Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, here's a thing about the shoot out where the cops killed a hostage and used civilians as shields:

The whole ACTUAL POINT of "law and order" policing, "broken window theory", etc., is the idea that when people get away with stuff, they go on to do worse stuff.

See: cops.

Again and again, we let our nation's poilce get away with carelessness, with cruelty, with negligence, with shooting first so they won't have to answer questions later, with turning city streets into war zones.

And quite often we as a society are willing to turn away because "they're criminals" or because it's happening to those of us with the least power and so those with any social influence feel safe.

But in doing so, we teach the police that they can get away with using their guns to solve any problem, that the gun is the safe and simple solution.

Did the cops run a credit check on the people in the cars they ducked behind? They literally could have been anybody.

"So long as one person is oppressed, no one is free." sounds like high-minded woo-woo nonsense to the supremely self-interested, but it's really not. It's a simple utilitarian axiom and yes, it's in our interest to believe it.

What violence the state practices on the people we despise and discount will be used against us, as the state becomes accustomed to exercising that power.

We should are about the militarization of far distnt neighborhoods where we don't personally know anybody who lives there *because the people who live there are people* but if we can't muster that we should care because it won't stay there.

See also: the draconian policies allowed and required and justified under FOSTA/SESTA and other anti-sex work laws, which are already causing widespread harm to sex workers and also rippling out further and further.

Cops and their defenders argue about what's a "good shoot" and a "good kill"... as soon as we reached that point, the question isn't "Is it necessary to use guns here?" but "Which is safer and easier: solving this without guns, or winning the argument after we use guns?"

Police are learning, every day and often in new and frightening ways, that the safer course is to shoot. Shoot early, shoot often. Shoot to kill so there's no one left alive to tell a different story.

Gunfire is becoming the conservative response. The path of least resistance.

The whole social justification for active policing is that people will behave badly if there's not sufficient threat of consequences for their bad actions.

But our police are largely exempt from that.

So either the justification we give them for their use of force is wrong (in which case we need to rethink the whole system) or our police are axiomatically bad and getting worse all the time (in which case we need to rethink the whole system).

This is not inevitable! Nothing about this is natural and automatic! We create the systems that create these outcomes. "If our boys in blue have to think about what they're doing, they can't do their jobs!" But what is that job? Turning a crowded intersection into a warzone?

Is shooting a child playing in a park dead on the spot the job? Is shooting a father browsing the shelves at Wal-Mart dead on the spot a job? Breaking down the door of a grandfather who misdialed 911 and shooting him dead, is that the job?

Things aren't going to get worse before they get better; they're going to get worse and worse unless and until we have a true cultural upheaval, until we utterly uproot the thinking that underpins policing, until we destroy the "thin blue line" mentality.