Hating the police

[Spanky Longhorn]

If you say so. But if no one is disputing the assertion (because it so mind-numbingly self-evident that only a total idiot would seriously dispute it...), then why would I need to back it up.

Though the prison numbers really do go a long way in showing exactly where resources in the criminal justice system are targeted.

lol. I know you're a long haired Christian squeeky voiced weird fucker but please try and show an ability to analyse data.

 

[xes]

and think

 

[ymu]

Why even bother, nobody is saying that we don;t need a police force, and this point has been done on the last page. We know there are bad people out there who need to be dealt with for crimes commited. This isn't about that, this is about the attitude of the police toward the general public, and how they go around using intimidation and force against peaceful, normal people. They treat everyone as a criminal, because that is now their job, if you can find some backwards arse bylaw to try and turn as many members of the public as possible into criminals, so then the courts can fine them, and the investors get a nice big fat return. This is about the police abusing their position and commiting crimes routinely, and then getting all sulky when people fucking hate them.

They don't treat everyone like a criminal though. There's a massive difference between the way they treat my partner and the way they treat me. He gets stopped all the time - once got pulled off a bus on our High Street for no reason whatsoever.

We got a flat tyre one night and couldn't get the wheel off to change it. We'd both managed to leave our phones at home so I went off to the phone box to call the recovery service. When I got back, there were two coppers there. They were really helpful - both of them crawling around in the gutter in the rain trying to get the wheel off for us. They failed, and left us to wait for help and then my partner told me what had happened before I got back.

They'd accused him of lying about it being his girlfriend's car because there was no phone box on that High Street (there was, cos I used it), seemed to think the position of the driver's seat was suspicious because it was too far forward for him to have been driving, when it actually confirmed his story that it was my car (he doesn't drive), taken the car off the jack and started searching it for reasons to nick him.

Which explains why they went out of their way to be helpful when I turned up with my white skin and middle-class accent.

Cunts.

 

[CyberRose]

Facts and figures to back up this assertion please.

Are you really saying the police spend more time policing protests than they do anything else?

Or do you mean that by locking up criminals, as Jon of Arc referred to, they are actually serving the interests of the ruling class?

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Do you know, I can't find a break down of police departments, their duties and numbers in each department. This would be the ideal measure of how police resources are allocated, obviously.

But if we look at the prison numbers, we might be able to infer from the crimes people are sentenced for roughly which areas are concentrated on most by the authorities...

Page 4 of this document gives the august 2010 figures. Mostly burglary, violence, sexual offences, robbery, theft etc. http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/pop-in-custody-aug2010.pdf

Do you dispute my assertion? Do you have any facts and figures to back this up?

Yes, I dispute that assertion; I don't see the connection between the figures you quote and what you claim they indicate.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Are you really saying the police spend more time policing protests than they do anything else?

Don't be stupid.

Or do you mean that by locking up criminals, as Jon of Arc referred to, they are actually serving the interests of the ruling class?

Please try to be a little bit less stupid.

 

[Jon-of-arc]

lol. I know you're a long haired Christian squeeky voiced weird fucker but please try and show an ability to analyse data.

Ha, you think I'm beardy jon. fraid not, spanky. You don't know me at all. But you have shown yourself to be a particularly charmless cunt by slagging him off in such a manner. A really nice guy, who's never done anything to hurt anyone. What a total penis you are.

And I am analysing the data available. If you have a better interpretation of it (or, even better, clearer data...) I would love to hear about it.

Otherwise stop posting like a pissed up arrogant arsehole, you massive knob.

 

[CyberRose]

Don't be stupid.

Please try to be a little bit less stupid.

Sorry I don't understand your reply to Jon Of Arc then...

 

[ymu]

Yes, I dispute that assertion; I don't see the connection between the figures you quote and what you claim they indicate.

Yeah - it's just another version of "Harold Shipman cured people, therefore what he did was OK".

How many white collar criminals in prison, Jon, compared to the amount of white collar crime?

