often deadly affair. It already doesn’t take evidence of guilt or wrongdoing to put an officer on guard, but a criminal blip on a cop’s computer in their car during an otherwise routine traffic stop creates an unnecessary tension where none should exist. Even if that crime was keeping rabbits collecting rainwater, living off-grid in the backyard, or any of the untold number of absurd behaviors now verboten by the state & I won’t even get started here on the unreal atrocities fueled by The Failed Drug War.
Barely in line with the law of the instrument, Citizens Have Become Opportunities For Revenue generation, as police patrol the streets searching for anyone stepping out of line with some contemptible code.
We are little more than Adversarial Dollar $igns to these roving bands of armed enforcers of extraneous laws.
Victims of a Chattel Slavery System to be Pillaged Plundered Harassed Abused & Shaken Down All to generate revenue & therefore justify the continuation of Big Government.
If you survive in America & It is dinner time… You have most likely broken the law today!
Between 2.3 Million & 2.4 Million Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan.
Too many laws, too many prisoners–the Economist July 22, 2010
Color of my Skin still Black…I am Human
Color of my…Fuck that I am Human! “
-StarrLight-
In 1970, less than one in 400 Americans was incarcerated.
Why has the prison population more than quadrupled over a few decades?
Why are you, as an average person & daily felon, more vulnerable to arrest than at any other time?
A constant flood of new & broadly interpreted laws are criminalizing entire categories of daily life while, at the same time, the standards required for arrest & conviction have been severely diluted. The result is that far too many people are arrested & imprisoned for acts that should not be viewed as criminal at all or should receive minimal punishment.
In so many cases, violated laws are so vague & obscure or complicated in language that even the police are oblivious of them. In other cases, outright innocence is not sufficient to escape the brutality of detention.
In light of Policing
Justice
Prison
&
Criminal Code Reform
Yes… there are several viable options for consideration. At this point though; Perhaps most imperatively… The Complete Abolishment Of Police.
The Powers That Be would have you believe the populace would devolve into chaos & violence without police departments.
But when you Open Your Eyes & Focus… You can see this ignores the chaos & violence caused & or Initiated By Police!
Not to mention the very real historical proof that a correctly & fully-functioning society can & will police itself.
Just Look 👀 at Portugal🇵🇹
Consider the size of the financial loop perpetuated by an excessively intrusive surveilance state & its armed enforcement agents. Through tax… We bear the cost of disproportionately large police forces, which go after petty criminals instead of preventing significant Property Crimes Murder & Rape!
Then us taxpayers fund backlogged courts, overwhelmed public defenders, probation officers, legislators & prisons in efforts to criminalize ever more innocuous & ridiculous behaviors. It doesn’t end. It is not sustainable. & These things do not fix themselves…
A 2013 study says a mere 2 of 14 arrests were for violent or property crimes.
If police actually existed to fight real crime, not the overwhelming number of ‘crimes’ conjured up by lawmakers, departments would be dramatically slashed.
Kappeler writes:
“If we take all the violent crimes reported to the police in 2011, we find that there were 1,203,564 violent crimes (FBI, 2012). Since more than 885,000 people worked as sworn officers in that same year (BJS 2012), there were 1.36 violent crimes reported for every police officer employed in the U.S. If crime were dispersed evenly across the nation’s police, then this would mean that in 2011 each police officer would have been responsible for investigating just over a single violent crime. And since we know that a relatively small number of criminals are responsible for the vast majority of crime in a society, each cop would be responsible for even fewer criminals.”
Since the hotly controversial deaths of Michael Brown & Eric Garner in 2014, the call for police reform exponentially intensified. While well-intentioned, years of begging & pleading nicely for the broken system to fix itself has; as to be expected, fallen on deaf ears.
Abolishing the police entirely might reek of radicalism
To a nation cowed by a constant bombardment of Governmental Fear Propaganda.
Consider for a moment how little violence is in our current society… Compared to just 10 years ago.
Trained & unarmed civilian intervention teams; often former violent offenders themselves, can & do defuse potentially violent conflicts in their own neighborhoods in cities from Los Angeles to Detroit ”
José Martín-Rolling Stone.
Nonviolent Peace Force
Restorative Justice
What is restorative justice? Where in the world is it being used? What are people saying about it? Does it really make a difference in real people’s lives? What is its future?
