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I'm having Thoughts again. Not very well-organized Thoughts, but when are they ever?
It's remarkable to see how fast "defund/disband the police" has gone from fringe idea held by weirdo abolitionists like yours truly to something that is not only mainstream discourse, but something actively being considered by governments. Before I get too deep into an analysis of how and why this is happening, I want to say that I'm for defunding the police. I'm for disbanding the police. I'm for abolishing the institution of policing. Modern policing is very new and arose from slave patrols. It is a deeply corrupt racist institution. We lived without it once and we can live without it again.
What I find fascinating is why we're now suddenly allowed to talk about it. Yes yes freedom of speech, democracy, but we all know that freedom of speech has its limits. The graffiti artist, queer pornographer, and multinational company do not all have the same access to freedom of speech. Some speech is freer than others, and a wealth of interests—political, economic, and media—have worked tightly together to determine what is acceptable to say and what is not. For years, as the brutalization of racialized communities by a class of people endowed with military-grade weaponry and absolved of any crime they might commit with it has become more visible due to the ubiquity of smartphones, we civilians have been allowed to talk about peaceful protests, bodycams, sensitivity training, but never before to question the institution of policing itself or how much of our tax dollars it gets. In Toronto, that's over a billion dollars a year—far more than is spent on poverty reduction, transit, paramedics, or libraries, all of which benefit far more people. Certainly, far left radicals have brought this up as a problem, but that last link is to CBC. Here's one in Macleans! By Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-TO, no less.
Speaking of Hudson, she did a really excellent interview yesterday with Canadaland, and you should have a listen. Among the many interesting points she raises is that CBC's The Current was supposed to interview her, until they found out she wanted to talk about defunding the police, and then they suddenly dropped her. A few days later, the idea was everywhere. She and Jesse Brown both remarked on the speed at which the Overton Window had shifted.
There are some good reasons for that on all sides of the political spectrum. Obviously, there's the left-progressive, humanitarian argument. Money spent on policing is not being spent on a social safety net that would reduce crime and improve the lives of people. Money spent on policing is being spent to equip cops with ludicrous firepower, which they use on innocent people, mainly Black and, on Turtle Island, Indigenous. Cops are apparently becoming less accountable, not more. Time and time again, we've seen them get away with murder. There's also, shockingly, a right-wing argument. We don't get much for our money out of the policing budget. Quite a lot goes to cops hanging around construction sites, for which they get time and a half. When cops take a break from active policing, there's good evidence that crime actually goes down. So if you're interested in genuine fiscal conservatism (is anyone, these days), especially in the middle of a pandemic where people are barely leaving their homes if they don't need to, police budgets are a good place to make some austerity happen.
But there's another factor and I don't think anyone is talking about it. I don't want to denigrate the courage and hard work of the many activists who put their lives and health on the line to demonstrate in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Without them (and, to be quite honest, without the rioting that also happened), his killers wouldn't be held to account at all. But there have been widespread protests and movements before, and there have been riots before. Why have politicians, media, and woke corporations suddenly had a come to Jesus moment?
Spoiler: They haven't. For the most part, they want what they always have—the transfer of public funds from your services into private hands.
A quarter of all labour in the US is guard labour.
This includes, of course, cops, military, and prison guards, but also private security. I think the reason why it is all of a sudden socially acceptable to talk about defunding the police is that the wealthy look at billion-dollar line items and see billions of dollars being paid to unionized positions, when if all they care about is their shops not being robbed and their condo developments not being burned to the ground, it's more fiscally efficient to spent a fraction of that money on minimum-wage private security guards. Or, for the more important functions of social control, whatever William Gibson-esque moniker Blackwater is going by these days.
While I generally am against privatizing public services, I still find it hard to look at this as a bad thing. The public eats the cost either way, by subsidizing corporations through tax breaks, or by funding the police directly. As someone slightly more likely than the average nice white lady to get her head bashed in by a riot cop, I prefer to not directly pay for my own concussions. There's also less job creep—part of the reason for so many police murders, especially in Canada where our cops by and large don't just randomly gun down people in the streets, is that cops are used in situations where cops have no business going, like people having mental health crises. You're not going to call a security guard to deal with your kid having a meltdown, security guards are mainly not armed anyway, and therefore the chance of a security guard defenestrating your kid is massively lower than if the only recourse was calling 911.