 

[xes]

They don't treat everyone like a criminal though. There's a massive difference between the way they treat my partner and the way they treat me. He gets stopped all the time - once got pulled off a bus on our High Street for no reason whatsoever.

We got a flat tyre one night and couldn't get the wheel off to change it. We'd both managed to leave our phones at home so I went off to the phone box to call the recovery service. When I got back, there were two coppers there. They were really helpful - both of them crawling around in the gutter in the rain trying to get the wheel off for us. They failed, and left us to wait for help and then my partner told me what had happened before I got back.

They'd accused him of lying about it being his girlfriend's car because there was no phone box on that High Street (there was, cos I used it), seemed to think the position of the driver's seat was suspicious because it was too far forward for him to have been driving, when it actually confirmed his story that it was my car (he doesn't drive), taken the car off the jack and started searching it for reasons to nick him.

Which explains why they went out of their way to be helpful when I turned up with my white skin and middle-class accent.

Cunts.

they really are pious fucking scum. They do this to anyone they meet, (unless they can't get away with it) but they're not really racist, they hate everyone equally.

they like to treat people like shit, but yes, if you're not white, then they are utter uttercunts.

 

[Mr.Bishie]

I've seen a number of posts and threads here saying that the poster or OP hates the police. I accept they're not perfect, but what do people who take this view think we should do instead?

I'd have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families

 

[purenarcotic]

My mate's dad drives a beemer as a company car. Because he is a black man driving a beemer he is routinely stopped by the cops for no other reason than he is a black man driving an expensive car. He has never not paid his tax / insurance / done anything to come up on a system. It's disgusting.

 

[Jon-of-arc]

Yes, I dispute that assertion; I don't see the connection between the figures you quote and what you claim they indicate.

OK, it works like this - police are mostly in the business of investigating crimes, and assisting in the prosecution of them. They lock people up.

These crimes are the ones that people have been locked up for. Mostly person on person crimes, and ones which poorer areas tend to have higher reported rates of. People targeting their own communities.

It's a pretty simple (and incomplete) picture I'm painting here, but I don't see why it would be hard to follow the logic.

 

[ymu]

My mate's dad drives a beemer as a company car. Because he is a black man driving a beemer he is routinely stopped by the cops for no other reason than he is a black man driving an expensive car. He has never not paid his tax / insurance / done anything to come up on a system. It's disgusting.

That happens to a mate of mine too. Thing is, he has a cut-glass public school accent - as soon as he opens his mouth, they're all cap-doffing obsequiousness. They stopped him once for racing a mate at silly speeds in their nice cars, and no action was taken.

Classist, racist cunts.

 

[ayatollah]

Yeah, that's about the size of it.

I do find the criminal justice system particularly odious though. It is based on the idea that suffering can and should be repaid with more suffering. I can scarcely think of a more heinous criminal than a person who considers themselves fit to decide how much of a person's life should be taken away from them in order to restore balance and fairness to the world. The world is unfair, the world is unbalanced. Beware anyone who claims they can rectify this state of affairs, particularly if the method they suggest involves the removal of dignity, safety, family and self-determination from another human being.

Unfortunately rectifying this "state of affairs " WILL involve removing the dignity, safety, and self determination, AND PROPERTY, from the capitalist ruling class Spooky Frank. It's called a REVOLUTION.

There is some interesting stuff in Ursula Le Guin's excellent old SciFi book "the Dispossessed " - an exploration of an Anarchist society in the far future, on how such a self regulating society would deal with crime and particularly serious crimes like murder - without a standing police force. If I recall rightly the members of the society deal pretty promptly and terminally with murderers for instance. So a free society without a propertied ruling class might still be quite brutal in certain circumstances, certainly entitled to remove freedom etc from those who threaten the rest of society. Of course in a society without poverty, massive inequalities, and a ruling elite (though in Le Guin's fantasy there still IS a sort of "nomenclatura" of the famous and "connected" even in this Anarchist society) , any "body of armed men/women delegated to enforce society's collective norms would, OR SHOULD, be a very different proposition to a bunch of boneheads set up by a capitalist state to do a bit ofhalf hearted "community policing" whilst keeping its powder dry for when the tear gas and guns have to come out when the interests of the capitalist state are under threat from the rest of us.