Conflict resolution (Like Restorative Justice) as a community program has effectively prevented criminal activity, made neighborhood relations better, lowered gang violence, & resolved; without police or courts, crimes which have already occurred.
Ethan Ucker, cofounder of Circles & Ciphers A Chicago based leadership training & conflict resolution program for young men who’ve been in prison, jail, or a gang,” They facilitate “peace circles.” I know… ‘peace circles’ most likely evokes images of stoned hippies around a campfire; but for many, the concept has done the extraordinary in a community once awash in violence and gang activity.
A real world example Ucker offered to the Chicago Reader recently:
There was a robbery at this store in the community. One of the people at the store whose stuff was taken said, ‘Look, I don’t want to call the cops. Is there anything we can do?’ … They found on Facebook that this young person was selling their stuff, and that young person happened to go to a school where we’d done some circles, so I knew a teacher at the school and could say, ‘Hey, this is where we’re at.’”
Eventually, robber & robbed were brought together in an attempt to resolve the wrongs done.
That young person ended up returning what he had that hadn’t been sold, and then working at the shop in restitution for everything else. Then it turned out he really liked working there, and after this agreement was over, he continued to go there and volunteer. There was a relationship built there.”
The more one is a part of their neighborhood & community, the less likely they are to rob or victimize their neighbors. This relationship in a community can be a persuasive & compelling deterrent against crime. This… cannot be said of police today as officers often don’t even live in the neighborhoods they police. This creates a cold separation & lack of personal attachment, investment, & stake from the ultimate outcome of any interaction, lessoning the odds that they will have any hesitation at all to act violently in an encounter that wouldn’t normally call for the Use Of Force.
Putting the community back in community policing while abolishing police as armed agents for revenue generation can effect sweeping changes to an increasingly polarized & distanced society. Rather than the financial feedback loop apparent in our injustice system. 2 conditions of which often drive actual violent crime & loosens taxpayer dollars to reinstate mental health & addiction programs as well as many other effective solutions.
Some versions of this community solution, subverting the need to involve police & the court system is termed ‘Reparative, Transformative, or Restorative justice’ & has appeared in cities across the U.S.
Philadelphia’s experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the process.”
José Martín – Rolling Stone
Our rights have been bought, traded, & sold by a control system powered by money.”
The only means left to reclaim those rights stand in wresting excessive power from those who would misuse & have abused it, in their all too often brutal ways.
Police are not protecting & serving the people who pay their salaries & are under no obligation to do so.
But if they aren’t solving crimes or protecting us… Whose purposes do they serve?
In recent decades, local governments have become deeply indebted to large, private financial institutions… Many of the same ones that brought of us the crash of 2008. (In Ferguson, for instance, the amount of revenue collected from fines corresponds almost exactly to that shelled out to service municipal debt.) Increasingly, cities find themselves in the business of arresting citizens in order to pay creditors.”
Ferguson is far from an isolated example. One wonders if those who unfalteringly defend the violent police state would as adamantly stand behind them if police were properly portrayed as State-Sponsored Armed Thugs For Big Banks & Corporate America.
These arguments for abolishing police don’t condemn officers as individuals.
Unless an altogether unlikely revamping of this Overcriminalization & Policing For Profit at the expense of communities nationwide takes place soon, Law Enforcement will continue to serve no one but The State & Corporate Interests. So those who argue that police put their lives on the line miss… Completely miss that they do so at the behest of a Control System oppressing us all to meet its monetary goals.
There is no perfect solution & in light of holistic reform Abolishing American Police might be our only realistic & suitable solution.
⭕️ A sunset provision attached to all new or amended laws. This is a clause that provides an expiration date for a law unless action is taken to renew it. Today most laws are in effect indefinitely.
⭕️ The elimination of civil-contempt imprisonments, which most commonly occur in family courts; men who are unable to pay court-ordered spousal or child support are imprisoned for “contempt” without a trial or appeal process, & for whatever term is set by a judge. This converts the penal system into a debtor’s prison. The America legal system is distinguished from most other Western ones in permitting such imprisonment.
⭕️ The elimination of a double standard under the law for those involved in law enforcement. For example, the elimination of personal immunity for the willful wrongdoing of police officers on duty & for district attorneys who pursue blatantly flimsy cases. Such immunity skews incentives toward brutality & over prosecution.
