Oh, look, I learned a new acronym. Handy!
There’s a pointless wrangle going on in this thread about the slogan “Defund the police”, which CripDyke also addresses reasonably on the Pervert Justice blog. DILLIGAF, people. ACAB. Defund the police, whatever that means to you. Change is necessary. That’s where the focus ought to be, not on the pedantry of how the demand is phrased, but recognizing the reality of how awful the police are in this country.
For example, here’s the story of the NYPD police squad rousting black teenagers on Halloween, even hitting one of them with their car. A civilian review board found that the police were out of line, so the police voided their conclusion and said they’d handle it entirely internally. These are the kinds of people we’re looking at.
One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.
Isn’t that charming. That’s the face of the police they are proud to present.
You might wonder what’s happened to the bad cops. Here you go:
Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”
The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.
The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.
It’s not just big city problems. Here’s the story of Brookside, Alabama, a little tiny town like a model Mayberry.
The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.
By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.
The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and “making up laws” to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees – or pay for costly appeals to state court – and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.
“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. “We are not safer because of it.”
Defund the police. Does anyone want to argue that at least Brookside is one place that needs savage cuts to police funding? Anyone? They expanded the police force ten fold, and the town wants to increase it even more. Look at what they have now!
This is indefensible. Defunding is the answer.
The thing that gets my goat about the Defund the Cops movement is the rightwing, white power structure and corporate media response to it: to pretend defunding cops is a “package deal”, pretend those who want defunding are trying to destroy cities.
In 2020, when Black Lives Matter called for defunding cops, many cities (e.g. Seattle and others) falsely claimed, “they’re calling for defunding police, ambulance and fire departments!” Any honest person knows BLM said no such thing, that BLM called for redistributing the money from cops to the other two public services.
The lie gained traction among those who supported the existing power structure, but (I believe) the public for the most part didn’t swallow it. You don’t hear that lie being told much anymore, and some cities have redistributed money successfully with better results (e.g. Denver’s successful funding of social workers instead of cops).
I had to look up what DILLIGAF meant, and it seems an appropriate slogan for this greedy, bigoted, shithole country we live in. Here, caring about anything other than your own selfish desires is seen as being an obnoxious busybody at best, tyrannical at worst. Dismissing the plight of the marginalized is seen as an act of freedom-loving defiance against those who think we all ought to sympathize with those they have deemed “unworthy.”
Fine, two can play this game. DILLIGIAF about your “liberty,” your “freedom,” your “rights?” DILLIGAF about your patriotism, your flag, your guns, your faith? DILLIGAF about your health, your happiness, or the health and happiness of the spawn you crapped out, you illiterate, mouth-breathing, Red State shit-stains?
No. I don’t.
Alabama law directs that a percentage of each traffic ticket fine goes to the municipality that issued it. Brookside is an example of a town whose leadership decided to exploit that provision to its advantage. It isn’t the only example, it is only the most egregious example to hit the news lately. They got greedy and they got caught.
Even more fun, despite some Democratic politicians promising to actually cut police budgets, none of them actually did so in any significant way, and the Biden administration made more federal funding available to local police than any of the cuts, and right-wingers are still trying to claim that anything bad which has happened vis-a-vis the police is because of defunding. (Same way they’re claiming that the inflation right now is because of minimum wage rises… which didn’t happen at the federal level and mostly didn’t happen regionally, either.)
I have spent 10 weeks in the USA, and lived 65 years in the UK.
I was a visitor, minding my own business, but I had more hassle from the cops in the US, Thani lifetime of living and travelling in Europe.
.
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the police and I’m here to help
Opponents of progress are never going to argue or respond in good faith; their objective is to control the narrative. Period. They’ll do it no matter what we say or do, and we have a massive problem of simply letting them. Every single time on every single issue. The narrative around abortion is so thoroughly infected with right-wing control that people on the left-wing feel the need constantly to accept the assumption that abortion is evil that we need to reduce, it’s just a necessary one and the best ways to reduce abortion are just different than the ones espoused by the right-wing. The same is happening here with efforts to call for police reform. It’s the center and the left allowing the right to dictate the parameters of the conversation, which then allows the right-wing to control how the center and the left support or reject policy positions. We see it with the Democratic Party leadership continually supporting, with a shit-eating grin on their faces, even more money being funneled into the police while at the same time openly mocking the idea of even a fraction of that money being used instead to give Americans COVID tests or masks.
