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An even-handed and restrained criticism of police

In July 2011 in Norway a man in a cop uniform and flashing a cop badge killed 77 people. The whole idea of “trust law enforcement”, “comply” etc is a sick joke.

There are often reports in the news here about elderly being robbed by people claiming to be police. Usually reported with the victim-blaming slant that “well of course they should’ve called their local precint and waited in line on the phone for hours and gotten their badge numbers and verified them before opening the door”.

Really? What happened to “well of course they should’ve complied and not have to suffer police brutality”...?

None of this is to diminish the brutality of real cops. Like the Golden State Killer for example, an EPD police officer while he was committing his Visalia crimes. It’s just to add an oft dismissed or ignored layer to the police debate.

“But not all cops are killers”, some say. “Moderate policemen have a responsibility to watch their own police community and stop this radicalization process.” They say “I don’t criticize all police, just ‘policists’, those who dress in those old-fashioned uniforms, those who carry weapons, those who want to turn all of Europe to a ‘Europolis’ police state.”

That’s twisted. Policing is a system built on trust, and that trust has been eroded again and again and again and again and I don’t know how to ever restore it.

And yes, in America, police strike disproportionately against black and latino citizens. I’m not trying to take away from or diminish how utterly fucked up that is, or neglect to say explicitly that black lives do matter.

There are two ways a society can set this up:

A society where all kinds of individuals and groups do violence against each other, or
ditto, but one of the groups is, by code and by culture, sanctified as the only legitimate one.

I would like it if violence overall was decreased. If a monopoly on violence can help with that, it’s good, but that’s a big iff, and this group has been undermining its supposed legitimacy.

Monopoly on violence - Wikipedia