On the Police and Heinlein’s Wrongness
As I said last week, there’s not a lot I personally can add to the voices that are currently speaking out regarding police brutality, racism, and how fucked this country is. But as sentiment grows for defunding/abolishing the police, I’ve seen a fair bit of concern or “concern” that amounts to: “this is a touchy-feely idea promoted by big idealistic hippie saps who think hugging can stop murder.”
I can talk about that, a little.
Because I am not idealistic. I do not touch, nor do I feel. I don’t think love is all you need, or that everyone deserves a second chance–“If forgiveness is your thing, YKIOK” is as far as I’m prepared to go, and in fact I can think of only a few people for whom forgiveness doesn’t amount to inflicting toxic trashfires on the wider social circle. I’m opposed to the death penalty because of systemic racism and classism and the proven and widespread existence of false convictions, but I would’ve been totally okay with drawing and quartering McVeigh, for example. Some people make a calculated decision to abandon their own humanity, and I don’t think A Better Society will fix that entirely. I think we will always need *a* body of people to deal with the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly het cis dudes who take their mommy issues or their authority fetish or their lack of a date for the seventh-grade dance out on others, and if we deal with those guys fatally, I’m cool with it.
The world is not getting a fucking Coke from me, and I can think of very few people in it whose company I’d like to keep.
And I’m in favor of defunding the police. I’m in favor of abolishing the police as we know them, especially as we know them in the United States.
Why? Because Robert Heinlein was a sexist, racist libertarian fuck who was possibly in a sex cult with L. Ron Hubbard (though his weird libertarian third wife denies that) and he was full of shit about many things. Most relevantly, here, he was full of shit about specialization.
RH, via one of his self-insert characters, has a whole paragraph that various incarnations of That Fucking Guy quote all the time: a man should be able to blah blah blah military-prepper-fappery, “specialization is for insects.” While any individual person should be able to take care of many aspects of daily life (being able to code doesn’t mean you can flail around all unable to wash a damn dish, Other Iteration of That Fucking Guy), specialization on a societal level is…how we get society.
There are good reasons that the person who rewires your house doesn’t fly your plane, that the same surgeon doesn’t repair heart valves and remove brain tumors–hell, that the Army and the Navy are different branches of the armed forces in most countries, ROBERT, YOU ASS. Lives are short, human brain capacity is finite, and the more complicated a situation is, the more specialists are needed.
Keeping communities safe is really goddamn complicated.
“Defund the police” or “abolish the police” is generally a shortened way of saying that the people taking down the homicidal bastard with an AR-15 or finding the Green River Killer do not need to be, and shouldn’t be, the same people who stop you if your headlights are out. They shouldn’t be the people who respond if you think your loved one might harm themselves, the people in charge of handling addiction issues, the people who look into property damage or financial wrongdoing (although TBH I’d be kind of okay with putting the lethal force department in charge of, like, PharmaBro and wage theft, but I’m a bitch like that), and so on.
Different problems demand different sets of professionals, with different training and, importantly, different cultures. (Also, exactly zero of these cultures should include systemic racism, and all of them should include way more training and vetting than most police officers currently get.) It’s really hard to get that just by separating departments within the same organization: reporting to the same management structure, being in the same union/fraternal organization, and having intertwined ranks or promotional structures makes it much harder to go against corruption or speak out when people are behaving badly.
(Should they coordinate? Absolutely–all agencies should, because that’s ideally how you keep murderous dickheads *from* getting AR-15s, or connect other murderous dickheads to killings in multiple states–but that’s different from literally being in the same organization.)
And, speaking as someone who consumes a lot of Total Bastard True Crime? The dramatic catching-a-killer, stopping-a-terrorist stuff, for which someone might legitimately need to be armed and trained in potentially lethal force:
1) Is a really small proportion of stuff police do.
2) Is…not a thing the general police are great at, as a rule. (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/). This ties into systemic bigotry: how many young men might have lived if the Milwaukee police hadn’t shrugged off complaints against Dahmer because it was “a gay thing” or the victims were people of color? How many people report stalking or domestic violence, get shrugged off, and are murdered later? Yeah.
3) Has a certain amount of crossover with police themselves. In addition to the known stuff, like the Golden State Killer, a *lot* of serial killers have tried to join the police, hang out with cops, etc. Authority really appeals to a certain kind of person.
“Defund the police,” generally used, means directing money away from buying fucking tanks for the local department and toward programs that could better address or prevent a lot of the “crime” going on. “Abolish the police,” generally used, means splitting off the functions that don’t require or justify force. That lets a department that actually does intervene to stop violent crime concentrate on that, while not sending people trained for lethal situations to check on folks who may or may not be passing bad checks.
You don’t have to believe in the innate goodness of humanity or the power of love or the brotherhood of man to support any of that.
You should really read these, which explain the general issue better than I do:
https://medium.com/@deray/on-the-path-toward-police-abolition-c8b91137024b
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/06/04/police-abolition-looks-like-palo-alto/
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