PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

I think you made some really good points about how, in some circumstances, abolishing local police is possible if people can be convinced to do it. This is something I genuinely overlooked that I need to think more about.

This is still not a trivial ask in many communities because the police will try to protect their existence. For example, if people tried to vote the NYPD out of existence, the NYPD has huge resources compared to the community they oppress to produce and broadcast propaganda. In comparison, some small-town police department might not have access to drastically more money than everyone else, at least not enough to flood the airwaves. Additionally, the Free State Project is absolutely tiny. It is something that the capitalists can afford to lose control over. But I think you made some good points and provided a good example.

However, even the Free State Project is under the jurisdiction of at least the FBI and the state police of the state in which they leave, even if they are difficult to call. And lots of places are in border control’s jurisdiction (like a lot a lot, because it’s the borders + the coastline + 100 miles inward!). So these police are going to be much more difficult to abolish by vote, practically impossible.

I’m happy to show you evidence and reasons, and sources. Are you open to that?

Always!

You keep lecturing me at quite a lot of length

Sorry about that, both the lecturing and “at length”.

You can also, if you think an anarchist community would make it work better, just make it happen and make your community, just like the libertarians did.

Yeah that works for very small scale rural communities, but what about the cities and suburbs where the majority of the population is? Those areas are more locked down.

Part 2

It was just “research” from your “comrades,” which makes it sound like only comrades can come up with truth, and anyone else needs to learn from them before “spouting off.” You literally said at one point “don’t use your judgement.”

I want to expand a bit on the “don’t use your judgement” point. A better way to say that would have been: “defer your judgement to that of the victim.” Choosing to defer your judgement to someone else is still a judgement call. And in the case where you are the victim, this collapses into making the judgement call for yourself.

And the reason I said that is because if the victim does not want the cops involved, then the cops should not get involved, period. I don’t see this as controversial, even if the cops weren’t the baddies. But since they are, bringing them in where they’re not welcome is a recipe for violence and further arrests.

I will admit that I typically give my comrades’ views the most weight, but I absolutely do listen to non-anarchists. Actually, that’s one of the reasons I have a SDF account: because almost no one is defederated from us, and we don’t block anyone (I think), so at least as far as Lemmy is concerned, I get stuff from lemmy.world and other non-anarchist instances and people on Lemmy. And for my news digest, I actually just compare several mainstream and independent media sources and try to “estimate” the story from the “corrupted signal” I get from taking all those sources.

I think you are mischaracterizing how insular the anarchist movement actually is.

The cops in most cities are organized by the city council and the mayor. “Capitalism” has nothing to do with it, except indirectly, because it takes money and connections to get on city council.

The phrase “except indirectly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here! Capitalism has an absolutely enormous but indirect effect on local politics. You can buy a politician’s loyalty for shockingly little, so little that even local businesses can do it for local politicians.

There are a lot of places where people through the exercise of their democracy, reduced the funding for the police, instituted other programs like social workers going to some calls, got the police force out of doing traffic enforcement, basically, doing reforms.

And where have those reforms gotten us? Every single time the reformers say they’re going to do some reform, then it gets watered down, and eventually the cops somehow get extra money, extra training, and nothing changes. Supplementary to the discussion above, this is why we need to abolish the police.

If the whole city council tried to disband the police completely, and just have an anarchist city, they would probably lose their election because the people of the city wouldn’t like that idea.

I don’t agree with you here. I think that, if we actually disbanded the police, people would be happier. Also, I’m not interested in winning elections. I’m interested in bringing power to the people.

But there is not some other entity that’s coming from outside and “enforcing” the police on the people of the city. It’s just the city government, which is our system, is changeable by a majority of the people every few years, if enough people can get on board for it.

It is absolutely not our system. In my case, the municipal government is the local branch of the state government, which is itself subordinate to the federal government. And at all levels, the people with the money are the ones that pull the strings. If push comes to shove and it’s the will of the people vs the will of the higher levels of government, the will of the government usually wins, and the will of the most powerful local capitalist will win every time (because states amplify the political power of those who are wealthy enough to prop them up).

It’s not like some Amazon warehouse where the “owners” run the city and make there be police, and there’s nothing the people in the city can do about it.

