Meme - Peter Boghossian @peterboghossian: "I'm constantly told that nobody actually believes we should abolish the police. So why is this Princeton professor advocating for the abolition of the police? What am I missing?"
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: "there is literally nothing left to write about police abuse and violence. Abolish the police. Jan 28, 2023"
Meme - Man: "WE NEED TO DEFUND THE POLICE"
Democrats: *happy*
Man: "SO THEY CAN'T ENFORCE GUN LAWS"
Democrat mob with pitchforks: *upset*
Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 on X - "On Jan. 10, police in Papua New Guinea's capital went on strike. Immediately, people started mass looting, rioting, and setting buildings on fire in scenes similar to US BLM riots. At least 15 were killed and a state of emergency has now been declared."
'Defund the Police' aftermath created 'ripple effect' that endangers everyone, law enforcement source says - "The movement to "defund the police" has created a dangerous "ripple effect" that is being felt in departments large and small, making communities across the U.S. less safe, law enforcement veterans say. The Philadelphia Police Department currently operates at around 20% below its targeted staffing level. In Portland, Oregon — where hostilities toward law enforcement are particularly high — the city’s police department has lost more than 230 sworn officers through retirements or resignations since 2020. In Indiana, the Noblesville Police Department, operating with around 100 officers, is seeing fewer and fewer applications, according to local media... short staffing has led to burnout among officers and morale is at an all-time low.
The deadly consequences of Defund the Police - "Even here in the UK, where cops aren’t armed and where the police-funding model is very different to America’s, the right-on lined up behind the vague, strange call for police forces to be starved of funds. A headline in the impeccably middle-class Guardian declared: ‘The answer to police violence is not “reform”. It’s defunding.’ Yet now, ‘Defund the Police’ seems to be a fast fading idea. You don’t hear it very much anymore. It might linger among the white antifa oafs who stomp around in cities like Portland and among well-to-do radical students on quiet, handsome campuses in the UK where there’s very rarely any need to call the cops. But on the streets, in politics, in the press, ‘Defund’ seems to have fizzled out. The old woke roar is barely a whimper now. And it isn’t hard to see why. This slogan has proven lethal. It has been an unmitigated disaster in numerous US cities. The cutting of cops’ budgets did not give rise to the new dawn of flowery peace and racial justice that the virtue-signalling defunders fantasised it would. On the contrary, it helped to stoke violent crime, further destabilise city life, and make life even harder for poor black and brown communities in particular. The lesson here is clear: wokeness kills... San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, initially supported the idea of defunding the police – now she says she will be ‘less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city’. That’s a remarkable turnaround... Numerous black New York officials counselled against Defund. One described this woke belief in trimming cop numbers as a form of political ‘colonisation’ pushed by white progressives. Another said it had the whiff of ‘political gentrification’. Polls over the past year have shown that many working-class Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of defunding the police. Some surveys show that black Americans oppose Defund more than white Americans do. In Minneapolis, for example, where George Floyd was killed, three quarters of black respondents to a poll about policing said the city should not reduce its police force. Black respondents were ‘considerably more opposed [to Defund the Police]’ than white respondents were. In a similar survey in Detroit, a majority of white respondents said ‘police reform’ was the major issue facing their city, whereas a majority of black respondents said ‘public safety’ was their main concern. For them, police reform was the lowest priority. As Slate says, this seemingly incongruous racial disparity can be seen in various parts of the US, where ‘many white people are open to police reform, and many black people are wary of curtailing law enforcement’. A Pew Research survey found that growing numbers of black Americans now want police funding to be increased. Strikingly, black and Hispanic Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to want more spending on cops. Thirty-two per cent of white Democrats want increased police funding, compared with 38 per cent of black Democrats and 39 per cent of Hispanic Democrats... There is also the problem of ‘general anomie’, says the Times. That is, the ‘unravelling of the social contract’ that we have witnessed in recent years, which could very well reduce ‘pro-social and relational’ behaviour and create the conditions for more anti-social and even criminal forms of behaviour instead. (Perhaps the