The trend towards privatized guard labour is, of course, a bad thing. But it is a bad thing that is currently opening a space for what is a very important discussion.
If there are two takeaways from my theorizing, they are:
1) Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that power cedes without a fight. Corporations have not suddenly gotten woke; we are permitted to discuss this option because economic factors have shifted.
2) "Defund the police" is not a complete sentence; "defund the police and reinvest the money in Black and Indigenous communities" is.
It's remarkable to see how fast "defund/disband the police" has gone from fringe idea held by weirdo abolitionists like yours truly to something that is not only mainstream discourse, but something actively being considered by governments. Before I get too deep into an analysis of how and why this is happening, I want to say that I'm for defunding the police. I'm for disbanding the police. I'm for abolishing the institution of policing. Modern policing is very new and arose from slave patrols. It is a deeply corrupt racist institution. We lived without it once and we can live without it again.
What I find fascinating is why we're now suddenly allowed to talk about it. Yes yes freedom of speech, democracy, but we all know that freedom of speech has its limits. The graffiti artist, queer pornographer, and multinational company do not all have the same access to freedom of speech. Some speech is freer than others, and a wealth of interests—political, economic, and media—have worked tightly together to determine what is acceptable to say and what is not. For years, as the brutalization of racialized communities by a class of people endowed with military-grade weaponry and absolved of any crime they might commit with it has become more visible due to the ubiquity of smartphones, we civilians have been allowed to talk about peaceful protests, bodycams, sensitivity training, but never before to question the institution of policing itself or how much of our tax dollars it gets. In Toronto, that's over a billion dollars a year—far more than is spent on poverty reduction, transit, paramedics, or libraries, all of which benefit far more people. Certainly, far left radicals have brought this up as a problem, but that last link is to CBC. Here's one in Macleans! By Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-TO, no less.
Speaking of Hudson, she did a really excellent interview yesterday with Canadaland, and you should have a listen. Among the many interesting points she raises is that CBC's The Current was supposed to interview her, until they found out she wanted to talk about defunding the police, and then they suddenly dropped her. A few days later, the idea was everywhere. She and Jesse Brown both remarked on the speed at which the Overton Window had shifted.
There are some good reasons for that on all sides of the political spectrum. Obviously, there's the left-progressive, humanitarian argument. Money spent on policing is not being spent on a social safety net that would reduce crime and improve the lives of people. Money spent on policing is being spent to equip cops with ludicrous firepower, which they use on innocent people, mainly Black and, on Turtle Island, Indigenous. Cops are apparently becoming less accountable, not more. Time and time again, we've seen them get away with murder. There's also, shockingly, a right-wing argument. We don't get much for our money out of the policing budget. Quite a lot goes to cops hanging around construction sites, for which they get time and a half. When cops take a break from active policing, there's good evidence that crime actually goes down. So if you're interested in genuine fiscal conservatism (is anyone, these days), especially in the middle of a pandemic where people are barely leaving their homes if they don't need to, police budgets are a good place to make some austerity happen.
But there's another factor and I don't think anyone is talking about it. I don't want to denigrate the courage and hard work of the many activists who put their lives and health on the line to demonstrate in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Without them (and, to be quite honest, without the rioting that also happened), his killers wouldn't be held to account at all. But there have been widespread protests and movements before, and there have been riots before. Why have politicians, media, and woke corporations suddenly had a come to Jesus moment?
Spoiler: They haven't. For the most part, they want what they always have—the transfer of public funds from your services into private hands.
A quarter of all labour in the US is guard labour.
This includes, of course, cops, military, and prison guards, but also private security. I think the reason why it is all of a sudden socially acceptable to talk about defunding the police is that the wealthy look at billion-dollar line items and see billions of dollars being paid to unionized positions, when if all they care about is their shops not being robbed and their condo developments not being burned to the ground, it's more fiscally efficient to spent a fraction of that money on minimum-wage private security guards. Or, for the more important functions of social control, whatever William Gibson-esque moniker Blackwater is going by these days.