I would argue that this basically is the reality of the situation, and that the voting is just to make the smallest of changes. (“If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.” I would like to offer a corollary: if a possibility is so impactful that it would actually disrupt the capitalist order, it will never be put up for a vote, because the government gets to decide what gets voted on, and the politicians are indirectly controlled by the capitalists.) Like with police interrogations, voting is not an equal interaction between the government and its subjects. The government has all the power, and that power is controlled by the capitalist class.

No offense, but I think you might misunderstand some core principles of contemporary anarchist philosophy, like how capitalism and politics are intertwined, and that might be why you’re not getting a warm reception amongst anarchists. I definitely recommend you check out Section D.2 of the Anarchist FAQ, and skim the rest of Section D. (Yes there’s a holy-shitload of reading for anarchists 😆. I can probably find you a YouTube or audiobook version if you’re not in the mood to do all that reading.)

Tl;Dr please read the PDF I linked. It will explain how interrogations work a lot better than I am capable of. And it won’t yell at you.

Part 1

I read your initial paragraph and didn’t see anything even remotely resembling “this is why” or where logically your argument came from.

To be honest, I thought we were on the same page about the cops being baddies, but on different pages about what to do about it, especially since you said you were looking to post in an anarchist community.

you have to realize that you wrote me an initial message with “All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions” “a worthless piece of shit.” “No they aren’t” “No you fucking don’t” “it’s terrible advice” and so on.

Yes, there was lots of swearing. That does not diminish my point. In fact, it enhances it, because it increases the chance of it being understood by the widest possible audience, and it underscores the importance of the message. It also forces the reader to practice confronting their beliefs, which in the real world are going to resemble my first post more than a perfectly typed theoretical tome.

I.e., just because someone is yelling at me doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is wrong. And this is something that really takes practice, to learn to listen even when someone is being up in your face, because I might just be “that wrong” or even stepping on someone’s toes in a way I don’t understand. For this reason, I really appreciate contemporary anarchist essays for being upfront and confrontational.

Let’s take these one at a time.

All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions

If you want, replace “bastards” with “baddies” and this is exactly what I want to communicate.

Why are cops ever the baddies? Because

• They enforce the will of the capitalist class. More plainly: they work for the rich; your interests come last. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the cops do not have to “protect and serve.” Even if they are taken at their word, even the pretext of law enforcement, namely to enforce the law as it is written, gives away the game: they enforce the law as it is written without regard for the ethics or effects of those laws.
• The few times that ordinary people do benefit from police interactions, these are not part of the function of the system. For example, sometimes cops will “not see something” if they’re trying to be nice. For example, if a homeless person is living under the overpass, an individual police officer might decide to leave the homeless person alone instead of giving them a ticket for loitering. Now in my view, this is, morally, the absolute bare minimum. But from the perspective of the police department, this is a (small) dereliction of duty, because the homeless person can be found to be breaking the law, yet the officer refused to enforce the law.
• The proof is in my personal experience, the experiences of everyone I’ve ever known, the people to whom I have listened to (comrades or otherwise!), my experience following the news daily (usually NOT from anarchist or even anarchist-sympathetic sources!), all the statistics about police I have ever seen, all the true crime slop I’ve watched, hell even C.O.P.S. made the cops look bad to me, and all the books and articles I have ever read on the topic. And look at what the cops openly and proudly focus on: harassing the homeless, prosecuting drug addicts, harassing sex workers, deporting migrants, silencing protests. And that’s just what they’ll brag about.

Why are the cops everywhere baddies? Because they are baddies in every country, because all states exist to prop up the interests of the locally powerful people, and the police serve the interests of their local state. This is, in my view, a fundamental pillar of contemporary anarchist thought, and I can refer you to literature for a better justification if needed.

Why are cops always baddies? Because being a police officer is defined by membership in a police department, because the powers and protections police officers get are at least mostly effective as long as the officer is in good standing with a police department, including when off-duty.

