Smashing the boys face into a cactus
This is accurate. I don’t subscribe to ACAB, but I see the logic in it, and this certainly seems to be the case for it. The only time we hear about “good” cops are in these cases.
The fallacy I see, and the reason I don’t subscribe to ACAB is that any “good” cops that exist that aren’t in this situation (of being fired), go pretty much unnoticed by everyone. Nothing they do is newsworthy. The other, more personal reason that I have to not subscribe to ACAB, is that doing so would shatter the faith I have in our entire society to govern itself. IMO, one of the first and most important parts of living in a functional society is the laws and the enforcement of those laws. Police are the front line of enforcement, on the streets with the innocent and perpetrators alike. If they’re unable or unwilling to do the job as detailed in the laws of the society, all criminal cases are suspect, both in what’s prosecuted and very importantly, what isn’t.
If they’re intentionally not bringing in criminal law breakers, and intentionally bringing in otherwise innocent persons (at least in regards to any criminal charges), then the courts, where Justice actually happens, can’t effectively do their job at ensuring that criminals are put into detention facilities, and innocent people are released.
Cops make mistakes. They’re humans like everyone else, and the court should be keeping them in check. Making sure that when they charge an innocent person, that person is set free, and when they charge someone who is guilty, they convict them accurately with all the punishments required as dictated by the laws, written by the government which we all vote for.
Government and the laws on the books, all mean nothing if there’s no way to enforce those laws. The police are just the first step in criminal cases, without them doing the job, the whole system is useless.
You have a very naive understanding of the function that police performs in our society - I’m going to go ahead and guess that you are not aware of the history of policing? Spoiler alert - it is drenched in the ideology of white supremacism and the politics of colonialism and class warfare.
I’m not concerned with the history of it, so much as their intended task in current times.
There’s a LOT of things that have horrific history, just look at America in general. There are no living persons from those years still living, though we’re still working on getting rid of the mentalities that some had, from current generations. They’re generally a minority
Maybe I can help you understand while I feel ACAB despite letting myself have cop friends. The problem is one of elevated responsibility.
Imagine a gang for a minute. Ever seen any good gang documentaries? A lot of “members” of the less insane gangs aren’t really criminals in that they just hang out and hang around. But they are in one of two real buckets, buckets that we can judge them for.
- They are fully aware of many of their members are criminals, maybe even rapists and murderers, but take no action about it because they feel they can’t OR EVEN because “I’ve never actually met the members who did this. Our group is really big”.
- They are not fully aware that the gang they are part of commits crimes. In this case, they are being willfully ignorant.
For police it’s the same. I live in an area where the cops are generally not going around abusing minorities for the hell of it. The breakdown here are the “Thin Blue Line folks” (bullet point number 2 above), and the “we’re good cops, so why would we go start trouble elsewhere?” (bullet point number 1 above) folks.
If I’m part of a subsidiary of a large organization, and my parent organization is allows for criminal enterprise, I am either complicit or fighting it.
Now the one exception I would allow for ACAB are cops who try to walk the fine line between forcing change and not getting fired. I may not agree with them in their passivity, but if in full honesty they believe they are being the most positive force for change they can without no longer being a force for change at all, I suppose I can give them that. I don’t believe I’ve met a cop like that in person in my entire life.
cops who try to walk the fine line between forcing change and not getting fired. I may not agree with them in their passivity, but if in full honesty they believe they are being the most positive force for change they can without no longer being a force for change at all,
What’s wild to me is that this is a movie trope that cops still perpetuate today. Dirty and corrupt cops and departments continue to exist, and just like in the movies you have some genuinely good people who are trying to do the best they can and change things.
I wonder almost if we need a campaign to extol that rare virtuous cop archetype so that more officers actually try to be like that. Either way we need sweeping legislation and cleaning house. Keep funding levels the same but mandate better cop pay + higher training requirements so that we have high quality people applying. Good jobs attract good people.
I think you link to some seriously deep facts about police. The irony is that in many areas (northeast) a lot of cops were Irish because they couldn’t get other jobs (racism), and they were neither particularly respected nor particularly free to be abusive. Boston, however, now has a fairly large police-racism problem against black people.
There is the fact that being a cop isn’t the best job, and the bigger fact that trying to be a good job basically dials the shit factor to 11. I guess it’s like the military in that it takes a particular kind of people to be a cop.
Think about it this way. You spend your days ruining others’ day over “the rules”, and sometimes you need to use force to lock a human in a cage. Not out of any weakness, but I couldn’t do that. I have too much sympathy for people. Physically overpowering somebody that just wants to get away and to safety. That’s just a non-starter for someone with my disposition.
So how do you get people like me who care about everyone into the police force? I feel like pay wouldn’t even be the start of it. I wouldn’t be a cop if it were the last job on earth.
I can definitely appreciate your words here. I can’t fault anyone for subscribing to ACAB. I would agree that the whole institution should be torn apart and rebuilt from the ground up. I don’t realistically think that will happen, but I would support it if it did.
I understand your viewpoint, I’m not sure I agree with everything, but I understand it.
The underlying issues that caused the problem described in the OP, are definitely a good argument for ACAB. You have also made good points, and it’s all valid. I won’t argue the facts, and I don’t have enough information to do so. I’m about as far from police paying attention to me as you can get. I live in an extremely rural area; it’s quiet, and I work from home. The regional police service drives through my little town maybe two or three times a day (from what I’ve heard) and I almost never even see the police unless something happens… Like someone finds that a house is being used to cook drugs, which has unfortunately happened, not far from me, or there’s a major fire or something, and they’re directing traffic.
The last time I even saw police in my area was a few months ago when they were surrounding a farmers field just outside of town. I can only guess that they chased someone into the field and lost them; I truly have no idea.
1: “Expect the best and people will rise to the occasion.”
2: Good police officers like in OP are fired every month. 800,000 cops in the US… there is a police department trying to fire their good cop(s) RIGHT NOW! Why plaster ACAB everywhere and risk discouraging them?
I do imagine many would argue even the fired officer (Taisyn Crutchfield) was a bastard but that gets tough to defend.
btw here’s the footage of the incident
I struggle with this myself, and I choose to look at it as a semantics issue. The point of ACAB is to highlight that bad cops are empowered by colleagues and departments who let them do that they want. It’s a condemnation of tolerating bad apples vs pruning them out. I think of it like the Nazi example – when 4 people happily sits down at the table with 6 overt Nazis, you end up with 10 Nazis. ACAB is condemning those 4 as enablers of the 6 and allowing them to persist.
So I agree, but I don’t think literally every cop is a bastard. There are some good people who are trying to use their position to change things while still helping the public – just like Crutchfield. It’s not worth the effort to specifically exclude them though because that’s not where change is going to come from. The good cops are fighting a losing battle. We’ll only see things fixed if there’s sweeping federal legislation to reform police.
And in that sense, ACAB is useful. It reminds people that these aren’t just a couple cops that needing weeding out, its entire systems and institutions. We can’t solve this by addressing only a few bad apples – we need to change the whole bunch. Now it might be that the only ones we throw away are the bad ones, and the rest of the bunch proves capable of realizing the problem. But you still have to address the whole bunch at once.
