Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

i believe the way the law works here is that the actual work must be done by a union shop - so primarily subcontractors. a non-union company can be the general.

and it's not just about permits/code bc when we've been a gc and had to hire unions we were responsible for all code, OSHA inspections, but it took longer and cost a lot more than using our non-union crew (and we pay our non-union crew well above standard industry rates). our crew will work overtime hours for one, but also they just hustle in a way i've never seen a union crew do. and i think it's bc they have more of a stake in the success of the project than a union that has been mandated to do the work no matter the quality.

sorry didn't want to turn this into a nuts and bolts conversation about using union vs non-union trade labor. and your point is taken that the teacher's union probably (???) doesn't go to bat for teachers accused of sexual abuse / violence whereas the police union does. of course police violence is a more complicated thing in general since there's never a good reason for a teacher to manhandle a student whereas the police are mandated to have physical contact w/ suspects (and occasionally - tho almost certainly far less often than claimed - they are put in life threatening situations that necessitate the use of violence).

maybe if cops convicted of things were disowned by their unions it’d be a message

police abolition isn’t about, as I’ve read, the abolition of policing or the enforcement of laws, it’s about allocating resources in a way that addresses the causes of crime, decriminalizes a number of petty offenses, and puts rehabilitation and restitution above imprisonment. the current police system is seen as incapable of shifting to that model as an institution

The value of utopian desires is in how they can translate to the real world - if your goal is police abolition there are about a million points along the way to create change, from police accountability and reform to demilitarization and/or disarmament to the just and equitable society getting la-di-da-ed.

note: protecting "bad teachers" and protecting cops who shoot unarmed black men/harassing anyone who protests injustice/etc. are not equivalent actions

Daniel - actually I didn't know (its more that I've read around Yarl's wood). Not sure if public or private matter so much as police and prisons go hand-in-hand in terms of dishing out state brutality and I bundled these together as things that can be immediately carried out by the UK government. I was giving out a few points on the way.

Given the way police behaves (as captured on videos and now increasingly on phones) and (in the US) what I've been reading around the increasing hand-out of weapons I am confident in talking about police abolition as a serious option.

walk me through what that looks like. is it just what mh was saying that we'll have police but we have to start from scratch bc the current institution is hopelessly flawed? (how do we develop this parallel institution and how do we switch over to it when it is developed?) or we won't have police at all? so how will the state police crime? at this pt either you're saying that there's no crime (utopian), no state (post-historical), or some third option? there will be crime but less than we have now and abolishing the police will lead to fewer murders/rapes/robberies than having them does?

beats me dude, there's a book Simon linked, maybe the answers are in there

or is "abolish the police" just rhetoric to signal how angry we are at the police and i shouldn't take it seriously as a policy suggestion? bc that's how i'm inclined to react to the proposal.

generally if you set a goal, then define a mechanism for action and milestones to get there, you'll learn a lot more and adjust plans as you go and get a lot further than you would had you not set an ideal goal

no, it's like saying "black people deserve reparations" and broadly outlining how that could work, as Coates and others have. the reaction isn't "you just can't give people money!" when that was not the proposal of that article

it's ok to have a visceral reaction, because it's meant to provoke discussion. in this case, what would a society without the police be like?

asking "how would we deal with rape and murder?" leads you back to the beginning, how do we stop these things from happening to begin with, and eventually you get back to the point of what to do with the hopefully now rare murder

Abolish the police, hire private contractors

Done

generally speaking people who default straight to the "what about serial killers?!" argument are not interested in a good-faith discussion

the teachers union absolutely goes to bat for teachers accused of misconduct

personally i don't expect anyone who talks seriously about abolishin g capitalism to have thought things out carefully

yes serial killers are the only criminals in our society.

fwiw i looked at the book - i skipped to the conclusion since the table of contents all seemed like critiques of current policing as opposed to a way forward. the conclusion offers a lot of great suggestions that i fully support but none of them as ambitious as abolishing the police. it's rhetoric guys. it's not serious.

xp why? serial killers exist, post-property societies don't

I sympathize with the people who are doing the boots on the ground work when it comes to this, because they have a point that theoretical models don't account for practical cases. There was a local public radio interview with a researcher who'd worked in prisons and jails and done case work who was frustrated with academic studies that pulled statistics but weren't in place in the institutions. There were a number of repeat offenders that, despite rehabilitation programs, were perpetually in jail and had patterns of arrest back to their youth. To him, their methodology was flawed and they couldn't see the forest for the trees. But you need both, because if you're surrounded by trees, you never get a feel for that forest's place in the whole ecosystem.

