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writerkitFor systemic problems, you change the system. Which absolutely can and should include going after individuals who were so corrupted by the system that they're committing crimes, but if you cast it as "every single cop is personally evil" and not as "this system is extremely broken and corrupting people", that actually leads you *away* from real systemic change. Certainly the proposed fix of replacing cops with social workers ignores that while social workers can't outright kill you, there's plenty of abuse of power in their ranks too. A starting question to examine where the power trip sensibility comes from might be to ask what cops and social workers have in common, and then if we find something that's a plausible cause among those commonalities, how we might remove it.
(Today, in our continuing series of "Kit reads Politics Tumblr so YOU don't have to!")
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 12:54 am (UTC)Oh thank god. :-P
I'm part way through https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 which phrases it as a systemic problem that intentionally *produces* (and attracts) "personally evil" people, which seems like a pretty important bridge between the two, with an actually concrete explanation of what the corrupting influences look like. (Mostly police academy, so far.)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 09:56 am (UTC)I think a big part of the problem is the strongly hierarchical system created by the dominant brand of capitalism. As the "former bastard cop" notes, the police are agents for enforcing capitalism. As such, abolishing the police is a systemic change that does require serious consideration. But the problems of hierarchy are everywhere: social work, academia, health care. People on lower tiers, whether customers or lower-tier workers are abused and/or overworked by people on higher tiers who can't see any other way of doing things because of the nature of the system. Even sociopaths would be well-behaved if we didn't have a system that consistently rewards sociopathy.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 03:59 pm (UTC)But also there are a *lot* of law enforcement agencies in the country and they're all bad in their own ways-- I was talking to a friend who's a defense attorney about this, a while back, and he enumerated for me the specific foibles of a lot of the local law enforcement agencies: "X department doesn't understand the Fourth Amendment and doesn't care, y department doesn't understand the Fourth Amendment and *does* care because they don't like being made to look bad in front of a judge, Z department doesn't understand this other law but they don't lie about it and they don't beat up their suspects, this other department over here *does* beat up their suspects..." and went on like that for every department in the general vicinity. Which implies that the specific nature of the ways that police get problematic varies by town and that the problem-solving process is also going to have to vary by town-- a department like the one in that article and a department whose main problem is they make a lot of illegal searches both need an overhaul, but they probably need different overhauls, and the number of people you can keep and retrain is probably going to be different between them.
(I've also just started reading this article: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigated-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/ which talks about how the FBI's rules of engagement with local law enforcement take into account that a lot of local law enforcement has been deliberately infiltrated by white supremacists.)