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To further call attention to what I wrote here on Monday, I read that
the IDF is training many American police and sheriffs departments.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/pro-palestinian-group-says-idf-trains-us-police-in-racist-tactics-629937
The IDF, whose training is designed and mandated by the Israeli
government and who are trained specifically to immobilize, and destroy
Palestinians and Arabs generally. If you were a Palestinian personally
who had suffered and who had seen your neighbors and family members
killed, maimed and houses destroyed at the hands of the IDF, would you
be so naive as to call for reform?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Reimann wrote
Here's an article of mine on the vote of the Minneapolis City Council to
disband the police:
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/06/08/minneapolis-city-council-votes-to-disband-police-will-they/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, the move to defund or abolish the police department eludes
and obscures the real problem: as John says, the class relations are
going to remain the same.
And to add to what John notes here, the police have greatly increased in
numbers from my childhood in the late twenties, when there was one cop
in my neighborhood, walking a beat, and acquainted with and generally
friendly received by most. That changed quickly as the Depression
deepened, and with the coming of the patrol car and night sticks
replaced by lethal weapons. And the police have been given increased
latitude by the power-wielders over the years because the system has
insurmountable problems in maintaining social control.
Just like the army, police are recruited from the working class or the
otherwise 'expendables,' who are faced with poverty and have no other
jobs available, and who are young, often rural and usually unaware of
the workings of the world. Just like the army, in which I spent three
miserable years, the police are taught to hate, then they're taught to
kill those they've been taught to hate, and just like the army, then
they're assured, as was Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, that the army
looks the other way, in fact expects you to do exactly what you did, and
you're home free, with a lifetime of PTSD. This in a system of rigid
discipline, where the only answer is yes SIR, and where you're also
taught that you're there to protect your buddies in a crowd control
situation, whatever the effect on anyone else. So almost anything goes,
and you know you have department and powerful police union backup. Above
all, your mandate is to protect property, which absolutely doesn't mean
house and property in a ghetto neighborhood, You're there to instill
fear in an uncontrollable social situation. So who's going to call the
out-of-control cops to 'protect and serve,' when they are most likely
going to make things worse, if they show up at all?
The only possible benefit of this reshuffle that I see is to mollify the
liberal elements in the middle class, and the less checked-out among the
afflicted, and to force the police union to back off and make a few
compromises. But how long does that last? And to what end? How long, for
instance, have liberal and neighborhood groups tried to implement
community control, with no success and no change?
Property, wealth and its unequal distribution, is the basic problem,
obviously, as John notes. It's endemic and unavoidable in this system,
where the poor exist in good part as a reserve army of labor, and as the
inevitable result of any system of devil take the hindmost. And that's
where the discussion should be going and where the pressure should be
applied. Anything less is dragging out the problem, really just hiding
problem and solution and making it worse. The impulsion toward
increasing militarization of the police, as the jobs disappear, worker
organizing becomes ever more difficult, and inequality escalates, is not
going to go away under the system of capitalist exploitation and
inequality.
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