We Protect Us

At the start of June Jonathan Joss, the indigenous actor who played John Redcorn on King of the Hill and Ken Hotate on Parks and Rec returned to the site of his former home, destroyed in a fire with his husband. He discovered the remains of a beloved dog and while mourning with his husband an assailant emerged, yelled homophobic slurs, drew a gun and fired.

 

This is a horror, and this is the reality we find ourselves in.

 

If we are to live in a safe society we’re going to have to make it so ourselves.

 

San Antonio police initially claimed there was no evidence of a hate crime. This is pretty standard operating procedure for just about any police force. Politicians and media figures pretend like the police exist to protect and serve our communities, but these situations are common. Joss had a long standing conflict with the neighbor who eventually shot him. As part of this, about a year earlier police confiscated Joss’ own firearms after someone allegedly discharged them into the sky. If police existed to mediate conflicts and protect people events would not have played out like this. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a situation where someone reported harassment and threats to the police where they took it seriously. And bear in mind, I’m white and pass pretty easily for a cis-man. I’ve known many white women who reported harassment and got noncomittal responses from the police. Ask anyone who has volunteered helping people experiencing domestic violence. Most of the time I expect the harassing party gets bored and moves on to another target, and police assume it’s better to let things work themselves out without doing actual work. All too often, though, harassment will escalate and culminate in violence.

 

When we say “All Cops Are Bastards” we mean it. If you are a good cop reading this… no you’re not. You let your comrades slide on bad behavior and dereliction of what you tell everybody your job is. The job of police is not to “protect and serve” their communities. Next, you’re going to tell me The Undertaker really killed Vince McMahon and Kane resurrected him with a lightning bolt. The kayfabe that police exist to protect communities is a premise more ridiculous than anything ever shown in WWE.

 

Police are an institution of violence that maintains the social order. This isn’t a conspiracy. There’s no master plan to make this so, it’s a system that emerges out of the complex web of money and ownership relations that serve as the hierarchy of our society. The people who own the infrastructure that operates society want to continue to own the infrastructure that operates society. You look at the average police officer in America today and they are heavily armed, heavily armored, incredibly lazy, and cowardly.

 

So much of our society is dedicated to lionizing and worshipping police. TV shows portray police as competent and interested in justice. In fiction police are heroes. In reality police piss their pants when they see a shadow and otherwise hang out playing Candy Crush.

 

The police are not going to protect us.

 

To someone who has lived a comfortable life up to now this is a horrifying thought. This is why there is so much resistance to the objective fact that All Cops Are Bastards. But when you accept an uncomfortable truth this allows you to start thinking and come up with your own solution. We all saw how the police treat protesters who want to reduce police brutality or who don’t like the new American ICE gestapo human trafficking our neighbors into slavery in foreign lands. It is widely believed that the NYPD directly threatened then NYC mayor Bill de Blasio. How can you deal with an institution of violence with it’s boot on the throat of our society?

 

We Protect Us.

 

We have to build alternatives to the police and replace them bit by bit. To put a finer point on it, what does the future of public safety look like? Saying anything about this is like prognosticating what future forms of social organization will look like. What will the world look like after the revolution? Any guess is going to be completely off base, but you might be able to anticipate some of the overall shape.

 

For the last eight years I’ve been involved in building up systems of community self defense, first for a socialist political organization, and, once that was well established we’ve aided other communities in the same mileu: queer communities, Jewish communities and anti-war groups. Indeed, volunteering for Dyke Patrol, Boston Dyke March’s safety and marshal team is one of my victory laps for the year.

 

The next phase of building out community safety will to spread safety knowledge among different sorts of community groups and help them provide for their own security. While me and a few comrades have vast knowledge and experience organizing for safety we can only be in so many places at once.

 

The main difficulty we are going to face is that the police are an ingrained institution that powerful people want to maintain the power of. Chipping away at this is going to be difficult. Establishment politicians of all sorts, both Democrat and Republican howled endlessly about defunding the police and what a terrible crime that was. They blame anything bad that happens on defunding the police. Police too afraid to stop a school shooter? They didn’t have enough robot suits and tanks. A rent-a-cop maniac guns down two democratic politicians? If only every space in America was filled floor to ceiling with police stacked up like cordwood.

 

Frankly, this is bullshit. In nowhere in the entire country have the police been defunded. The closest I can come up with is a few left liberal municipalities froze police budgets in the early 2020’s for a few years.

 

The real truth is that the Democrats consider the police more important than their voters. Democrats in power have more in common materially with their Republican cohorts. They know they would lose prestige, money and power if society changed significantly, so they want to enforce the current system for as long as they can manage. Cop City was built by Democrats. Eric Adams was a Democrat until it wasn’t convenient any more.

 

Police as an institution are unaccountable. Indeed, often times the worst and most violent police are showered in awards to disguise their many crimes. The pepperpsray addicted cop that crushed homeless people’s wheelchairs has a dress uniform with more medals than Field Marshal Zhukov. No matter how many crimes he commits he is always cleared by internal affairs. After all, could a police officer with all these awards be responsible for these crimes?

 

In some places civilian oversight boards have been created but they are given at most advisory powers. Usually, those to get involved with them with the best of intentions quickly realize these are controlled opposition, are not allowed to have any oversight and quickly burn out. Qualified immunity is the deranged legal construct that says that police cannot be held accountable for the crimes they commit. There’s caveats and cope, and every once in a while a police officer does something so terrible they are held accountable, but this is rare. To actually hold a police officer accountable for murdering someone slowly over the course of ten minutes, a video of which was extensively published, we had to hold nation wide protests for six months and even now chuds call for the pardon of the murderer.

 

The only real path forward is to go on the offensive on city budgets.

 

In most municipalities police budgets dwarf all other local budget line items and they never stopped growing. One thing that may help with this is the creation of alternative emergency services. They have existed for a while, but since the 2020 uprising they have gotten more attention. As it is now, in almost all municipalities in America, when you have an emergency services call police are sent as a matter of course. Even if you buy into the fiction that police exist to keep us safe there are many calls they are simply unnecessary for. Many emergency calls are mere minor conflicts. They could be resolved easily by unarmed community mediators. There are occasional genuinely dangerous situations, however, an institution made up of heavily armed and panicky men are more likely to exacerbate these dangers. Police are trained in de-escalation but all too often they find non-violent methods of de-escalation to be the domain of cuck soyboys. They very often use an excess of force to de-escalate when some active listening and calm affect would have done the job just fine.

 

The process of abolition will be gradual. We will fight vigorously to strip away duties from the police and handle them in some less ham-handed manner. They will fight and push back, and after a setback we will learn and push back harder. This process has already begun.

 

The struggle will be long and difficult, but especially now the resistance to the state’s violent lawlessness is growing. Increasingly, we are providing for our own safety needs. The mummified hand of the Democratic Party seems to finally be rotting away and losing it’s grip on power, and that opens up new possibilities. We are in a dark period now, but there is light on the horizon.