NYT will now pay more attention to those of us who think genuinely progressive politics means challenging anomie through solidarity, strong communities and gainful employment, and ditch its addiction to the hyper-atomising cult of identity politics.) Yet as even the NYT must admit, in addition to this mix of virus and anomie – and very possibly exacerbating this mix – there is the problem of ‘changes in police behaviour’. ‘Protests against police brutality [make] officers more afraid or unwilling to do their jobs’, says the NYT in its analytical explanation for why ‘so many Americans are killing one another’, which is about as close as this newspaper, which was so sympathetic to the BLM mayhem, will get to admitting that the ferocious and often fact-lite demonisation of American cops over the past two years may have had negative consequences for many communities, especially poorer ones... It is remarkable how much more pronounced anti-police sentiment is among middle-class graduates and the professional elites than it is in many working-class communities. As the African-American mayor of Newark Ras Baraka said in the summer of 2020, Defund was a ‘bourgeois liberal’ ideology, pushed by out-of-touch members of the observing class. The African-American former mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, was even more cutting. There is an ‘audacity of ignorance and white privilege’ in those who support anti-police policies and who refuse to acknowledge the spike in crime that these policies can cause, he says. In response to Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s liberal, police-critical DA, who has denied that Philadelphia is experiencing a crisis of crime, Nutter says: ‘It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. “I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with black people. Some of my best friends…” All that bullshit.’ Defunding the police is very often a case of privileged white liberals positioning themselves as the saviours of black communities, says Nutter, while in reality causing more disarray in those communities... the slogan ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) has gone from being the cry of working-class football fans four or five decades ago to being the intellectual property of university-educated middle-class radicals. The signalling of anti-police virtue seems to be a higher priority for the British cultural elite than tackling crime... It is essential to note that this elite turn against law and order is not motored by a belief in freedom or by trust in ordinary people’s ability to govern their communities for themselves. Indeed, a great contradiction of our time is that the woke elites continually signal their disdain for ‘authoritarian’ policing while expressly supporting new, even more insidious forms of policing – of speech, of thought, of personal behaviour. They disdain traditional applications of law and order, while demanding more intimate forms of control in the shape of cancel culture and nanny statism. They bristle at supposedly old-fashioned ideas about maintaining social order while seeking to enforce cultural order – that is, intellectual order and lifestyle order. That’s because the driver of the bourgeois embrace of the Defund ideology is not trust in liberty and community, but rather the upper middle-classes’ growing alienation from the values that underpin traditional forms of policing in the community."
Seattle Dem who pushed police defunding fumes at cops for not investigating human feces on her lawn - "A socialist Seattle City Council member who pushed for police defunding is livid that cops aren't addressing reports of feces being tossed onto her lawn. Kshama Sawant, 49, wrote a letter to police after they failed to investigate six bags of human feces left in her yard along with threatening emails received dubbing her 'the queen of s***'... Sawant led Defund the Police protests in 2020 and advocated for the Seattle police budget to be cut by 50 percent... Seattle's police department has weakened due to woke policies with about 400 officers leaving since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to King5 News. The department reported 954 equipped officers in 2022 - which is the lowest in 30 years... The result led to the police department announcement in April that they would no longer investigate reports of sexual assault, according to an internal report. Two members of the police force provided documentation to KUOW showing that last month not a single sexual assault case involving an adult victim was assigned to a detective... In September 2020 Carmen Best, the widely respected then-chief of Seattle police, resigned hours after the city council made good on its promise to approve sweeping proposals that would cut about 100 officers and slash the department's budget. The 2021 police budget, approved in September 2020, was reduced by nearly $35.6 million, or nine percent, from 2019. A year later, the budget was cut again. In November 2021, the city council voted 8-1 for a 2022 city budget that cuts police funding by more than $7 million."