Perhaps looking and behaving like an occupying military force actually increases crime? Seems to me that actually paying their firefighters (?!) would be a better use of public money.
Intransitive @1
This is basically the argument I made in the other thread. It was too easy for those in corporate media to paint “Defund The Police” as dangerous radicals. It’s more difficult to do this with “Black Lives Matter” without just coming off like a racist.
Does the officer who ran over the boy know that Punisher can kill dirty cops like him along with lawbreakers such as pedophiles and drug pushers? If he’s a real character, Frank would kill that dirty cop just like he does in the comics. Especially in Punisher Max!
BTW, Don’t mess with Frank Castle, the man who brutally punishes criminals and (in my version of him) plays the harp beautifully!
@ 6 nomdeplume
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the police and I’m here to help
Ah no. That is only true if said in a US accent.
DILLIGAFWYLL – Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck What You Look Like?
Seriously – A person’s appearance should have no relation to what they care about.
@11 as was the original…
nomdeplume @13
Even then it was only true when Republicans ran things.
If defunding is the answer, that means we have to have a conversation with you about specifically what you mean by defund. That seems to be as personal and difficult to pin down as people’s notions of gods.
How about we just dismantle the police? Or destroy the police? Those are less open to interpretation and endless liberal navel gazing.
@14 Certainly true, although Boris is doing his best…
Control the police.
Discipline the police.
IGAF.
@11 jrkrideau
There are plenty of awful people in UK police forces.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/24/met-apologises-to-academic-for-sexist-derogatory-language
Thankfully most of them aren’t given guns.
Ossowo Harpist@10–
There is a famous Punisher issue where he calls out police fanboys by pointing out that they are betraying the laws they swore to uphold and are, in fact, nothing like him.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/punisher-police-skull-logo-spoilers/
Oops! Apologies for mixing up your name, Owosso.
de-fund the police is a case where the sound of the slogan won the day even when it was very easy to be twisted by everyone.
it is easy to say and it is sticky
restructure the police to reallocate the funding to more productive and efficient personnel and departments like other emergency response, health and welfare and mental health is not easy to put in some simple slogan to chant in a march or demonstration so instead of arguing about the necessary policy changes our response is to argue about the chant.we focus the discussion of the fucking phrase and reactionaries interpretation again when clearly the evidence points out that the tough on crime police against the citizens is not rally work very well.
I have no excuse for the typo’s and messed up phrasing i don’t even drink!
Redangel , Nice. Immature behavior at its best !
Pest control, we have a troll infection.
You might be hearing some muttering about police funding after the Ottawa occupation is over. A lot of people have pointed out that if a bunch of racial justice protesters had caused the same kind of disruption the duped truckers and their friends are, the cops would have taken mass action a long time ago. Instead they’ve taken sporadic action, with the Ottawa police chief wringing his hands that if they get too aggressive things might turn violent. At least they charged the guy who actually showed up someplace carrying a rifle or shotgun.
Re 3:
In the case of Brookside, this issue seems to have dramatically escalated around 2018, so I have to wonder what happened just prior to then. Also, is it really profitable for the municipality? Doesn’t the local government need to shell out even more money to employ an army of robbercops? Do they have some higher level source of police funding that can be gamed?
Wrangling about the slogan is not as pointless as you think. In Wikipedia’s page on it, the very second sentence in the introduction reads: “Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services”. It is a hopelessly vague statement that can be as moderate or extreme as anyone wants to make it at any particular moment, be they progressives who actually believe in it or conservatives who bring it up to scare people with its ramifications. As a result, it is massively unpopular among Americans and is considered politically toxic, which is why Democratic leaders avoid it as much as possible.
