We have been trying to reform the police for decades. You cannot reform an institution that had its origins in controlling the bodies of some. Reality has shown us that there are two types of policing irrespective of who heads the institution or who is employed by the institution.
How should one imagine defunding the police? It is a matter of responsibly reallocating funds from policing to social programs to prevent encounters with the enforcers of plutocratic order, the cops, which too often unnecessarily end tragically for people of color. POCs and especially black men are more often than not treated inhumanely as one has seen with the constancy of advertised and unadvertised police murders of POCs.
As we remove task after task from the cops, that should not involve police violence, their job is minimized to a very small job of keeping order by engaging the chronic criminals.
If we first take care of humanity, law and order follow. Much of the rest of the world that do not lock up a large percentage of their citizens is probative.
‘You broke my wrist!’: Black man sobs in pain after Georgia cop takes him down for crime he didn’t do
A Black man is accusing a Georgia police department of using excessive force when he was shown on video being grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground by an officer in a takedown the man said broke his wrist. Antonio Smith, the injured man police identified, wasn’t even the suspect officers were looking for, police confirmed on social media Monday after an inquiry from Valdosta Daily Times.
Valdosta police confirmed Monday in a Facebook post that they were informed of a related lawsuit against them Friday. The incident, however, dates back to Feb. 8, 2020, when two officers were dispatched to a Walgreens in South Georgia. They had received a complaint that a man outside the business was “harassing customers, screaming loudly, and asking customers for money,” police said in the Facebook post.
https://twitter.com/BenjaminPDixon/status/1275764723280199682?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1275764723280199682%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailykos.com%2Fstory%2F2020%2F6%2F24%2F1955677%2F–You-broke-my-ribs-Black-man-sobs-in-pain-after-Georgia-cop-takes-him-down-for-crime-he-didn-t-do
While one of the officers questioned a man a customer led them to, the other responding officer approached a man behind the Walgreens and asked for identification. “While (the) first officer was running the identification provided by the subject, it was learned that he had active felony arrest warrants,” police said.
The incident took a violent turn after officers approaching the scene overheard the mention of the warrant on a police dispatch, and one of them apparently didn’t realize two different men were being questioned by police by the time he arrived, police said.
Source: ‘You broke my ribs!’: Black man sobs in pain after Georgia cop takes him down for crime he didn’t do
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You cannot reform an organization that refuses to change, save if one has the leadership willing to enforce those reforms.
Ever. It just won’t work.
Leadership can not just promote, but enforce by removing those refusing reform from their posts. Given some lawless enforcement officers responses and worse, command level officers that also run the FOP’s responses, enforcement by leadership would have to respond by terminating them for cause, due to gross insubordination.
In short, talk back to your highest echelon command, you are grossly insubordinate and now are also ineligible for unemployment insurance claims.
Part of the problem is what I witnessed at a community college some years back, as there was a police academy colocated there. Their training was, us vs them, we’re all them and claiming that it’s a state of war, all civilians are potential threats. I listened, aghast as the instructor went on and on about that, war on drugs, war on crime, it’s a war out there on our streets, so watch your back around civilians. It’s no wonder that they want military battle dress uniforms, military Kevlar body armor, military combat helmets, military surplus rifles and armored personnel carriers to carry them into battle!
That results in our police literally being at war with peace! Deescalation isn’t trained or given a token training, resulting in conflict being utterly inevitable.
Which is decidedly odd to this military veteran of both of our wars. We incessantly tried to deescalate things, as escalation could and would result in our being horrifically outnumbered by the entire populace. People initially resented our cordon and search for weapons caches, but soon accepted them when peace and quiet reigned supreme.
Our police lack that mindset and have a WWII battle mentality, as was shown during the protests, no warning, just open fire, no warning, toss flashbangs at the press.
From the military side of me, such force is inevitably met with force of my own. The difference is, they qualified with their weapons at most, once per year, we qualified quarterly under the conditions we expected to fight under.
To steal a line from an old client, “Those people don’t know how to behave” with what equipment and resources we’ve given them, so it’s high time to take them back and retrain or fire those who are insubordinate to their superiors, their own chiefs, mayors, governors and ultimately, the very populace that is paying taxes to have them enforce our laws.