So it turns out the nypd RPD held down and strangled a man in distress untill he died. This happened MONTHS before George Floyd, but it was apparently buried. Recently they released the bodycam footage, showing he pleaded for the police not to shoot as he was disabled, which prompted them to cover his head with an "anti spittle/bite" hood and knelt on him until he died.
From what i've read, no cops have been fired, let alone charged with anything.
No jokes this time.. i'm sad and knackered and i don't know if i have anything insightful to say about this.. but couldn't find this on the chat, i felt like we should know and not let the murder go unknown.
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I admit, I had thought for a while that we were never going to win actual police abolition and that we should push for stripping their responsibilities and keep them from responding to crises. Things like taking their guns away, making them grab something from the trunk or run away if someone starts shooting, residency requirements, some theoretical system that would actually force accountability. Not since all this started. It's been galling to see how people protesting police brutality has been met with this fucking much petulance and cruelty. That NYPD union chief asshole just screaming while dozens of cops stood in solidarity, how George Floyd's killer had a line of cops standing guard at his house, how conservatives and liberals just fell in line the second somebody whistled at them.
No, we need to push for police abolition because anything short of that is permitting institutional evil to prey on our most vulnerable.
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it probably will. Those who control capital will recreate the police if we don't. FBI/ATF/DEA/USPSIS/USSS will become more involved absent cops and while we won't have local cops entering every brown person who wears a colorful backpack on the way home from school into a gang database, we'll have to deal with "community partnership" and "outreach" programs between law enforcement and "communities". By "community" they always mean a handful of Karens, local priests, small business assholes, and one or two people who run a co-opted outreach program that has a multimillion dollar endowment and helps twenty kids at a time.
The only way we win this thing is by going outside, talking to our neighbors, building solidarity and community.
How many of you know your neighbors' names? How many of you can spell the names of Game of Thrones characters?
I at least feel like the topic of police abolition has gone from pie in the sky to something that actually gets discussed now, at least. I think plenty of people in the US are at least waking up to not only how brutal the police are, but how indignant and stubborn to even the slightest reforms they are.
"Body cams!" and "deescalation training!" doesnt seem to work as well now as it did five years ago, now that weve had five more years of evidence of how woefully unaccountable the police are.
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You don't.
What can be done within capitalism is dispersion, displacement, disenfranchisement, intimidation, sabotage, etc. You know all the tricks the GOP and the torries use to hollow out things like USPS, UK rail, the NHS, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, public schooling, basic infrastructure? That. These tools exist. Ultimately we won't even start to move in that direction until we, as a society, grow comfortable with the idea that it's better for a cop to die than to kill.