Weird. We're told that defunding the police means keeping their funding constant, but giving other groups like social workers some of their burden
Life on the Streets: A Cop Confesses What Policing Is Like in the Age of BLM/Antifa - "after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him... Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the “interest of transparency,” they know we can’t pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. It’s just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isn’t at fault. I am... You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police. Some mayors have made it known to their department brass they’d rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand. You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city won’t have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up! Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. They’ve all already moved on to the next rage-bait. Who gives a f— if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person. Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur — oftentimes with stolen firearms. I’ve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) I’ve stood over. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape. So, in a kne- jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Say I make a good stop and it does lead to a good solid arrest of a violent felon in possession of a gun. A gun I saw them toss, a gun I recovered. An arrest with a signed confession after I Mirandized the perp. I go to testify in court on my day off (of course). I’m pulled aside by the assistant district attorney and told, “we’re most likely gonna lose this one.” Uh, what? Signed confession, saw them pitch the gun. Not Guilty. Seems the judge is a former defense attorney with a soft spot for convicted felons who “made another mistake.” That happened to me. So I’m literally putting my life on the line and going into neighborhoods that blue checkmarks on social media wouldn’t deign to set foot in unless filming a movie there (with a paid police detail for safety of course). For what? Judges just play fast and loose when they want. Is this sh– worth it anymore? I make a good stop and the guy pops hot with a felony warrant for rape and he resists arrest and it goes south? I go viral, am the villain on CNN/MSNBC for a week, and that guy gets $2M dropped in a GoFundMe. You want to know what major cities in America will look like after the police are abolished? Kenosha. Minneapolis. Portland. You can’t chant “Abolish the police,” and then be surprised when there are gunfights in the streets, armed citizens guarding businesses, and not allowing people to loot their life’s work. Because when we’re ordered to stand down, people get on roofs with long guns and protect themselves and their businesses. Deaths will occur. I’m not here to adjudicate what happened in Kenosha or Portland, or advocate for anyone involved. But, it happened, and to pretend it didn’t happen would be intellectually dishonest. Guys with enough time on the job are retiring or retiring early. Nationwide. Can’t blame them. Guys like me who still want to do the job? They’re looking to transfer to smaller agencies that are still allowed to do their jobs. Get the burglar, chase the stolen vehicle with the felon behind the wheel."
Keir Starmer is siding with the sensible law-abiding majority against the tantrumming Left - "In response to Starmer’s comments, it tweeted: “When we say 'Defund the police' we mean 'Invest in programmes that actually keep us safe like youth services, mental health and social care, education, jobs and housing.” Which begs the question, why not say that in the first place? Why say “Defund the police” if you don’t actually mean it? Unless what is meant is that all the extra spending on these services should come from the police budget. In which case “Defund the police” would be entirely accurate."
From 2020. The left likes to fuck with words to gaslight (e.g. "book bans"), so
Police groups slam Black Lives Matter chapter for complaining shot police officers treated as 'heroes' - "A description of the #StopMPD campaign on the group’s website claims that D.C. is an "occupied police state" that was "never meant to protect" Black people. "Policing and the system under which police work exists is bound to the enslavement, degradation, and murder of Black people and was never meant to protect us, but instead to exploit our bodies and labor to fill prisons and bolster capitalism," the page read. "No amount of feel-good videos can deny that truth – no dancing, ice cream peddling, dance videos, BBQ eating COPAGANDA can change that.""
An open letter to a protester from a Baltimore County police officer - "for every negative news story involving the police, there are thousands of positive stories that proceed normally, without incident, and without recognition. I would tell you my stories of doing good deeds. I have saved one life directly, and many others indirectly. I have given out many, many warnings when I could have given out citations. I have let people go home when I could have taken them to jail. Every year, I spend hundreds of dollars of my own money buying food for the hungry, transportation for the stranded and shelter for the homeless. I might tell you about the time I paid the towing fee to get a DUI suspect’s car out of the tow yard after discovering that his impairment was mostly due to an undiagnosed brain injury. There have been a handful of times where I nearly shot someone, but didn’t, and mere milliseconds made the difference. I have never been accused of excessive force or brutality, and I make an effort to stay composed, even when people spit in my face or worse. More recently, even after someone coughed on me repeatedly while telling me that he wanted me to die from coronavirus, I stayed composed... I would offer to take you on a ride-along and show you that my job is incredibly difficult. I have to record every single thing I do on camera, thereby subjecting myself to criticism from anyone and everyone, including myself. I have to be everywhere, all the time, and I have to be everything to everyone, immediately and perfectly. I would tell you these things not to garner sympathy, but to provide you with insight into that which you might not see. I would do this to illustrate that most police officers are good people like me. I would explain how part of me cringes at the comment that I’m “one of the good ones,” as if I’m the exception to the rule. Because the truth is, I represent the norm. I would be tempted to point out statistical realities to support this point, but numbers never seem to hold any gravity when compared to the raw footage of a bad cop making a bad decision... I would ask that you judge me not by my uniform, but by the content of my character. I would point out that “us versus them” thinking is always bad, no matter which side you’re on... instead of repeating platitudes, I would simply remind you that even if you still hate me, if you ever dial 911 or call out for help, I will come running. I promise. I will come running. And then I would open my palm, and offer you my outstretched hand."
