Defund the police

Saturday, April 17, 2021 permalink
tags: politics - current events - BLM

I’m not a journalist. Read about the murder of Adam Toledo and the subsequent cover up. Read about the murder of Daunte Wright. The list is too long and I’m not an expert, but for every instance of police brutality that makes national headlines, hundreds do not.

The extent of crimes that police commit with body cameras is shocking, but as painful as these videos are, it’s extremely valuable to see how violent police can be when they know they’re being watched.

I haven’t fact checked the numbers myself but I came across a stat that apparently if you add up US police budgets they would make up the world’s third largest military. Of course, it is common knowledge that we spend far more than any other country on our actual military, which is also a problem.

President Eisenhower said in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

We need to end the war on drugs and treat drug abuse like the disease it is. We need to make healthcare a right for every person living in America. We need to invest in feeding and housing every person in America. We need to make quality education available to every person in America.

Militarized police are, at best, a band aid to protect the elite from the consequences of disasterous underinvestment in social welfare of the past 50 years.

I’m not against increasing spending in police training, but overall spending is far too high. For police entrusted with lethal weapons I’m all for drastically increasing the training required, but there should be orders of magnitude fewer police with weapons, lethal or otherwise.

And sitting on somebody’s neck when they’re already handcuffed is frankly not something that training is going to fix.

Black lives matter. While people of all races are the victims of police brutality, we have a justice system that brutalizes black people disproportionately. Reforming this system is a step towards racial justice, and serious reform is impossible without defunding the police on a large scale.