Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.
Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.
The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.
I think the main argument against disbanding the police is that we’d have no mechanism to prevent violence from former cops. I have no expectation that their behavior will improve if we just stop paying them.
Also if we get rid of the police we might as well get rid of a good chunk of the government while we’re at it. One of their core functions is to pass laws and with no enforcement arm there’s no point having those.
I usually couldn’t care less about electoralism, but if any politician has get rid of police and government as their platform, I will vote for them and campaign SO HARD.
Great news is that would be the last time you’d ever have to vote, too. I wonder what kinds of benevolent folks would step into that power vacuum, fun to think about.
This. The actual job of cops is to protect rich b*stards and their stuff from ordinary taxpayers. And making us pay for our own abuse with our own tax dollars.
If that goes away, they’ll just hire mercenaries, instead. They won’t give up that protection.
Easier to throw them in jail when you strip them of qualitative immunity though.
Who exactly is going to throw them in jail?
If we remove the current police we have the room to reform them better. Also the FBI is less corrupt than current state level police.
Still corrupt. But less. The FBI can do it in the meantime.
But in reality we need police reform. We need to make them walk their beats again. They need to police the places they live, not neighboring counties. They should mostly not have guns. A good chunk of the force should be replaced with social workers. And qualitative immunity needs to go away permanently.
That’s something I can get behind.
We do have a mechanism to prevent that, our right to bear arms.
LOL. Rights mean nothing if there’s no enforcement.
Enforcement of your own rights is protected by yourself. The government doesn’t enforce the right to free speech, it can’t force you to say something. The government doesn’t enforce the right to a warrant, the government is the one who makes cops enter your place without one.
The government also doesn’t enforce gun ownership to anyone but the military and the militarized police. There is no “Government supplied and required to own and use firearm”.
Governments rarely give you freedoms you never had before they came into power, they just remove the limits they enforced onto us. And they never do it willingly.