many people in america already exist in a world where police and prisons do not exist. go to any middle to upper class suburb in america. cops arent wandering the streets. people aren’t being arrested. neighbors aren’t being sent to prison. and generally everyone is....fine. many people say they cannot imagine this world. what most of them cannot imagine is someone not policing black brown and poor people. THAT is what is unimaginable to them. not the absence of law enforcement. if you are lucky, you already functionally life with that absence. so how are these places without cops on every corner surviving? well. those places are more like to have people with decent jobs, access to housing, quality schools. it turns out that when people have the tools they need to survive, we can rely less on punishment.
police are a back end solution, and functionally, they actually have nothing to do with most incidents that involve behavior that could legally be categorized as criminal. experts estimate that around 40% of violent crime and 30% of property crime is even reported. now imagine what percent of drug crime is reported. virtually none. ESPECIALLY in the suburbs. no one is calling them cops on your teenage neighbor for getting high in his bedroom. so, even at baseline, cops are simply NOT INVOLVED IN THE RESOLUTION OF MOST “CRIMINAL” INCIDENTS. So let’s take the crime that IS reported. How much of that is actually solved? Well given cops only solve 60% of murders, much less than that in big cities.....NOT MUCH. We solve less than half of violent crimes, MAYBE 20% of property crimes. And again, depends on where you live.
Look, the point here is this -
It is extremely easy for some of you to imagine that the George Floyds are a tragic cost of doing necessary business, and that a looted Target is simply evidence of a need for more correctional control. You may not want to come to that conclusion, but there it is anyway. BUT. the opposite is true. when a system insists on ‘keeping the peace’ through death, racism, and control, no one is going to give a single fuck about the structural integrity of your corporate big box store. when your care, respect, or concern for people is nonexistent, this is a predictable result. if the law is not for you, why the fuck should the law be for us?
here’s the last point. a major chunk of the people saying “why don’t they just follow the law” are the same people applauding mostly white people for flagrantly defying orders to wear masks, or stay inside. many of you have never been closely policed in your natural lives, and when a pandemic meant you had to do something you didn’t want to do, you refused. so maybe keep that same energy when you look at people throwing rocks into a target store. i can hear the betsy sues now, the ones who believe they have a god given right to breathe on strangers at the town bar, shaking their heads in disappointment at “looters.” listen: we all have our limits. your limit may be wearing a mask in the midst of a once-in-a-century medical disaster. the people taking stuff from target? maybe their limit is watching a cop kill a man as he cries out for his mama. now who is more reasonable?
