You might know someone who has, I sure don’t. I’ve been in rehab, I’ve been in women’s shelters. I’ve been in homeless shelters. I’ve met a lot of people who have been victims of violence. Loads who have gone to the police for help too. I cannot name a single person for whom the police did literally anything beneficial whatsoever. There are a lucky few. Mostly white mostly middle class people.
But that’s all besides the point. And you’re choosing to continue to ignore that this is not the purpose of the police. A side action that they are occasionally asked to perform, and which they very rarely do anything beneficial towards. More often than not police are themselves perpetrators of physical and sexual abuse (their daily job is literally commiting acts of violence and using the threat of violence, it’s not surprising). The primary purpose of their job has nothing to do with violent crime or with violent crime prevention.
My point being getting rid of them isn’t going to change all that much if they don’t actually do all that much anyway. Women get raped every day. Sexual violence is essentially a given for the majority of women in our society. The number of victims is staggering, especially when you poll people indirectly. Police do nothing about this. It’s literally not their job. I know a girl who was sexually assaulted at 15 by a man in his mid 20s. Not only did the police fail to do anything, but the justice system actually supported the man and absolved him of all wrong doing just because. She was harassed by members of law enforcement who were friends with the man and local members of her community to the point that her family literally fled out of the country out of fear for her safety. Hers is just one story in a mile high pile.
There are millions of women who have been victimized again when trying to report crimes that happened against them. Being a woman or a minority immediately dispels any fucking notion that the police are there to protect you. That’s not the point of their job. It literally isn’t that is literally not why police were conceived of nor is it what they spend their time doing. I don’t have to come up with a system that ends all violence. No such system presently exists.
If I’m being asked to replace the police then I’m sorry your question doesn’t actually make sense. I’m an abolitionist, I don’t believe that the police should exist at all. I’m also an egalitarian who believes every hierarchy is coercive and we should dismantle all of them. I think that dismantling patriarchy as a concept and giving women and non-binary people equal power and respect within every realm of society would do many times more to prevent sexual violence than any amount of coked up gun toting militaristic assholes with shiny badges will. When it comes down to individual instances of violence, I believe how it is handled should be decided by those in the community in question, those directly impacted. I believe that violent crime warrants some kind of response but it shouldn’t be up to some uninvolved unempathetic judicial system to decide how.
So when your roommate’s crazy girlfriend shoots him in the face with a shotgun (thereby killing him), what do you do? Accept this happens everyday and continue to go on about your life, with the crazy girlfriend still residing in the blood stained room?
You might know someone who has, I sure don’t. I’ve been in rehab, I’ve been in women’s shelters. I’ve been in homeless shelters. I’ve met a lot of people who have been victims of violence. Loads who have gone to the police for help too. I cannot name a single person for whom the police did literally anything beneficial whatsoever. There are a lucky few. Mostly white mostly middle class people.
But that’s all besides the point. And you’re choosing to continue to ignore that this is not the purpose of the police. A side action that they are occasionally asked to perform, and which they very rarely do anything beneficial towards. More often than not police are themselves perpetrators of physical and sexual abuse (their daily job is literally commiting acts of violence and using the threat of violence, it’s not surprising). The primary purpose of their job has nothing to do with violent crime or with violent crime prevention.
My point being getting rid of them isn’t going to change all that much if they don’t actually do all that much anyway. Women get raped every day. Sexual violence is essentially a given for the majority of women in our society. The number of victims is staggering, especially when you poll people indirectly. Police do nothing about this. It’s literally not their job. I know a girl who was sexually assaulted at 15 by a man in his mid 20s. Not only did the police fail to do anything, but the justice system actually supported the man and absolved him of all wrong doing just because. She was harassed by members of law enforcement who were friends with the man and local members of her community to the point that her family literally fled out of the country out of fear for her safety. Hers is just one story in a mile high pile.
There are millions of women who have been victimized again when trying to report crimes that happened against them. Being a woman or a minority immediately dispels any fucking notion that the police are there to protect you. That’s not the point of their job. It literally isn’t that is literally not why police were conceived of nor is it what they spend their time doing. I don’t have to come up with a system that ends all violence. No such system presently exists.
If I’m being asked to replace the police then I’m sorry your question doesn’t actually make sense. I’m an abolitionist, I don’t believe that the police should exist at all. I’m also an egalitarian who believes every hierarchy is coercive and we should dismantle all of them. I think that dismantling patriarchy as a concept and giving women and non-binary people equal power and respect within every realm of society would do many times more to prevent sexual violence than any amount of coked up gun toting militaristic assholes with shiny badges will. When it comes down to individual instances of violence, I believe how it is handled should be decided by those in the community in question, those directly impacted. I believe that violent crime warrants some kind of response but it shouldn’t be up to some uninvolved unempathetic judicial system to decide how.
So when your roommate’s crazy girlfriend shoots him in the face with a shotgun (thereby killing him), what do you do? Accept this happens everyday and continue to go on about your life, with the crazy girlfriend still residing in the blood stained room?