Thread by @AlexandraErin

Here's another abolition perspective.

Imagine the police did not exist but someone proposed them. They told you, "Don't you wish there was someone you could call when you were in trouble? A public servant to serve and protect your community? Someone to uphold the law?"

They tell you, "Our new concept, The Police, will exist among your community with mutual respect and trust! When there is danger, they will confront it! When you are threatened, they will protect you! They will defuse tense situations! They'll find lost people and stolen goods!"

And this sounds like a great deal. I mean, all of that stuff, right? Sure, the price tag is high and they say they need all kinds of special legal protections for themselves, but in exchange for what they're offering?

So everybody buys into this brand new idea of The Police.

And as soon as it's up and running, people start calling them for crimes.

"Rape? Were you drinking? Sorry, we don't do bad break ups. Maybe keep your legs closed next time, honey, then you won't have regrets."

"That's a civil matter."

"Did YOU see your car get broken into?"

People start calling them because they need help.

"Please, my father is getting old and he's a little confused, I need someone to check on him." BANG. He's dead. "My neighbor is having some kind of seizure." BANG. They're dead.

And it's not... it's not *every* crime report they wave and it's not *every* call for help that ends in someone being shot to death. No. But this brand new idea that you have no preconceived notions about was sold to you as a good and helpful thing. Would you keep it?

If you didn't have any concept of The Police and someone came to your town and convinced it to give MOST OF ITS BUDGET to this new group and that same group started confiscating cars and houses and cash for flimsy reasons and fining people to get more money, would you keep it?

If you didn't have any prior concept of The Police but you bought into because they said they would serve and protect your community, and then they failed to, and you took them to court and they argued, "What? Serve? Protect? Those aren't our jobs."

Would you keep them?

If we didn't have hundreds of years of mythmaking, PR, photo ops, copaganda, fearmongering by politicians and police, and of course the HEFTY added dimension of white supremacist fear/control steering us to see cops as our necessary allies, would anybody want the police?

I talked earlier today about the mistake of viewing policing through a service model. A lot of (mostly white) people still have the view that the police, you can call them to give your kids a talking to when they "make a mistake" and they'll come out and give your kids the facts.

But there's a lot of stories out there about kids and older people getting arrested or shot when someone in their life calls the police hoping to help straighten them out and give them a wake-up call.

There's a gulf between what the police are sold to us as and reality.

And that gulf has always been obvious to the communities that are most strongly policed, and least strongly sold to.

Because, again, policing isn't a service. It's an exercise of authority.

And it doesn't do for us what they tell us it does.

If the police didn't exist as an institution and there was no prior cultural idea about them embedded in our brains and someone came along to us and sold us on the concept based on all the wonderful things police supposedly do... we would reject them as a failure so fast.

Because they don't do those things reliably. And while the success rate might be higher than the failure rate for some of them, the potential outcome of a failure is so horrific that there's no rational cost/benefit analysis that makes it a good idea to have them do it.

Like, let's simplify this. Instead of "What if the police didn't exist and someone tried to sell them to you?" imagine someone proposes a community helpline where you can call when someone is in distress.

And they add, "We'll hardly ever shoot you or your loved ones to death."

And you're like, "Beg pardon?"

And they say, "When you call because someone is in distress, having a seizure, having an episode, non-responsive, or trapped... our professional agents will almost never shoot them when we show up. Hardly ever."

If that was the proposal before you, a helpline you can call when someone is in a crisis, and the person pitching it told you that the one you intended to help being shot to death by the helper was a rare but definite outcome, you'd reject it. I hope!

Abolishing the police is a radical idea apparently, and unthinkable for many.

But flip the script. PROPOSE the police. ESTABLISH the police. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that going well? Can you imagine people accepting that?

None of us would accept what the police "give" us, what the police "do for" us, at the price (financial and otherwise) they extract, as a good bargain or even a thing that made sense if it had to be established today.