There is quite a lot of material on the link I provided above (in reponse to Simon's tweet), setting out some of the points by people who are thinking these things out, Mordy. I am currently thinking this out myself, reading around - but I am saying its more than some juvenile demand. xps

If you completely reshape how the police operate, how we look at rehabilitation, prison reform, etc. and change all the pieces if even subtly, isn't your goal the abolition of police? Because the concept of what the police are in the end is significantly different.

It's the Ship of Theseus problem, you guys are just on the "same ship" side

I don't think it's a genuine demand at all. I think these are sincere people making strong cases for reforms who have gotten off-track by letting their rhetoric get ahead of their ideas. I mean look, I agree, "abolish the police," if that's just a nicer way of saying, "fuck the police." I'm not seeing anyone taking it seriously tho. Maybe shame on me for thinking this was a serious cause?

"abolish the police" is a great way to express a direction imho, if you support the sort of proposals and reforms abolitionists are putting forward this seems to be a v small thing to split hairs about

Not sure if public or private matter so much as police and prisons go hand-in-hand in terms of dishing out state brutality and I bundled these together as things that can be immediately carried out by the UK government. I was giving out a few points on the way.

I getcha. I only brought it up because it's an important detail, from a leftist pov specifically - a lot of detention centres are run by private companies (G4S, Mitie), funded by The Taxpayer's Money, and it's all far closer to the US prison-industrial complex than I think the general populace realises.

personally i don't expect anyone who talks seriously about abolishin g capitalism to have thought things out carefully

Plenty have looked at this question, some have tried and other are thinking of trying it again.

see also "end poverty"

This does not mean that no one should articulate or fight for reforms. However, those reforms must be part of a larger vision that questions the basic role of police in society and asks whether coercive government action will bring more justice or less. Too many of the reforms under discussion today fail to do that; many further empower the police and expand their role. Community policing, body cameras, and increased money for training reinforce a false sense of police legitimacy and expand the reach of the police into communities and private lives. More money, more technology, and more power and influence will not reduce the burden or increase the justness of policing. Ending the War on Drugs, abolishing school police, ending broken-windows policing, developing robust mental health care, and creating low-income housing systems will do much more to reduce abusive policing.

this is from his conclusion. i think body cameras are important and disagree w/ his analysis there but look at what he considers routes to reduce abusive policing. he isn't advocating getting rid of the police. maybe it would make more sense to call it 'reduce policing'? when i first saw "abolish the police" i immediately thought "this is dumb af," which might suggest it's not the best path to enroll ppl in the reforms?

see also "ban tankies"

xp

Ending the destruction of the environment - well that's just impossible!

*sits back, watches the end of humanity within my lifetime*

body cameras have been repeatedly shown to do jack shit iirc

"reduce policing" sounds super fucking lame imho

see also - stop people from "chanting their garbage" - impossible, the 1st amendment must be protected, protect Nazis! xps

body cameras have been repeatedly shown to do jack shit iirc

link or what bc i've seen studies that showed dramatic decreases in use of force by police when using body cameras

I remember Coates also talking about how he saw reparations as a goal potentially multiple decades off, that he saw his work more as planting seeds. I think the same can be said of a book like End of Policing -- maybe can't literally lead to abolition of police, but can start to shift the conceptual paradigm about policing, people in their 20s and 30s reading it now who will be policymakers and judges down the road.

