I will never ever ever calls the cops. Doesn’t matter what kind of “what if” hypotheticals you throw my way to poke holes in my statement. Its against my principles to call on police or pretend that police have my or other humans best interests at heart.

the very existence of the police is violence

"The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. When persuasion, indoctrination, moral pressure, and incentive measures all fair - there are the police."

-- Our Enemies in Blue by Kristian Williams

One of the most immediate and unfortunate things that anti-police organizing encounters is liberals/bootlickers being like "well what defines force/brutality?" which is of course how killer cops or even rapist cops are rarely if ever indicted

because the lines between "excessive" force and "illegal" force and therefore brutality are always blurry, subjective, and easily thrown out of court by a judge (who could also be a bootlicker)

"The state, claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, needs to distinguish its own violence from other, allegedly less legitimate, uses of force."

and what do we have at the end of this? cops pointing guns at masked protestors who are confronting non-cop fascists, deeming community self-defense as an "illegitimate use of force"

"[For police], legitimate and excessive force exist as part of the same continuum, rather than as a distinct species of action."

reading anything about cops makes me think not of johannes mehserle or peter liang but of daniel holtzclaw, the east asian-white mixed race cop who systemically raped and sexually assaulted 17 black women in Oklahoma City

when i think of police violence i think about how that man was allowed to roam black neighborhoods of Oklahoma City and terrorize black women

THIS is why ACAB and abolish police and destroy white supremacy

The thing is, the statistics about how frequently police kill unarmed people aren't enough to shock people into, you know, refusing to call the cops

Even with the rise of sites that map police violence against regular ol' people, theres still many more people who believe cops have the right to kill *shakira voice* whenever, wherever

There's a part where Williams compares how cops respond to police abuse and police brutality with the same rhetoric and patterns of response that abusers do to instances of abuse

again, little surprise that cops have the highest rates of domestic abuse

Let's be real, my entire live-toot of Our Enemies in Blue will have a general CW for all the various violences that are associated with and done by the police.

"Policing, it seems, is the only profession that both exaggerates and advertises its dangers... the overblown image of police heroism, and the 'obsession' with officer safety... do not only serve to justify police violence after the fact; by providing such justification, they legitimize violence, and thus make it more likely."

I really like this book but unfortunately its not changing my mind about cops - I already hate them

Why would "the state (meaning, here, the civil authorities)... let the police claim the means of violence as their own[?] Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command...

But why?

The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want."

"When the police enforce the law, they do so unevenly, in ways that give disproportionate attention to the activities of poor people, people of color, and others near the bottom of the social pyramid. And when the police violate the law, these same people are their most frequent victims... It must become quite clear that the object of police attention, and the target of police violence, is overwhelmingly that portion of the population that lacks real power."