Defund The Police

"Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, 'polite society,' and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel."  - An anonymous ex-policeman writing in Medium.

Defunding the police isn't as radical an idea as it sounds at first.  Look at how well funded they are now. The town of Doraville, Georgia, a small suburb of Atlanta where the GM plant used to be, has a freaking tank for goodness sake!  Turn on the television and you'll see hundreds of police from various levels of various jurisdictions wearing all manners of state-of-the-art personnel armor and equipment and armed with guns, flash grenades, tear gas, pepper spray and what have you. Meanwhile, our nurses and medical first responders are improvising by wearing garbage bags as PPE and reusing face masks way past their suggested operating life, putting their lives and the lives of their patients at unnecessary risk.  

We've defunded health care and medical workers to fund the police.  We've defunded welfare, unemployment benefits, and mental-health services, too.  As a result, we now have people out of work with no social safety net, no food on their table and facing evictions. Reagan famously emptied the mental-health facilities and deposited an untold number of mentally ill people on the streets, many of whom are now homeless and causing problems that they don't have the ability to avoid. The resulting crime and discomfort to the status quo cause a need for more police, but instead of putting the money back into health care and the social safety net and solving the problem, we put it into more and more policemen.  And to pay for those additional cops, we have to cut budgets even more elsewhere and on and on it goes in a never-ending vicious cycle.  This needs to end.

Why do we need armed policemen to respond to traffic incidents and to direct traffic?  When my car broke down in the interstate HOV lane leaving me in a perilous and life-threatening situation, the responders who showed up and rescued me weren't armed policeman and didn't need to be, but were a mechanic and an EMT to actually deal with the situation.  And if you tell me that traffic directors need to be armed to protect themselves, I'll point out that the only reason they need protection is because they're armed policemen who've done other things to anger other people.  An unarmed traffic attendant isn't going to be in any more danger than the unarmed construction and utility workers otherwise out blocking traffic (and usually the very reason that someone is needed to be out directing the traffic in the first place).

A man with a gun, good guy or not, is not the answer to every societal problem and we shouldn't be responding to everything, from suicide prevention to counselling the homeless to directing traffic to getting a cat out of a tree, with an armed policeman.  And if the past few weeks have showed us anything, it's that in addition to unbalancing our civic budgets, our reliance on armed policemen for everything is causing so many more problems of its own. 

Defund the police.  Now.