While I generally am against privatizing public services, I still find it hard to look at this as a bad thing. The public eats the cost either way, by subsidizing corporations through tax breaks, or by funding the police directly. As someone slightly more likely than the average nice white lady to get her head bashed in by a riot cop, I prefer to not directly pay for my own concussions. There's also less job creep—part of the reason for so many police murders, especially in Canada where our cops by and large don't just randomly gun down people in the streets, is that cops are used in situations where cops have no business going, like people having mental health crises. You're not going to call a security guard to deal with your kid having a meltdown, security guards are mainly not armed anyway, and therefore the chance of a security guard defenestrating your kid is massively lower than if the only recourse was calling 911.
The trend towards privatized guard labour is, of course, a bad thing. But it is a bad thing that is currently opening a space for what is a very important discussion.
If there are two takeaways from my theorizing, they are:
1) Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that power cedes without a fight. Corporations have not suddenly gotten woke; we are permitted to discuss this option because economic factors have shifted.
2) "Defund the police" is not a complete sentence; "defund the police and reinvest the money in Black and Indigenous communities" is.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 06:50 pm (UTC)1) true and lasting respect for one anothers' human rights, whether at the individual or group level
2) fiscal responsibility without lapsing into austerity doctrine?"
Is there a third component to this question that I've left off here? I think there is. You've covered some of it with the "redirection of funds to other needs" commentary.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 06:59 pm (UTC)And then there's the question of whether cops actually increase public safety, which I got into an argument about last night. If I'm raped, do I really need to spend my tax dollars paying the salary of someone who's going to come by, laugh at me, ask me what I was wearing and how many men I've slept with, and then do nothing about the rapist? It doesn't make me any more or less safe to have that option.
Hence redirection of funds. I just suspect that without critical analysis, that redirection is likely to go into private and not public hands.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-06 07:04 am (UTC)Best summation of that scenario I've ever seen.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-06 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-05 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-06 01:48 pm (UTC)2) "Defund the police" is not a complete sentence; "defund the police and reinvest the money in Black and Indigenous communities" is.
These are very good takes.
Had not thought about this in the context of privatization of security. Interesting idea. Of course the downside of privatized security - well, one of the many downsides - is when the big corporations start demanding that their private security forces get more powers, to pursue suspects beyond the corporation's property, arrest and interrogate people, etc.
I think there's other reasons why more radical ideas are able to get an airing though; one is the galvanizing effect of Trump, the extreme hatred of him on the part of even large parts of the corporate Neoliberal establishment seems to give permission to think, see, and say things that were previously unthinkable and unsayable. Secondly, the way the police have attacked even mainstream journalists. It's like CNN and the NYT and so forth have reached the "And then they came for me" moment.
BTW, I saw this as an article in another place - I see this entry isn't locked, is the identity of these two handles public knowledge? Cool, anyhow!
no subject
Date: 2020-06-06 02:03 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely, and that is the danger. One of the dangers. Privatized security in Iraq, for example, appears to have committed more war crimes than the US military, which is saying a lot.
But corporations are also going to fight things like "unionization" and cut corners as much as possible (scare quotes because police unions aren't real unions), which means that private security is less likely to creep into other domains, such as mental health.
The other factor I didn't talk about (which may end up being part of a whole separate post today if I have time) is that a lot of the surveillance functions of government have been taken up by corporations and individuals. The GDR would be envious our how easy it is for citizens to publicly view and report on the actions of our neighbours. We have an app for that! So that's another point of savings that can go into tax breaks for rich people.
BTW, I saw this as an article in another place - I see this entry isn't locked, is the identity of these two handles public knowledge? Cool, anyhow!
I wouldn't say public knowledge—like I wouldn't link there from here—but it gives me a place where I can repost and then link on FB where it gets more views, without directly linking FB to here. I too willingly report my political opinions to governments and corporations like a good citizen. :)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-06 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-07 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-09 03:05 am (UTC)I agree 100 percent, and I’m worried about how this could play out. Security guards are generally not armed, but in the US, I can see it happening with ease, especially in open-carry states. So we’d have a bunch of self-appointed tough guys running around with guns and shooting people in the name of public safety, which is... pretty much what we have now.
I think it’s less likely to happen in Canada, since gun laws are tougher here, but there are lots of Conservative politicians eager to change those laws.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-09 01:45 pm (UTC)I think my hope here is that site-specific security is easier to contain than broad-based policing. It's not going to creep into social problems to quite the same extent, and it can be more easily reformed. I've dealt with both hall monitors and armed cops in schools, and I can tell you with the one exception of a hall monitor who abused his power, the former were much more effective at keeping schools safe than the latter.