Why are cops forever baddies? Because:

• At some point, they did not exist. But if they never existed and someone created them right this very second, I would still be able to argue based on the cops’ own stated purpose that they are the baddies.
• When they were created, they were branched out from slave-catching patrols. Slave- catching is evil because it violates the principle of autonomy, which is again a pillar of anarchist philosophy. So they started off evil.
• As modern policing grew into what it is today, the blatant disregard for autonomy has not really improved, as evidenced by the existence of prisons, jails, and police killings. So in the recent past and present, police have been evil. This is supplementary to the discussion above.
• If we keep doing policing like we do now, then it would still be an evil institution. But if we changed it, then the change would really have to be so drastic that it would simply be something else entirely, because the police are such a fractally evil organization.

Why are there no exceptions? Because cops are a subset of the set of baddies, and this is because, as discussed above, cops are evil because their function is evil. So the only way for a cop to stop being evil on account of being a cop is to stop being a cop. And when individual police officers do something good, they do it in spite of being a cop, often in flagrant dereliction of their duty to uphold the law as it is written.

“a worthless piece of shit.”

I very carefully worded that to make it clear that I am calling the police worthless pieces of shit.

Which I am. And they are. They’re actually a lot worse than shit, because shit can be useful as fertilizer. The police, on the other hand, keep our species from reaching its full potential.

“No they aren’t”

Yes, that’s one of the points I want to make. That was in response to “(The police are) there to solve real problems.” My issue really was with the word solve. In case it was unclear: yes, the problems are real, and i do not mean to trivialize them. Furthermore, their pretext for being there will likely be to solve the problem. But they are not there to solve the problem. Solving the problem is a pretext for reestablishing control of the situation in a way that is palatable to their paymasters. In rare cases, for example stopping serial killers (which, from watching hundreds of true crime documentaries, which are notoriously pro-police: they are terrible at doing!), these interests line up with the interests of the people, but considering how many people have their lives ruined or ended by police for property crimes, crimes of poverty, drug crimes, antisocial crimes (i.e. pissing in the street), it is clear to me that this is the exception rather than the norm. That’s what I desperately need to communicate.

“No you fucking don’t”

This was in response to the bit about talking with the police. In the guide I linked, there is a huge section about how the police ask you all sorts of innocent, easy questions to butter you up for hard ones. You really should not talk to the police almost ever. Talking to the police is not a equal exchange. The cops have all the power, and they will use whatever psychological and physical means that they can to fill up their case files.

Saying “no you fucking don’t” was crucial to demonstrate how seriously dangerous a choice that is to make. If I had said “no you don’t”, that would have betrayed how important this point is.

“it’s terrible advice”

Again, that’s the point I wanted to make. I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying that because I think it needs to be said. If you told me “you should plug your fork into the outlet” with complete sincerity, I would tell you “that’s a terrible idea, don’t do that” because following that advice could be fatal. I would rather see you alive and upset at me than dead by listening to terrible advice. And then once the fork is down, I will gladly infodump about why it is a terrible idea to fuck with electricity. But in that moment, I need you to put the fork down. Similarly, I need you to not collaborate with the cops in the future. Lives are at stake. At least after whatever incident you’re going through in the present moment since I acknowledge it might be too difficult to reverse course.

No, you would have loved to give me “the answer,” using the model that everything I think is stupid and everything you think is right and can’t be questioned. I’ll pass.

*sigh* No I wouldn’t have, no I don’t think that everything you think is stupid, and I most certainly do not think that everything I think is right and can’t be questioned. In fact, I rewrote my reply several times because I wanted to critique my own beliefs before I posted it. And I indicated in my reply that I desperately want my response to be torn apart to improve my understanding of the world. The guide I posted is not the answer, but I do believe it is a good one.

And I’m sorry if anarchists have treated you like that. I desperately want you to contribute to the discussion, because you probably have some experience to offer that can add some subtlety to the discussion. But a discussion goes both ways. Even on Lemmy.world, there are about a dozen people telling you that their experience contradicts your advice. It at least calls for some thought.

You are mistaking your ideology for reality. You don’t need to learn anything, or test any assumptions, because your ideology already gave you the answer and your emotional conviction lets you know that it’s right. That’s a dangerous mistake.

