Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
Before abolishing the police you need to have an idea of what is going to replace it.
This post offers no ideas.
I also wonder if they mean, abolish the current police force, or the concept of a police force.
I can understand the former, but the latter makes no sense to me.
Before abolishing slavery you need to have an idea of what is going to replace it.
This post offers no ideas.
I also wonder if they mean, abolish the current slavers, or the concept of slavery.
I can understand the former, but the latter makes no sense to me.
This is a really dumb response. The replacement for slavery is the same work just paid and without ownership of the workers.
The police are already paid, and they do things that are genuinely neccesary like crisis intervention and investigating legitimate crimes (not busting pot dealers and ticket quotas), they just do a bunch of evil and corrupt shit on top of it (and usually do a shitty job of the neccesary things as well). There does need to be something to replace those roles.
To be fair, OP's post is also a really shitty analogy because of those reasons as well.
Slavery isn't just unpaid labor, it also involves social control, and violent enforcement. “I can’t imagine society without X unless you give me a detailed replacement” is a lame way of defending the status quo. Slavery, feudalism, child labor, debtors prisons all had the same argument made for them and they skip over the question of whether the current form is legitimate or inevitable.
This was exactly what I wanted to say! Thank you!
Okay I'll offer up the alternative.
Show any social worker or mental health professional a violent police interaction and in 90% of cases they will just shake their heads. They deal with the same shit every day and successfully manage many of the same situations without shooting anyone. The police universally try to respond as aggressively and counter productively as they can and it turns mental health crises into violence. Like yeah, there are situations where armed response is needed but so many of the common situations don't require someone pointing guns at people. Go watch a random badge cam video and ask yourself, could a competent mental health worker resolve this? Food for thought, people frequently react in extreme ways to the police because they know how violent and unjust the situation will become with them involved.
For prison at a minimum just stop with the drug war shit. Stop sending people to jail for parking fines and weed and getting them wrapped up in the system so they lose their jobs. An ideal standard could, again, involve mental health treatment, counseling, and rehabilitation. If someone's arrested for stealing shit, maybe they need to be put in a safe environment where they can learn skills, get a job and contribute to society. If they're too dangerous, they need to be in a facility where they're getting actual help and treatment until they aren't dangerous if that day ever comes.
You may be thinking that this stuff is just vaguely cops and jails by some other name and at a hyper superficial level that may be in part, but the meat grinder we've built is definitely not the above in any stretch of the imagination.
There are even more extreme versions like the restorative (not just rehabilitative) justice systems built by the Zapatistas, I encourage people to seek out alternative proposals, there's a whole world of ideas out there.
I'll give UK police some credit here.
They very capable and willing to take a minimum force approach to defuse a situation, to talk and calm things, rather than escalate violence.
I know they don't always get it right, there's always that 10% that's out of control.
Generally speaking, they're policing by consent, not force
Hey man, agreed the current police force is bad, sure, but how about an alternative being the leading narrative? A good platform offers solutions as the primary policies rather than soapboxing to the choir.
An alternative is local communities be in charge of this themselves. The money spent on policing could be better used to build up services to avoid crime originating, for mental health services, for armed community defense, etc. Local communities don't need to buy sonic weapons, apcs, and fit out riot squds.
As it stands police do very little to prevent crime, and rarely bother to solve a crime after it has been reported. What they do, do is a ridiculous amount of abuse towards innocent people.
We cannot get to that stage without first removing the barrier that is public perception that police prevent crime and keep us safe. Getting rid of them will allow organic means of defending a community to grow. The Black Panther are an excellent historic contemporary example of this in the media today, but they have to operate in constant opposition to the police which hinders them greatly.
Likewise we can see community defense in action in Rovaja and Zapatista's - but that's much harder to put into a meme compared to 'police bad' which most people understand.
No, it's not.
Abolish the police and replace them with this other thing that’s totally not just a better version of the police
A better version of the police would still be better.
Right. But the OOP is quite clear that replacing them with something better is not enough.
They're letting perfect be the enemy of good. Which is a shame, because then nothing changes :-(
So you're the person the meme is referring to. Brave of you to admit it
It’s very easy to imagine a perfect society without police. Unfortunately we don’t live in imagination land