The people who trash the police are usually those against "stereotypes", of course
Bill Melugin on Twitter - "A public records request reveals that LA city councilman Mike Bonin, who voted to defund LAPD by $150 million, has called LAPD to his home 8 times since 4/4/20, including to provide extra patrols and protection from peaceful protesters at his house."
Meme - "If you cheer for the rebels in Star Wars, then you should fight for the abolition of the police in our galaxy today! Cops are stormtroopers, and the US is the Empire! Together we can fight for liberation!"
Meme - Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur: "I'm done. I'm now supporting #DefundThePolice 100%. I already largely agreed with the substance of the argument & now I'm down for the framing, too. There is no reform or transformation that can fix this. We have to start over and completely rebuild policing inthis country." - Jun 25, 2020
Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur: "Will people who came up with "Defund the Police" slogan admit they were wrong? It was wildly counterproductive framing. You don't speak for the left. And neither do people pushing the counterproductive "Abolish Prisons." Polls show that almost no one on the left agrees with you." - Sep 13, 2022
Top tier gaslighting as usual
De-policing Is No Myth - "Police leaders, local officials, and analysts have been sounding the alarm about “de-policing,” including mass resignations and retirements in America’s police departments, driven by the increasing challenges of the job in the wake of last summer’s anti-cop protests. Now the Marshall Project, a media organization devoted to criminal-justice reform, has some news: data say that the de-policing trend is all made up... the evidence for de-policing is not just a survey or exaggerated claims from unions. It’s the individual reports of large-scale retirements, resignations, and other departures from multiple big-city departments. Last November, I documented that at least half of America’s 50 biggest cities had seen staffing drops; in some cities, like Minneapolis, the situation appears to have worsened since then. And recent research based on data from a “large police department in the western United States” explicitly links a large drop in staffing to the post–George Floyd protests. And as the Associated Press just reported, the Baltimore Police Department cannot comply with a federal consent decree meant to reduce police misconduct because it is dramatically below staffing levels. So what to make of the Marshall Project’s data, which seem to show something different? The short answer: these data are a poor measure of actual beat-cop staffing levels... Aggregate data also ignore the mechanics of the de-policing trend. Many officers have left big-city forces not for other jobs, but to go work in the suburbs. That’s not surprising—rather than trying to switch careers altogether, cops are leaving jurisdictions that don’t want them for jurisdictions that do. Such outflows would produce the dramatic decline in force readiness experienced by cities like New York and Minneapolis without changing the overall number of cops. This explains why de-policing could drive large increases in violent crime—what I and others have called the Minneapolis effect—even if the total number of cops remains constant. Because the large majority of violent crime takes place (almost necessarily) in big cities, a shift of manpower away from them and into the relatively more peaceful suburbs and rural regions will lead to an overall increase in violence."
Meme - "yes, we actually, literally mean defund & abolish the police"
"thesweetfeminist: Police don't keep us safe. They don't even try. Despite policing making up *40%* of the city budget in Uvalde, police hid outside during the massacre and used force *to hold back parents from entering the building trying to save their children*. Parents listened to their children scream, while police threatened them with tasers and literally held them to the ground. For over an hour. While they inexplicably waited for border patrol to arrive (???). But we shouldn't be surprised, because this is what police do. They are cowards, they are callously violent, they don't care about the safety of our children. Police in schools function solely to punish children. They certainly aren't there to protect anyone. Police are not a solution to mass shootings. They aren't a solution to anything. When we say defund the police, we mean it literally. When we say abolish the police, we mean it literally. We won't accept reforms - we've seen over and over again that *reforms do not work*. It is absolutely irredeemable. Policing has always been rotten to the core. As a reminder: Policing in the US began with groups of white people doing slave patrols. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it so that escaped enslaved people could be put under arrest by any white person - "effectively making all white people into cops, and placing all Black people-free or not-in danger of incarceration." (Source: Benji Hart 2017). Eventually these ad hoc police forces were centralized, professionalized, and militarized. Policing in the US has always been racist - by design. Policing is not the path to justice or safety. It won't save our children. Abolition is the only way forward. l'll link to Mariame Kaba's excellent article Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police in my stories, please read."
Weird. I thought no one wanted to abolish the police.
