Thread. Despite the fact that police ignore most crime and have nothing to do with preventing most harm, the media relentlessly links cops to "public safety." Why? Answering this question changed my life. (1)
Elites who created the “criminal justice system” are broadly comfortable with the way that our society looks. These bureaucrats, profiteers, and people who own things thus market a "crime" problem in need of “law enforcement” in order to keep society looking like it does. (2)
This is vital to understand: powerful people do not want to solve the “crime” problem if that means a society that looks much different—say, more equal and with less private profit. (3)
Hence they both create and respond to “crime” with strategies that increase inequality and control, but do little to stop the same problems they purport to care about—and that often make those problems worse, thereby justifying a circular call for more (selective) punishment. (4)
This is why you see elites reflexively talk about more cops, surveillance, weapons, and prisons instead of higher paying jobs or worker-owned businesses, health care, affordable housing, and community-based investments in violence interruption, the arts, and athletics. (5)
If cops prevented harm, we'd be the safest society in world history. No one has ever spent more on cops, weapons for cops, and prisons. And yet the cops and media keep telling you how unsafe we are. (6)
And for you lawyers, that is why U.S. courts do not enforce the "rule of law" when it is intended to make our society more equal (like criminal violations by cops, equal protection, or the bill of rights). Those rules conflict with the goals of the punishment bureaucracy. (end)
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