Thread: The U.S. has 570,000 people who are homeless each night, but 17 million vacant homes. How does this connect to police budgets? (1)
A huge portion of what police do is arrest people who are homeless. In Portland, for example, the *majority* of police arrests are for human beings who are homeless, and a *vast majority* of those are for things police call "nonviolent." (2) yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
It is a choice by elite bureaucrats who control the police to arrest, cage, control, and brutalize people without houses instead of helping them get permanent safe shelter. Why? (3)
This is a key point: many banks, real estate investors, etc... own a lot of vacant properties. Their wealth depends on a society that prefers to have people suffer on the street than guaranteed a stable place to flourish. (4)
The barrel of a police officer's gun and metal chains around people's wrists is the only way that our society can have 30 times more vacant homes than homeless people. Only the threat of imminent force makes this possible. (5)
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1217451292076978181
This is what makes mass squatting movements like in Philadelphia so inspiring--they bring this conflict that underlies the entire criminal bureaucracy out into the open. (6) shelterforce.org/2020/08/24/squ…
The need to exhibit overwhelming increasingly militarized force to control the very poorest people from threatening property wealth of the very richest is one of the main functions of police and, therefore, one of the main reasons it is so hard to reduce police budgets. (end)
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