Abolish the Police

(weird, that's how it works in new york, at least, which is why the past several years of my life have been spent taking various forms of upper-level math; I think it works the same way in california as well)

(er, for regular certification that is, although all the similar programs here also require it)

yeah, in more liberal states theres generally stiffer requirements. in tx as long as you have a bachelor's you can take any certification test, pass it, and you're good to go (i have like 6 or 7)

also

we should abolish the police

Same 100%. My experience in schools was that 1. The DOE made schools pay out of their budgets to get trained in RJ. There was some optional funding from different grants and stuff but it was very piecemeal. This forced schools to train only selected staff that they either a) Thought needed it most (ie were the worst at handling de-escalation and even escalated conflicts in their classes) or b) Were the most enthusiastic & committed, meaning, they were already trying to use RJ and were already on board and maybe needed the training the *least*.

2. Even if RJ were the be-all-end-all of a police & carceral abolition, which it isn't, you have to go a lot deeper than "sitting in circles talking." In terms of the "restorative" part: At their root, crimes are forbidden/penalized because they cause harm. They damage people physically, emotionally, economically, and this hurts individuals, selected groups, and the collective community all on different levels. A restorative approach asks, "What would go some way toward mending the harm that you caused? How can you labor to re-weave our individual and communal health in order to heal where you harmed, remembering that YOU are ALSO part of the collective and your actions clearly show that you also are not well, but are still accountable?" And that is kind of mind-blowing!!!! Ifaict we really don't have anything like that!

lol school are in no way doing that second thing. They can't. They don't have access to the relationships or the trust or the communal fabric, except maybe in rare cases. But they can stop calling the police on their kids for a start.

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:17 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

What I don't understand is what are schools supposed to do when a 180-lb high school student (or multiple high school students) are beating the shit out of another student, or attacking a teacher or staffer, or worse when a student is threatening others with a weapon. Why should schools not "call the police on their kids" in that situation? There is no restorative approach that protects the safety of others in that moment, even if you assume that a long-term, intensive restorative approach might eventually cause the aggressor student to no longer be an aggressor. Like I think there is a bit of magical thinking or avoidant thinking going on here that says "Well we'll divert the funding to all these other things that prevent the violence from happening in the first place." But you're never going to get to zero violence.

fwiw my wife has worked in SPED for 14 years, including 11 at the elementary and three at the high school level, has taught both 12-1-1 and ICT classes as well as worked one-on-one/in small groups as an interventionist, has taught in poor schools in the bronx and brooklyn as well as a part-G&T school that has increasingly admitted low income kids and kids with IEPs. She has seen and been through A LOT. That doesn't make her word the be-all-end-all, but if she says there are situations where you need to be able to call police as a last resort, I believe her.

What are they supposed to do when it's the police officer beating the shit out of a student? Maybe I keep asking this in the wrong thread, but what is your plan/ideas/slogans for addressing police brutality, including the violence cops do within schools?

What's crazy is that multiple people have proposed in this thread multiple times that there could be people whose job is to physically intervene in those situations who are not the police and you're still pretending that you actually want to resolve this and not just be an obstacle.

Because there ARE people in the school whose job that is, and they aren't capable of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

tbc man alive who exactly are you talking about that can only do their jobs by invoking the police?

America's savior speaks:

A bit of skepticism from @BernieSanders in a @NewYorker interview published this morning, when asked about the Defund the Police movement, but he does say "we want to redefine what police departments do." https://t.co/dahxN8l8L3 pic.twitter.com/WiSxVHP1rP

— Adam Kelsey (@adamkelsey) June 9, 2020

poorly trained and poorly educated - check
poorly paid - hol up

unperson no one cares about bernie sanders anymore, you can stop now

trying to get that cabinet job

"Why should schools not 'call the police on their kids'" --- I can think of a few reasons but fyi we have a whole thread on police brutality and corruption, and information on the school-to-prison pipeline is p widely available. imo the onus should be on those who want teens (or anybody else) winding up in the judicial/carceral system to explain why that benefits them or anybody else. there's a big gap between "i don't want teachers and students to be defenseless" and "i want these kids to have criminal records" which is what happens when you call the cops.

otm

Because there ARE people in the school whose job that is, and they aren't capable of it.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 10:39 AM (forty-two minutes ago)

how the heck did they get the job then?

definitely abolish private school tho btw

abolish carceral logic in public school too

imo these debates are kind of troll-ey word games and largely besides the point

― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

*Watching ppl risk their life for a better world* is like Scrabble to me.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 3:35 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

just because people are risking there lives doesn’t mean that everything is conceptually coherent and consensus exists. word games serve a function to paper over differences until the common enemy is defeated. if it’s rude to point those out, im sorry. i don’t risk my life but i support the movement financially and by attending protests and through social media, i just also like to talk about these things with friends and on anonymous message boards. imo it’s probably a necessary condition for any revolutionary movement to be paradoxical in this way, it’s not like a burn im abolish the police

*on

if you're attending protests you are risking yr life to some extent imo

moreso than usual

actually had a confrontation w some local alt right media freaks, so im probably on some neonazi antifa list lol

were you wearing a mask? the only good thing about this happening during a pandemic is that most are

or at least I hope most are

Yeah mask on the whole time

People love to try to poke holes in the prison abolition movement by saying “what about rapists, do you want them just wandering around?” But the reality is, they do wander around. Between unreported rapes, and rapes that never go to trial, and trials lost, and plea bargains accepted, fewer than 6% are arrested and fewer than 1% are convicted. Beyond that, though, placing people in environments in which sexual violence is the currency of survival is not making anyone safer.

