Yeah, no, fuck all cops. And please lets not pretend like shit isn’t getting mighty fasc-y all over Europe too…
So what’s the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.
Defunding them and diverting those resources into social services that have been shown to actually give back in meaningful ways to the communities and safety/effectively deescalate tense situations without committing atrocities while perpetuating systemic hate-based violence.
There does need to be someone with a gun I can call if someone is literally breaking into my home intent on murdering my family. But outside of those extreme and fringe outlier circumstances, society would be much better served by well-funded social workers and emergency first responders who are trained to resolve conflicts while actually helping those in need of it without threat of eminent deadly violence.
Reality is and always should have been cops do cop things. Locally. Traffic shit should be department of transportation. etc. etc.
Make local cops walk local beats and only focus on the community safety and suddenly things get better. ‘Us vs Them’ is a pretty easy thing to spin when they only are a corrective force with a chip on their shoulder.
Proper training, education, and being held accountable for your actions will filter out the bad blood quickly enough.
Defund is frankly a word that was selected poorly. It implies punishment. It only amplifies the ‘Us vs Them’ narrative on both ‘sides.’
ACAB? No. Problem with corruption and a system that spits out at best tight lipped accomplices and at worst zealots brandishing ‘might makes right’ ideals? Yep.
Fix the system and the problem fixes itself.
ALL cops you say?
I have many friends and family who have joined the Scottish Police and given years of their lives to serving their communities, risking their own lives and health. Should I say fuck them too?
I joined the police for six months before deciding it wasn’t the career for me and got back into charity work. Are you saying Fuck Me now or just for the six months I was in? Did my fuckery expire?
How can thousands, millions of people doing a job be reduced to such a binary sentiment.
How can thousands, millions of people doing a job be reduced to such a binary statement
The reason why most people (including myself) say ACAB is because of the system of policing, not the merits of any given police officer. Systems are inflexible and adverse to change. Individual good cops can exist, but once again, the system itself is the problem. A good cop can never fix the system, nor could a hundred, or a thousand. A million could, at best, give the illusion of a good system. People often say a rotten apple spoils the bunch, and I think that looking at policing from the perspective of individual rotten cops, or rotten cops “spoiling the bunch” is problematic when the system itself is rotten. And for participating in the system, yes, all cops are bastards.
I think it’s disingenuous to have a slogan that targets individuals then claim you’re just commenting on the system when questioned. If it’s about the system say the system sucks.
Okay I agree with the idea of a rotten system as think that generally many legal or government institutions are rotten and self serving for the rich.
But the flaw in the argument from my perspective is that if all the decent people don’t go into the police, the ones with integrity, a moral compass who genuinely try to help people and do the right thing, then that leaves the bad apples.
So for going into a system and hoping to change it for the better, help/protect their community from criminals and the bad apples and make a real difference in lives, by that logic those people striving for better are still bastards and that just doesn’t feel right to me.
Again no hate here just a genuine conversation
Also Europe:
“Let’s do this obviously good thing for the sake of the whole continent.”
“No, because it would help France.”
Let’s not forget brexit. Americans aren’t alone in their dumbassarry
I’m from germany and I’m scared about the future. The far-right is getting more and more voters. It’s not just the USA who is fckd.
Thanks for sharing our pain. I don’t understand how people pretend that Europe isn’t going thru the same stuff like we are in the US.
Inflation, migration debates, cost of living crises, rise of authoritarianism, income inequality, all of this is and has been global. Some places affected more than others depending on what you look at.
Lol as if all of Europe has no problems of their own.
Like, yeah, I’m American and shit is really fucked up here in some specific ways… But let’s not pretend Europe is some sort of utopia.
Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.
Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we’ve managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.
… and the list goes on.
It’s a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We’re turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we’re no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.
The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to “love America”, still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.
You’re a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we’re 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we’re further from being united than ever before. The fact that you’re even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.
A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say “How are you even a country?”. And it’s not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y’all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.
Thank you for sharing - I didn’t know the Dutch were getting hit with this crap, too. I always just think of it as a US and increasingly British experience.
It’s a global phenomenon, caused by infinite growth based economic modeling (you know, where you base your whole economy on extracting increasing amounts of value from finite resources).
This type of modeling has been proven wrong and debunked early in the previous century, but it is still practised because it works very well for those gaining most of the profits.
You’ll usually hear the politicians promoting policies that help the larger companies argue that such policies directly create jobs and thus economic value for the people. But this is more of that trickle-down economics bullshit that doesn’t apply in the real world.
Because politicians worldwide have been so fixated on financial gains as a measure of the economy, they fail to measure and correct on (mental) healthcare, housing, education and equality.
Just some context on how large our housing problems have become: There is currently a deficit of 450 000 homes, which is projected to grow past 500 000 by the end of 2024.
The time we stop running countries like we do companies is when we’ll see things improve.
