Sunday, June 28, 2020

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.

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