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sc94597 on 01 June 2022
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sc94597 said:

Considering the number of police and retired police at the Jan 6th event, "nobody wants to see dead children" is untrue. There are plenty of fascist and white-supremacist police in this country who want to see dead BIPOC children. See: White Supremacist Links to Law Enforcement Are an Urgent Concern and FBI Investigated White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.

Some police might be good people, but all police in the U.S do bad things in their role of being police. The majority of police officers have harassed homeless people in their enforcement of anti-homeless laws. The majority of police officers have racially profiled a BIPOC person. Many police officers lie and/or concoct evidence. Many don't realize regular people have a constitutional right to not self-incriminate, "to remain silent" and will abuse people for using it even after they recite it in the Miranda verbiage. This is systematic, not some one off "bad apple" thing. So when we see our militarized police force which has no respect for citizens and sees itself as above everyone else, what is essentially an armed occupying force with very little legal culpability and in fact many legal protections in the form of qualified immunity, fail to "protect and serve" children, then we rightly question why they should exist. So that they can harass homeless people, BIPOC people, engage in white supremacy, and enforce capitalist class relations on working people? 

I beg to differ. Anyone who "talks big" on social media/real life about seeing a certain demographic in a shit-situation obviously hasn't had to deal with any of this.

Their opinions would change and become extremely humbled if they were responsible for assisting someone who was BIPOC... Because at the end of the day, we all bleed the same colour of blood.

So it seems the police force has perhaps got a cultural issue that needs changing? I know the gun culture in the US civilian world needs to change.

It isn't clear what you are referring to with "a certain demographic in a shit-situation" here. If you are talking about American police, I wonder, what exactly is the "shit-situation" they are in systematically? Their job is far from the most dangerous even if it is more dangerous than the average, ranking 22nd in mortality rate. In many jurisdictions they have a solid middle-class lifestyle and even in the poorest-paying jurisdictions they make at least a median income for their area, with benefits. They, unlike almost any other occupation, are protected from liability to a high degree with both strong unions and legal protections -- something very few Americans enjoy. Sure they see the darkest parts of a stratified society, but so do many working people who live those dark parts. And of course when the FBI -- a federal police force in itself that has a long history of racial antagonism, is saying that local police forces are disproportionately white-supremacist for even their standards then maybe it isn't "perhaps" but a "known" like with the gun culture. More people die from police violence than mass-shootings after-all. 

If you are suggesting that the loudest voices that "talk big" on social media about homeless persons and BIPOC persons being targeted by police haven't dealt with any of the problems I mentioned, then I will have to emphatically disagree. We're loud because we've experienced being in these categories. I've personally been racially-profiled by police despite having had lived in my small municipality (with practically no crime) for six years at the time and never having had committed a crime, before or since.  Likewise, my half-brothers and step-sisters have been even more strongly racially profiled for being black, again without having committed crimes. Other BIPOC friends of mine almost always can account and are emotionally distraught when recounting when they were racially profiled.  My strong emotions about this aren't from some distance, but personal experience that has been confirmed to be systematic by the empirical data. 

And if the police can't handle the "stress of the job" and perform it professionally, then maybe they shouldn't be doing the job? Unless of course, like the Supreme Court of the United States has confirmed in many cases, the job of police isn't to "protect and serve" but rather to enforce the state's legislation regardless of its effects.