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/surviving-rape-prison-abolitionist/

Prison abolitionists acknowledge that in some cases societal separation (over various time lengths with various parameters) is necessary but disagree that a prison system can adequately address the ultimate causes of rape. Pilot programs have long been established across the country that have provided an alternative to the prison model of justice, forcing abusers to reckon with the consequences of their actions, feel the pain they have inflicted keenly, and pay their newfound knowledge forward, all without the use of prisons and jails. Is that not the goal of a restorative justice system?

walking away from this thread now for my mental health

https://people.com/crime/breonna-taylor-sex-assault/?fbclid=IwAR096SNoTje8Gw-GfaCiG8ihmxbUliv75NyOH9XR0OzO92H3PKumZ9aImdw

awful url

Sorry, I don't know anything about urls or how to fix them.

Allegations of sexual assault have surfaced against one of three white officers accused in the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old unarmed black EMT and aspiring nurse in Louisville, Ky., who was fatally shot March 13 by police while they carried out a search warrant on the wrong apartment.

The allegations against Officer Brett Hankison -- raised last week by two women on social media -- attracted the attention of Louisville Metro Police, which has reached out to the women so the department's Public Integrity Unit "can initiate and conduct an investigation," police spokesman Dwight Mitchell tells PEOPLE.

everyone should look up the Toronto clown versus firefighter riot imo

It's good they are feeling villified.

WATCH 🚨 New York police boss Mike O'Meara went off on the media today:

"Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect ... Our legislators abandoned us. The press is vilifying us. It's disgusting." pic.twitter.com/CXOPARKff7

— August Takala (@AugustTakala) June 9, 2020

How can you vilify someone if they are already a villain? All you can do is describe how they act.

"just because people are risking there lives doesn’t mean that everything is conceptually coherent and consensus exists. word games serve a function to paper over differences until the common enemy is defeated"

Many people have been working on the question of restorative justice and/or other approaches to this question and you've chosen to pick up on a not very mature twitter thread and basically dismiss the whole thing as a word game. This is in the middle of protests where it's quite likely that many of the activists could be either hounded, jailed or killed. A lot of the activists aren't waiting to get a coherent argument so you can pick on it and end up being happy with 0.5% conviction rate.

Well Cops is canceled at least: https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/cops-canceled-paramount-network-1234629637

The official car of "defund the police" is this LAPD Lamborghini parked in a disabled spot pic.twitter.com/Jsr5Tyzdz2

— Peter Miller (@peter_miller) June 9, 2020

I had no idea Cops was still a show

Running From Cops is a great podcast (about the show)

Cops was only good when the police looked dumb

I have only seen the clip of dumbness from an episode many years ago from my home city where some guy in a dirt bike took off down railroad tracks in an industrial area. The cop chased in his car, got it stuck on the tracks, and the segment ends with a slow-moving train blowing its horn a lot trying to get the cop to move off the route

zing

Nice.

"I don't know if we have ever experienced this kind of global challenge to racism and to the consequences of slavery."

Angela Davis says anti-racism protests around the world are "a very exciting moment". pic.twitter.com/MIqZ8fFtfN

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 9, 2020

"treating us like animals and thugs" is an interesting choice of language

from the cop I mean ofc

Running From Cops is a great podcast (about the show)

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Cops was only good when the police looked dumb

I have only seen the clip of dumbness from an episode many years ago from my home city where some guy in a dirt bike took off down railroad tracks in an industrial area. The cop chased in his car, got it stuck on the tracks, and the segment ends with a slow-moving train blowing its horn a lot trying to get the cop to move off the route

― mh, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 9:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It's worth listening to that podcast to learn more about A&E's Live PD, a literally evil show--exponentially worse than Cops--that is also the #1 show on cable. They're currently in the news due to erasing their footage of police officers killing Javier Ambler in Texas in March 2019: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200609/lsquolive-pdrsquo-says-video-of-in-custody-death-of-javier-ambler-has-been-destroyed

so many shows in the UK about how great cops and immigration and other pigs are, would be great if they all tanked

Interesting times for the burgeoning tru-crime podcast market too. The joke in circulation is that white women with podcasts will solve murders instead of the police but there's a huge amount of cop fetishisation bound up in most of the popular ones.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html?smid=tw-share

A Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent of Americans consider racism and discrimination a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. The poll found that 57 percent of voters thought the anger behind the demonstrations was fully justified, while a further 21 percent called it somewhat justified. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against African-Americans, and that there’s a lot of discrimination against black Americans in society. Back in 2013, when Black Lives Matter began, a majority of voters disagreed with all of these statements.

probably too much to hope this discredits the "they're just going to turn people off their cause" civility crowd forever