A failed attempt at argument

We need to cut way back on the use of force by state agents in our society.  We do need armed people at some point for the extreme cases, but it should be restricted to extreme cases.  I saw a thing online attempting to argue back against this, but it only ended up proving my point.

Obviously this is meant to suggest that you need a cop with a gun to handle this.  A naked guy with his fists raised is such a dangerous thing, after all.

But this is *exactly* what we want social workers to be doing.  We don't need a person with a gun ready to murder this naked dude.  We need someone to say "Hey, what is up?  You seem pretty agitated.  Want to tell me why you are on this roof?" without the implied threat of death or imprisonment if the answer isn't what the emergency worker wants.

Nurses and doctors and social workers and lots of other people have to deal with difficult, delusional, drunk, or otherwise problematic people all the time.  They do it without weapons, because the presence of weapons escalates otherwise safe interactions into violence.

A social worker who can talk naked dude down, figure out what his problem is, and try to help him solve it is exactly how we should respond to naked people on a roof.  (That is, assuming we think that naked people on a roof are a problem in the first place, which they are emphatically not, unless they are doing something else that is an issue.)  We definitely don't need a cop with a gun.

If that naked guy grabs an iron pipe and starts threatening to murder nearby people, *then* we need a cop with a gun.  Let's reduce the number of armed state agents by 90%, hire a ton of social workers and EMTs to replace them, and see how much less violence we can have.  I am confident it will be a lot, and we will make life much easier for the people the cops so consistently make problems for - people of colour, queer people, trans people, and others that are already oppressed.  The police amplify the effect of existing prejudices, so we need to reduce their numbers to the absolute minimum we can get away with, given the occasional necessity for violence by the state.

Black lives matter

What with all the conflict in the world surrounding BLM I figured I should link to a black person writing about his struggles with police.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote a piece on this topic, and one of the key things it nails is how racist policing can't be explained away by 'but the police need to question suspicious people' and similar attempts to ignore the problem.  Tyson's story includes an example of him being questioned for carrying books into a building on campus.  This isn't a thing you would imagine any police officer randomly getting involved with, except that Tyson is black, and the police felt sure that black people don't belong near a physics department.  That is for white people!

Here it is.

One thing I have found interesting in all this is looking at the way people talk about their proposed solutions.  'Defund the police' has become a refrain from the protesters, and I am totally behind that.

Sometimes I have seen people saying "Well, obviously we want to redirect most police funding to social workers, health workers, etc. and shrink the police force, but we don't want to *eliminate* police." but others truly want to get rid of police entirely.  No armed law enforcement at all.

You see similar arguments with regards to prisons.  Prison abolition strictly means no prisons, and some people advocate for exactly that, while others want significant reductions in prison populations.

I am certainly in the 'significant reductions' camp.  There are deeply evil people in the world that cannot be dealt with via fines, classes, apologies, or other similar techniques.  The Jeffrey Dahmers and Robert Picktons of the world can't just be left alone.  We need prisons for such people.

We also need armed law enforcement.  When somebody has a gun and is ready to shoot other people, we need people who are trained to fight them.

But we need so few of those people, and such a small amount of prison space.  The desperately evil and incorrigibly violent are rare.

Traffic control does not need to be overseen by armed law enforcement.  Responding to people who are drunk or high or otherwise causing a fuss does not require guns and clubs, it requires someone trained in social work.  There are so many police functions that simply should be overseen by somebody else, probably somebody with actual training that applies to the situation at hand.

We could reduce prisons populations and police personnel by 90% and it would make me happy.  We do need those both of those things for the extreme cases, but there are way too many cops and they are way too involved in everyone's everyday life.

Changing how the police operate is certainly a good goal.  There are so many things we could do to try to reduce the damage police do in each interaction.  However, the simple fact is that we can do a tremendous amount of good by drastically slashing the number of interactions the police are involved in, and we do that by stripping away the vast majority of their budget and putting it towards programs that bring far greater benefits and far fewer problems.