 

[frogwoman]

Isn't it? Your first point in your post above makes this claim "the police exist largely not to defend the people but to defend the interests of the state and capital, they do this through the use of force", but then go on to say the answer isn't to get rid of the police.

I am mildly confused by your two posts

what i mean is that the answer is not to get rid of the concept of the police. to be honest i think the idea of a society where the police, or something like it, will never be necessary at all is utopian bollocks. even under socialism or communism (or whatever) there will always be sadistic cunts, there will always be people who enjoy making people suffer, who are greedy, who want to get as much stuff as possible and fuck everyone else. there will also always be people who for whatever fall under these cunts' spell or who are influenced by them for whatever reason, until we have a society where the material conditions that push people to and opportunities for people to fall in with "the wrong people" are almost completely minimised.

currently a large proportion of these cunts are actually ruling the country. we also have a large proportion of them in the police and prison and justice system itself. the problem with capitalism is that instead of dealing with criminals equally, not only the police but the very laws that the police enforce and the entire mechanism of the justice system is designed to protect capital. there are more laws to protect property than there are to protect people. as xes said in his post the police have become increasingly militarised over the last few decades and i believe this is a trend that will continue given the slump in living standards and the very gradual demise of western liberal democracy. so we have people who are, as said, frequently power hungry, some of them are sadists (although i don't believe all of them are). but the very way that the police operates in a capitalist system encourages that brutality, which is necessary to maintain the system. when the laws themselves are all about protecting capital or for that matter power itself, as in states like north korea, it doesn't matter how the police (especially those at the front line of so-called "political policing") actually feel individually about such matters. we also have the fact that in their conditioning/training the police effectively come to see everyone else as an outsider. i'm erm ... probably not explaining this very well, but what i'm saying is that the "niceness" or otherwise of police officers doesn't come into it because they will act in that way anyway because of how the system they are defending is set up and the jobs that they have to do - and very frequently people are attracted to a career i the police BECAUSE of the power. their position in society puts them not above the law, but in a position where abuses of power by them will be investigated in a tokenistic manner or not at all.

the idea that society needs a body of people who are trained to catch criminals and even to use violence if necessary isn't a problem. i could even forsee a situation where "robust" policing of, say, fascist demonstrations became necessary if only in the short term if there was a serious threat. the problem that we have got is that the institution of the police does not set out to stop crime, it is there to keep "law and order", and if combatting crime does not fit with that objective (for example the relationship between law enforcement and the mafia in many countries) they very frequently won't do it.

 

[ViolentPanda]

and of course the answer isnt to get rid of the police ffs.

I respectfully disagree. We need to get rid of the police, but not of policing. It's the police as an institution that is the source of much of the trouble between the police and "those who are not the police", not the concept of policing. "Policing" is something that people mostly arranged for themselves until 250 years ago, whether that be through the election of local constables, or something more complex, such as a watch system. Our current system could really be viewed as an artefact of the industrial revolution. The expansion of urban sites, and the concentration of a mass of poor in small areas always meant that the privileged would feel threatened, and require a state-sanctioned method of controlling "the lower orders".

 

[frogwoman]

unfortunately "protecting capital" is just as much about what crimes are NOT prosecuted (or what things most rational people would consider morally wrong that are considered civil offences or not made illegal in the first place).

 

[ViolentPanda]

PCSOs

Round here the PCSOs patrol on their own, while the coppers (on the rare occasions we see the idle cunts) are always in twos or threes.

 

[Pickman's model]

Obi-Wan Kenobi came bursting through my door once, rather than some glowing wand in hand it turned out to be pepperspray.

Edit: I didn't "abide" you see Pickman's.

so?

 

[Pickman's model]

this debate seems overwhelmed with concentrating on politics and framing the police as being purely there to protect the interests of the powerful and the wealthy.

