Re: Sad to read this
No politician in their right mind is considering doing away entirely with law enforcement. This is a busted strawman meant to make people talking about defunding law enforcement look silly. To defund does not mean to remove all funding and to eliminate it entirely. It means, in essence, to lower funding because your average police department probably doesn't need tanks. More important than defunding law enforcement, however, is retraining them. It's very, very clear that there are large systemic problems with law enforcement in America right now, and one of the ways you fix that is by improving and tightening the training they receive. Another way you fix it is to remove the toxic insular mindset held by many cops, the so-called thin blue line that separates them from everyone else. It's the thing that will get an otherwise decent cop to put their head down, or even flat-out lie, to protect another officer. Removing or severely limiting qualified immunity would also be an excellent idea. Sometimes, police will be put in positions where they have to do odd or even dangerous things, but this doesn't mean they should get to use qualified immunity as a shield for trashing someone's house or shooting someone, just because some clever lawyer can make it look as if a police officer, by right of never experiencing exactly this situation before, could not reasonably have known better. Seriously? If you want to be a cop, that's awesome. I respect those people who truly want to help citizens and enforce the law fairly, with no bias, no racial profiling and no automatic desire to protect those who have done wrong alongside them on the force. But if you want that responsibility, then surely it ought to come with the accountability of having a fucking brain. Qualified immunity needs to be scaled way, way back.
And while we're talking about cops...Accman, seriously dude, this whole apologism crap has to stop. Like, years ago. Has to stop. Even if all this boy's mother said when the dispatcher picked up the phone is "my son's having a panic attack", that does not in any way justify his being shot. No weapons were found or even suspected based on evidence. From the multiple articles I've read, dispatch and the police knew what they were getting into. Why they didn't come with mental health professionals is beyond my understanding, but maybe they were short-funded or something. If you'd just stopped after saying that the cops made a mistake, then great. We're in agreement. But you didn't. Instead, you decided to explain that maybe there was some sort of reason that kind of explained why--no, no, and no. This is half the problem. I wonder if you did the same when you heard about Kyle Written house. I'll get into this in a sec.
This excuse-making serves only those in power, or those in the dominant class, and it's fucking disgusting. Accman, I am not specifically targeting you anymore, you were just a handy jumping-off point. When Kyle Writtenhouse shot a couple of people, I saw a lot of posts showing him cleaning up graffiti and stuff, as if to highlight that he's only seventeen and is very likely unhinged. The rhetoric goes something like this: "Well he can't be all bad. I mean, he did an awful thing, but just look at him!". And nobody does this with black folks. Or disabled folks. Or women, at least not usually. Women routinely are asked by police what they were wearing after they reported a rape, as if their choice of clothing has anything to do with someone raping them. Black people are assumed guilty if they're male, wearing a hoodie or happen to be walking in the rain at the wrong time of day on the wrong street. What I'm saying is that there's an unspoken assumption that white men are innocent till proven guilty, while everyone else is probably guilty till proven innocent. It pervades most of the right wing to one degree or other, but it's not the sole purview of the right. Either way, it is absolutely disgusting.
To anyone reading this, here's my advice. When you hear about something horrific that has happened, really stop and think about what you're about to say or type. Be ready to challenge your assumptions. If the automatic assumption about Kyle Writtenhouse is that he's mentally ill, while the automatic assumption about Jacob Blake is that he shouldn't have been ignoring police orders, you have a serious problem, and are in a way contributing to systemic racism. I am simply done letting this slide.
There was no reason for this thirteen-year-old to be shot. None at all. No competent police officer should ever have wanted to discharge his weapon, much less been able to do so, under these conditions. Unless we want to put forth the idea that having an autistic meltdown should give police officers a convenient excuse to shoot first and pick up the pieces later, this narrative must stop immediately and without a second look.
Also, don't talk to me about who is or isn't agitating protests at this point. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that white supremacists planted people at specific protests to incite violence, and while they were by no means the only instigators, the fact that someone would try to reframe this situation in such slimy fashion tells me everything I need to know about the far right.
Every moment you waste on talking about looting and rioting is a moment you aren't using to confront the real issue. Clearly, you care more about broken windows than broken people.
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