I remember when CHAZ got started, they demanded the complete abolition of the Seattle Police Department, including pensions. This is the kind of thing a lot of people associate with “Defund the Police” and it’s understandable if they feel gaslighted by people insisting that it’s not really about completely defunding the police, and that it’s all just right-wing scare-mongering (I don’t consider it gaslighting, just to be clear; gaslighting implies someone knowing something to be blatantly false and pretending otherwise while people accused of it are all too often just oblivious to the fact that not everyone who shares their ideology shares their views).
So yeah, everything you write about the police in the USA sounds horrible and should be fixed. But defending a slogan is not synonymous with fixing the system and neither is criticizing it synonymous with preferring the status quo.
I’ve read about Brookside before. Sounds like the town has been taken over and is being run by gangsters.
You mean like, “Cut taxes now!”?
Criticizing the slogan is not synonymous with preferring the status quo, but spending your effort criticizing a slogan which has been successful in rallying street level activists puts you in the role of demoralizing street level activists who have similar goals.
Why not ignore the slogans you don’t like and put that same energy into attacking the status quo?
I mean, if you actually don’t prefer the status quo, that seems to be a plan more likely to achieve your desired outcome.
@Crip Dyke 34
“Criticizing the slogan is not synonymous with preferring the status quo, but spending your effort criticizing a slogan which has been successful in rallying street level activists puts you in the role of demoralizing street level activists who have similar goals.”
This. This obsession with the slogan getting looked at. Usually utterly uncited feelings about some people who will misinterpret, or even easily misinterpret or some other reason…that ends up revealing problems with the person taking the slogan in a bad way.
Well, if they don’t like the criticism they can go and deal with the problem people. I have no reason to soften things.
I don’t care about the slogan, just fix the fucking problem and fire (and blacklist) the bad cops!
Brony:
Nope. That’s just a way of saying any criticism whatsoever (because what criticism takes zero effort?) is bad. In short, it implies it’s above criticism; a form of “the means justify the end”.
CD: you need a qualifier there to get your actual meaning across, such as “spending the bulk of your effort”.
[Wow. Obs: “the end justifes the means”]
@John Morales
Your point isn’t obvious.
So Crip Dyke would say their criticism of criticism is bad? XD
Brony:
It should be, even to you.
Maybe, maybe not. Ask her. I can only justify commenting on what she’s written, not on what she might say.
(It certainly isn’t my claim or inferable from my claim)
@John Morales
You responded to me instead of responding to CD directly.
Make it obvious. Consequences.
I see criticism of a subset of criticism on the basis of empathy and pragmatism. “Overton speed bumps” might be a good label.
Brony:
Actually, I initially responded to both of you, and thereafter to your response to my response.
It could hardly have been more obvious.
(But hey, how about you make it obvious what part of what I wrote you find confusing?)
Truth.
Exactly what I’m doing.
(OK, now I’m just playing. You did not specify a referent, though I think you meant criticism of my criticism rather than my criticism of criticism of criticism. :) )
“…how about you make it obvious…”
No.
Fair enough, Brony. I think I made my point obvious (except to you, by your claim), but you won’t say what it is about the comment that’s not obvious so that you don’t get the point.
You understand, I hope, how I can hardly make it more obvious to you if you refuse to explain what it is that you find confusing about my comment.
Ah well.
Or there’s straight-up literal highway robbery: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-28/marijuana-cash-seized-armored-car-fbi-san-bernardino-sheriff
When a slogan actively gets in the way of addressing the status quo then critisizing it is fighting the status quo. ACAB and defund the police do just that. Because at this point leftists care more about being percieved as fighting the status quo than actually doing it. You guys have no idea just how many black and brown people you pushed away with this shit. Many of us think white people are just co opting the movement for their agenda. BLM is split between two groups. The radical idiots who push these things and those actively focused on making change.
Not gonna lie tho i was also one of those idiots. I lived in an area with some notoriously bad cops so ACAB made sense to me.
Btw what does defund the cops even mean? Because in the 90’s police corruption was huge until they increased their budget to increase their pay. If that get affected if you think police are bad now lol just wait.
Right now the best approach ive seen is what Biden did which increased budgets but allocated those resources to better training and hiring. While flawed, I havent seen anything better or realistic. Activism is great but if it amounts to no change or worse actovely hinders progress than you are doing it wrong.