Week 12

I've been slowly getting used to not being at work, although my sleep schedule has dramatically changed. I now get to bed at a semi-reasonable hour every other night, the remaining nights I see the sun rise. I'm working on it. Unemployment came through which was nice, and kind of surprising honestly, I figured I'd get slow rolled for a couple weeks but I guess they are catching up to the claims finally.

Protests are well into their second week now with no signs of stopping, one benefit to people being out of work is that there is nothing stopping them from hitting the streets, what else do they have to do? The big issue that has emerged over the last few days into public discourse is defunding police departments. With the Minneapolis City Council prepared to do just that to their PD, and other cities making pledges to cut budgets.

I am all for it, the institution does more harm than good and pretty much always has.

Now when people talk about abolishing the police the arguments pop up in a predictable fashion, opposing voices point to the gang warfare of a couple/few decades ago as if what put an end to that was increasing militarization of the police rather than social reforms, they maybe refer to "The Purge" film's as an example of what might happen without cops. Forgetting that in those movies the violence of the holiday was directly instigated by the very police state that we apparently need to protect us from that violence.

Now I don't think these arguments are in bad faith, from most people anyway. But they serve to distract from the point just like "debates" over violent protests distract from the reasons for the protests. Supporters of the concept of abolishing the police then have to argue that no, they don't mean we just revert to lawlessness, what they rather mean is that the idea of police needs to be reformed and the only way to do that is to tear it all down and redistribute resources.

That argument isn't wrong either, but it too is part of the distraction, the real point should be answering this question:

Is the system we have now better than nothing?

Would no police, and the support structure that allows them to exist, be better than the system we have in place now? To answer that requires us to turn people into calculations, how many crimes solved and criminals captured equate to one unjustified killing? How many legitimate speeding tickets make up for one illegal search and seizure? How many drug busts make up for one case of planted evidence?

I don't know how to make those calculations, but legally speaking when a detective is found to be corrupt or something every case they have worked on before often gets called into question. So in cases where that exists then legally the answer is "none", no amount of good work makes up for one case of corruption.

My personal view aligns closely with that, no organization will ever be perfect but I think we certainly can expect rather closer to perfection than what we have been getting. The good our system does right now is outweighed and pretty heavily at that, by the evil it does.

So, in my opinion the answer is no, the system we have in place now is not better than nothing. And the harm done by having nothing in place is less than the harm done by keeping it.

If we have literally nothing to lose then why not just go ahead and do it?