Cops don’t defend the weak or the poor lol.
me getting assaulted in my house at 5am in the poor neighborhood cops don’t give a shit about: wow i sure am glad cops exist in this world
me getting raped in my dorm and going to the cops and having them tell me i’m lying: haha, good one cops I sure do love yall.
my family getting shit stolen from them by the cops: haha wow, without cops who would protect our property?
me calling the cops on my abusive father only to have them arrest me for defending myself long enough to call the cops: haha, wow, i’m so glad yall protect the innocent amirite?
Cops literally killed a hero that stopped a mass shooting
Jemel Roberson yet another victim of the great and caring cops.
remember that time cops went on strike and crime hit a record low?
Ya know, before I understood the basics of anarchism, I asked the same question that anon was asking, and received the same answers. These answers didn’t help me or stop me from asking the question, because my question wasn’t really about cops, it was about my own sense of safety.
As someone who, at the time, had never been in a fight, the idea of having to defend myself terrified me. As a transgender person, the idea of having to rely on my community for defense terrified me.
So the idea that there had to be a system tasked with my protection was attractive, even though I could clearly see it failing to protect anyone and actually harming people. I kept wondering if maybe it could be reformed into something better because no one had addressed my feeling of not being safe.
One day, in a lecture by an anarchist who was speaking about something else entirely (I think it was the Spanish civil war), I asked the same question again. A bunch of anarchists expressed irritation. But one person offered to explain it to me after the lecture. So afterwards we sat down and talked about it. Along with explaining that police had never been created to protect us and had always served to make us less safe, they actually addressed my sense of safety.
They walked me through the ways in which capitalist society creates and maintains bigotry and social hierarchy, how often abuse is a result
of people taking out their anger on those below them in the social
hierarchy, how punishment does nothing to stop the repeat of harm, how transformative justice addresses our actual needs and breaks the cycle of harm. I can’t really explain all of it myself, I’d suggest reading Peter Gelderloos’ chapter on crime: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works#toc41
That conversation played a huge part in my road towards being an anarchist, because instead of focusing on disproving my statement, it focused on addressing my needs. How anarchist is that?
So I guess what I’m trying to say is: we’re right to mock the idea that police make us safer, but it’s probably good to at the same time realize that a lot of people feel structurally unsafe and just explaining how the police do NOT make us safer is not enough, we have to respond to their need for safety. It doesn’t always have to be laborious, it can be simply providing a ‘read more’ link. But if we don’t address people’s basic need to feel safe, we’re not going to find them by our side fighting to abolish cops.
QueerAnarchism 