eg https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10940-014-9236-3

reparations seems far more plausible to me and far more desirable than abolishing the police but anyway i think i've said everything i have to say on this topic so ymmv whatever

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldurkheimer/2017/10/23/why-dont-police-body-cameras-work-like-we-expected/#43e435f1244d

ok just quick lol at that amazing article

"Potentially false assumptions may also be the culprit. For example, the thought process that led to putting cameras on cops assumes that civilian complaints track actual instances of police misconduct (not civilian fabrication)."

yeah I was really only interested in the quotes from the study, article is trash

now that's what I call unbiased reporting lol

when i first saw "abolish the police" i immediately thought "this is dumb af," which might suggest it's not the best path to enroll ppl Mordy in the reforms?

fixed

I getcha. I only brought it up because it's an important detail, from a leftist pov specifically - a lot of detention centres are run by private companies (G4S, Mitie), funded by The Taxpayer's Money, and it's all far closer to the US prison-industrial complex than I think the general populace realises.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 26 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, although in the UK I think this handout of prisons to G4S is more in line with the carving out of other parts of the public sector to private interests. Can't remember if there are lots of PFI style deals for prisons or not (from a quick google its a yes)

the phrase End of Policing is terrible marketing for otherwise good ideas, as it conjures up thoughts of failed states, piracy, militia-controlled zones, rich people with bodyguard armies etc.

IDK, it's provocative and makes you want to read it

Abolishing the police makes sense as long as we successfully usher in a new world where no policing is ever necessary, i.e. where every citizen is a responsible, infallibly ethical being who cannot even fathom doing harm to another.

yeahhhhhh that's not what any actual police abolitionists envision but cool strawman

Ok, so tell me more about the alternatives.

here's one pretty common concept, from an interview w/ Vitale:

You write about restorative justice as an example of non-punitive alternatives to policing. Can you talk about what this model looks like in schools, as well as in communities grappling with violence?

Restorative justice is a mechanism that’s designed to resolve social problems in non-punitive ways by trying to identify what the underlying forces are behind problematic behavior and, instead of using punishment and exclusion to respond to that behavior, drawing that person in and trying to figure out what can be done to both repair them and whatever harm their problematic behavior has produced.

The place where this has gotten the most traction has been in schools. These systems typically involve peer adjudication, where students work with students engaged in problematic behavior to try to identify the behaviors and causes of those behaviors, and then come up with some solutions. Often, the problem is coming from outside the school, something going on at home or in the community, but sometimes it’s coming from within the school, like bullying. We had a horrible stabbing here in New York City just recently, the first death of a student on campus in many years, and of course, the young person who did the stabbing said they were subjected to long-term, persistent bullying. And what’s going to be done about that? Possibly nothing. Instead, they’re putting metal detectors in the school. So that’s a kind of punitive approach. A restorative justice approach would have created avenues to address that bullying long before it escalated into a violent, deadly confrontation. The whole school community has to be involved — students, teachers, administrators. It requires rethinking how whole disciplinary systems are organized so that problems are identified early, and the goal is to resolve them, not to punish them.

In communities, one of the more interesting models is linked to a concept called justice reinvestment. We know there are neighborhoods where problematic behavior is highly concentrated, and local and state officials spend millions of dollars to police and incarcerate people. What if those communities kept some percentage of people who get arrested in the community and tried to develop strategies for resolving their problems, and in return, the community got the money that would have been spent incarcerating them? We could afford to begin to produce some supportive housing and community-based mental health systems, we could find summer jobs and after-school employment for young people. We could develop services not just for them, but for their parents. These things are cheaper than jails, prisons, and police, and they don’t come with all the collateral consequences of driving people through those punitive systems.

fwiw my grade school had peer adjudication. i was bullied frequently in 5th/6th grade and i took one of my bullies to adjudication once. it turned out that it was just another popularity contest and they sided with the bully and asked me if i could see how i had invited the bullying on myself through my annoying behavior. anyway i got into a fist fight with him a month later at the tetherball court and ended up winning and that worked much better he never bothered me afterwards.

lol