Thread by @AlexandraErin

One thing that opponents of police abolition or even just radical reform need to grapple with: how much we as a nation are overpoliced and underserved by the police.

Or: we have a lot of police, but they do more things TO us than FOR us. And no, that's not equally distributed...

...but even in white communities and even in affluent white communities, the police "help" mostly by doing things TO other communities.

All the things that come up with as "Well, who are you going to call if _____?" ... already calling the police is at best marginally useful.

The biggest class of crimes that affect the average person the most often in terms of financial loss are things the police will turn up only to tell you, "Look, this is a civil matter. This is a dispute between you and your bank/boss/landlord."

If I went into a bank and stole $7,000 of their money, that would be a police matter. If a bank "mistakenly" sent a repo team to my house while I was on vacation and everything I owned was stolen and thrown away, that would be a civil dispute. Even if I had no business with them.

Every "But who will you call if ____?" post on this site that gets traction gets dozens of stories from people who called the police to report crimes, sometimes crimes they were there to witness, to which the police turned up and said, "Sorry, can't do nothing."

As in: "I saw this guy taking things out of my car and here's his license plate." and the cops say, "Oh, so you didn't see him break the window?" or "Well maybe if he gets stopped for something else."

The people who imagine the Police-As-A-Service are either people who very luckily had a positive experience with the police (it happens, sometimes!) or people who've never really had to call upon them but are comforted by the BELIEF that the police would render service if asked.

I mean, that's really it, in a nutshell. They think of policing as a service and the police as service providers. They imagine a service model of policework that doesn't exist.

And defenders of police, when confronted with the uselessness and inaction of police Taking A Report on crime will say, "Obviously they don't have the numbers or resources to chase down the guy who stole your radio, sorry the police are more concerned with other things."

But the police in big cities are incredibly well-funded and incredibly well-staffed, and what is that all even FOR? Honestly, "people to find the guy who stole your radio" is just not the kind of operation that scales up well. The more police we have, the less well served we are.

The more police we have, the more they exist as an occupying force. The more driven they are to justify (and supplement, as they can legally steal in multiple ways) their budgets by DOING THINGS, and since they can't find the guy who stole your radio, they DO THINGS to people.

So let's take it for granted, for the sake of argument, that we do need a police force because of violent crime, as police defenders say.

How big does that force need to be?

We don't know. We don't know the scope of the actual problem you claim the police must exist to solve.

We don't know because we're overpoliced right now. We don't know because the ongoing criminalization of drugs, sex work, and frankly Black existence creates whole swaths of crime that the police must now address, both new "crimes" that exist under the law and crime sparked by it.

See also: "I think prison does a lot of harm but obviously we need a way to incarcerate SOME people, the violent people for whom there's no other option."

Okay, but how many people is that? We don't know. We don't know the size or shape of that problem.

The practice of incarceration means that the number of people we must imprison, the size of the problem, is infinite. Because there's always more money to be made locking people up and putting them to work.

And an indefinite need to imprison creates a demand for policework.

So you don't think we should abolish the police because we need them? Well, let's find out how much we need them. Abolish for-profit prisons, and deprecate imprisonment as a punishment. Decriminalize sex work, decriminalize drugs, decriminalize homelessness and poverty, etc.

Most people who are arguing against abolition and for massive reform... there's no actual reason to dig in your heels against abolition, because we're not going to get there by overnight fiat just magically erasing police all at once. Right?

If you're right that the police are essential, we'll find that out as we cut back on policing, as we defund policing and redirect that money to other essential services that can pick up the slack BETTER for the community support functions police grudgingly, half-heartedly do now.

And when I say we'll find that out, I don't mean there will be The Purge and we'll all go "WHY DID WE GET RID OF THE POLICE?" as our loved ones are murdered, I mean as we transition through various phases of Less Policing and More Service, maybe there's a point that stops working

And if we get to a point that stops working, then, hey, you were right. And you got the reforms you wanted.

And if we don't find a point where it stops working then hey, you learned something. And aren't you glad you tried, even though you doubted?

Proponents of radical police reform should be working with police abolitionists, because this way you can help shape the transition. And also, frankly, the police are so strongly dug in you probably shouldn't be starting with what you *want* as your position.

If you think that arguing for police abolition is counterproductive for reform because it scares people... you have an uphill battle to convince those people that less police and less powerful police and less policing is a good thing anyway.

And also nothing stops you from tailoring your pitch to your audience. You can argue to take specific power and resources away from the police ("Why do they need qualified immunity? Why do they need tanks?") without specifically advocating for abolition.

And yeah, there are some abolitionists who think arguing for specific reforms is weak. I'm not one of them. "Take tanks away from cops" is not the opposite of "abolish cops". I don't want them to have tanks while we're abolishing them.

"Make cops pay their own settlements and fines" is not specifically a counter-abolition/moderate/liberal position, because as someone on here noted last night (don't remember who, can't find the tweet), *that would bankrupt most police forces*.

Which, again, is a big reason why I'm an abolitionist: policing, in any positive interpretation of it, does not work. The police themselves will tell you that they can't do their job if they're not allowed to brutalize and kill.

If routinely applying the legal consequences of their actions (either in monetary settlements or criminal sentences) to the police would mean that they cannot police, then logically and obviously we don't need policing. It doesn't work. That's my stance.

You can say "Well, we need something like policing, some better version of policing." and I'm open to that but we need to find out what that is and I don't think it's realistic that we can find it by working with the people who tell us they can't be reformed.

And this make me a softer abolitionist than others, though I see myself as more pragmatic. I want what works, as long as it works for all of us, and I don't care what we call it. I also don't care what we call our economic system or our government.

I know that what we're doing right now doesn't work, I know the people we have doing it respond to every attempt to make it work with "Well, if you try to do that to us we'll just kill more people, how do you like that?" and so that's not ideal.

And I know that whether we end up with "an almost entirely different thing that we call the same thing" or "a completely different thing", the way we get there is to start scaling down what we have now, start removing powers and resources from the police, start funding services.

Surely if you're in favor of reforming the police you can agree that a massive program of decriminalizing the Wars On coupled with reducing the budgets and sizes of police departments and sending their money to various needful social service programs is a good step towards that.

And if you are sure, dead sure, that we do in fact need SOME police... well, we can just keep doing that stuff, keep paring back the police and their powers, until we find the level of actual necessity.

And if you think the police badly need to be reformed... oh, man. There is nothing you should want in terms of how to make that happen then a giant, vocal police abolition movement. Nothing will reform the police faster than that. Literally nothing. They can't be induced to.

I wish there was some kind of metaphor for how you as a police reformer could use police abolitionists to your advantage, by presenting yourself as being an ally to the police, on their side really, there with water and some helpful advice to get the abolitionists off their back.