⭕️ Reinstatement of the men’s rea safeguard. Men’s rea means there was no “guilty mind” when an act occurred &, so, there was no crime although civil liability may well exist. For example, if a man bumps into another car without noticing it, he should not be charged with leaving the scene of an accident. He is civilly liable but not criminal so. Currently, there is a concerted attack on mens rea so that people are deemed criminally “guilty” despite their intent.
⭕️ Establishment of an “ignorance-of-the-law” defense. This differs from men’s rea. For example, if a man knows he hits a car and leaves the scene, an “ignorance” defense would be “I didn’t know to do so was illegal.” It would be an invalid defense because everyone in our society is reasonably deemed to know that the destruction of property is wrong. But it is currently impossible for anyone — including the police — to know the content of every law. The principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” comes from 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes who addressed willful ignorance of laws that were well-known or a matter of common sense. Thus the claim “I didn’t know rape was wrong” is an invalid defense while “I didn’t know buying an orchid was wrong” would probably be valid even to Hobbes.
⭕️ The elimination of criminal charges for all nonviolent “wrongdoing” toward law-enforcement agents. Such charges include obstruction of justice, lying to the police, & peacefully resisting arrest.
⭕️ The decriminalization of all drugs
⭕️ A return to the traditional rules of statutory interpretation by which criminal statutes are narrowly construed. Today, not merely criminal laws but seemingly unrelated ones, such as the Commerce Act, are being stretched to include a wide range of so-called violators as criminals.
Legislators have powerful incentives to call constantly for more laws & stricter enforcement. Until a large enough voter or protest base has been victimized by the law & demands change, politicians are rewarded for continuing that call. Being “hard” on crime will not merely win votes, & gives the state a vehicle more social control. Meanwhile, asset forfeiture that often accompanies arrests can turn a tidy profit, not just for the state but especially for the police departments that absorb the assets. Moreover, hordes of unionized people now have well-paying, plush-benefited jobs in the legal & penal systems. If 90 percent of arrests and imprisonments were eliminated then 90 percent of those jobs might disappear.
&
So…
Until something drastic is done!
You & Your Children will continue to live under the constant threat of arrest by an arbitrary power against who you either have no defense or a defense that could cause your ruin or even worse!
Will You continue to live in a police state.
“Last Words”
A Tribute To Men Killed By Police
Shirin-Banou Barghi created this series of graphics dedicated to those killed by police officers.
She pushed out a back door and ran into the darkness beneath overarching oaks. He lay on the floor near his kitchen, two bullet holes in his chest, blood pooling thick, dying. -mobile.nytimes.com
Mehserle testified that he meant to zap Grant with his Taser in an Oakland station – but instead pulled his .40 caliber handgun and blasted the man. -newyorkdailynews.com
At one point, Guzman says, he spoke to Sean Bell and said, “S, I love you, son.” He says Bell said, “I love you too.” Then Guzman says Bell “stopped moving.” –abclocal.go.com
Jonathan never had an opportunity to reply. He had bullets in him before he could ever hit the ground. So there was not sufficient warning. No one ever told him to stop. He didn’t have time to react. -huffingtonpost.com
The officer demanded that the two “get the f—k on the sidewalk, Johnson says. “His exact words were get the f—k on the sidewalk.” -gawker.com
They said they thought McDade was armed because … he clutched his waste band as they chased him onto a dimly lit neighborhood street. -pasadenastarnews.com
New York City police officers shot and killed 16-year-old Kimani Gray in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.
The medical examiner’s office later ruled Garner’s death a homicide, caused by the officer’s chokehold as well chest and neck compressions and prone positioning “during physical restraint by police.” -newyork.nbclocal.com
He was at the video games playing videos and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were. And the next thing I know, he said ‘It’s not real,’ and the police start shooting and they said ‘Get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him. And I could hear him just crying and screaming. I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human. -msnbc.com
“The newly released cell phone footage undermines the statement, showing Powell approaching the cops, but not coming as close as was reported, with his hands at his side. The officers began shooting within 15 seconds of their arrival, hitting Powell with a barrage of bullets.” –http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5694224
Diallo was shot outside his Bronx apartment. The police officers had mistaken him for a serial rapist, who was later apprehended. -pri.org
3rd Eye Focused 