Isn’t this the exact kind of thing you just accused anarchists of doing to you? You’re dismissing my experience, and frankly the experience of almost every single other commenter here, as mere “ideology”. This so-called anti-police “ideology” (really “sentiment”) is the distilled experience of thousands of anarchists and millions of working people of all stripes. Please at least listen to it. I can’t and don’t want to force you to internalize it, but please at least listen. Listening is what separates a shitty anarchist from a good one.

I had an interaction with the cops this week. They solved our problem when someone else had completely failed, even though it was that other person’s job. I’m actually just about to call the precinct and talk to them again about it, because we still have some questions.

That genuinely sucks, and I hope it works out for you. The point I’m trying to make is that, as far as the function of the police are concerned, your positive experience is an accident. It is not designed to help you.

Terrible advice. Please, check this guide from Projet Évasions (PDF warning) instead.

Cops are not always the enemy or the maniacal whole-job-is-making-evil thugs that Lemmy sometimes makes them out to be.

Yes, they literally are. All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions, no matter what they are currently doing or have done prior, and capitalism is always evil, so their whole job is in fact making evil, and anytime they do something beneficial is an accident. If a person puts on that uniform, they’re a worthless piece of shit. End of story. Individual cops can stop being pieces of shit by burning the uniform and trying to fix the lives they have broken.

It really is bad for people to get mugged or their cars broken into, and they’re the solution our society has come up with to minimize the amount of it that happens. It’s not always a bad thing.

Emphases mine. I’ll take them one by one:

• Cops were and are imposed on us by the capitalist class. Any consent ever expressed for these monsters has been beaten into us by generations of police violence and then solidified by propaganda.
• That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to maintain order for capitalism. Historically, modern police forces descended from slave-catching patrols. In interrogations specifically, their purpose is to gather information to build up a case file. The presence of police does not deter crime, and the deterrence of crime is only a pretext for the police to do what they’re actually paid to do.
• Interacting with cops is always an immediate personal danger, especially after you have been hurt or are vulnerable, because they are unhinged monsters who will send you to the morgue if you make them too uncomfortable. You might decide to make that choice to interact with them to prevent some greater evil, for example being courteous during a traffic stop to prevent the cops from detaining you for being suspicious. But at the end of the day, we must recognize that any interaction with the cops is always treacherous.

If you find yourself talking to the cops, there are more or less three ways:

They’re there to solve a real problem.

No they aren’t, they’re there to enforce the will of the capitalist class. Practically , they’re there because they either think they witnessed a violation of the law, or because someone called them. Rarely do they even attempt to solve problem, and in the rarer circumstance that individual cops do solve a problem, it is because they betrayed their actual function as cops.

Someone’s car got broken into, someone got beat up. Just talk with them. Tell them what you know, help them figure out the situation.

No you fucking don’t, because that cop will likely use your evidence to go after someone who didn’t do it. They don’t stop crime, they don’t solve crimes, they only provide information to the judges and terrorize the streets while doing it. Don’t help the cops with property crimes.

In almost all of the US, their effect on the problem will be positive

Use your judgement as to whether that’s warranted of course, and your impression of the justice level in your local area, since it varies quite a lot in the US.

Don’t use your judgement, use the judgement of the victims! If they don’t want the cops involved, then they don’t get involved and that should be the end of the discussion.

The same applies with any type of federal law enforcement, I suspect, for the next few years.

It has applied for the entire existence of the modern police, and it will continue to apply as long as police exist. The guide I linked was written in 2022. Yes, we need to hammer this point over and over and over until people understand that no administration, even the so-called lesser-evil party, will ever be on their side except perhaps by accident.

I was going to post this as a comment, but it was in an anarchism community, and I figured some sections of it might be unacceptable there.

Rightly so, because it’s terrible advice and it’s clear to me that you haven’t sought out any wisdom from the community. What you should have done was asked for critique. We would have loved to talk about this in more detail on any anarchist forum.

In my view, it is so much more important to listen to people as an anarchist (or any kind of revolutionary) than it is to spout off my views, hence why I don’t really post that often. Even this comment I expect and hope to get torn to shreds in the hope of improving the quality of my understanding of the world. So next time, please actually solicit the advice of your comrades before making statements, and in general do some research before making posts like these. Hence why I have started this comment with a link to a guide solicited from a group of anarchists.