Whilst I wouldnt seek to deny that they serve this function, they do far more apprehending of common crooks - people who target their own communities with theft & violence. How do people suggest society should react to such instances?

how many councillors, council leaders and indeed mps have the police done then?

 

[Jon-of-arc]

how many councillors, council leaders and indeed mps have the police done then?

Dunno - how many council leaders have been reported for crimes?

 

[abstract1]

I respectfully disagree. We need to get rid of the police, but not of policing. It's the police as an institution that is the source of much of the trouble between the police and "those who are not the police", not the concept of policing..

 

[ViolentPanda]

this debate seems overwhelmed with concentrating on politics and framing the police as being purely there to protect the interests of the powerful and the wealthy.

Whilst I wouldnt seek to deny that they serve this function, they do far more apprehending of common crooks - people who target their own communities with theft & violence. How do people suggest society should react to such instances?

You say "far more". If so, it isn't enough. Policing that actually fulfills the remit that is claimed by the police and the state wouldn't be the paltry service that many people in working-class locales get - a 5-minute visit if you've had a break-in, a crime number to use in the unlikely event you could afford insurance, and a few pamphlets about securing your home, while you hear anecdotes from people in the private houses a couple of roads away about the great service they had from the Old Bill. Why should I have any confidence in a group of people who've only ever actively attacked me, or treated me as somehow worth less of their time because of where I live and how I speak?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Unfortunately rectifying this "state of affairs " WILL involve removing the dignity, safety, and self determination, AND PROPERTY, from the capitalist ruling class Spooky Frank. It's called a REVOLUTION.

I don't think revolution necessarily requires any sort of punishment of those currently in power. All we really need to do is dismantle the apparatus by which they are able to control the lives of other people. I will shed no tears for their property though.

If our former oppressors find themselves isolated and helpless in a society based on voluntary mutual aid where everyone is dependant on the goodwill of their fellow citizens then they will have only themselves to blame.

e2a: If dismantling the apparatus of control requires killing all the coppers then I won't lose too much sleep over that.

 

[Pickman's model]

Dunno - how many council leaders have been reported for crimes?

given that you're interested in people targeting their own communities for theft, where better for the police to start than councillors, council leaders and mps? after all, it's public knowledge where they live, and it's a fair auld bet that they're almost all on the fiddle. why would anyone need to report them when it's odds on that they're guilty as sin? i thought the police were supposed to be proactive and intelligence-led whereas now you're saying that they haven't a fucking clew.

 

[Pickman's model]

I respectfully disagree. We need to get rid of the police, but not of policing. It's the police as an institution that is the source of much of the trouble between the police and "those who are not the police", not the concept of policing. "Policing" is something that people mostly arranged for themselves until 250 years ago, whether that be through the election of local constables, or something more complex, such as a watch system. Our current system could really be viewed as an artefact of the industrial revolution. The expansion of urban sites, and the concentration of a mass of poor in small areas always meant that the privileged would feel threatened, and require a state-sanctioned method of controlling "the lower orders".

policing is a more recent word than 250 years ago and i think we do need to get rid of it, not least because of its unfortunate association with the state.

 

[ViolentPanda]

But if we look at the prison numbers, we might be able to infer from the crimes people are sentenced for roughly which areas are concentrated on most by the authorities...

That probably wouldn't be a sensible set of inferences to draw, as the ratio of convicted offenders to any particular offence is fairly fluid in any one year. It's pretty difficult even to draw year-on-year conclusions because (perhaps mainly due to political fidgeting with criminal legislation over the last 20 years or so) even the actual definition of a particular offence can change between one year and the next.

 

[ViolentPanda]

What would the police look like under a socialist government (in theory, obviously, not how it actually turned out in reality)?

Like your mum, but with jackboots on.

 

[Jon-of-arc]

You say "far more". If so, it isn't enough. Policing that actually fulfills the remit that is claimed by the police and the state wouldn't be the paltry service that many people in working-class locales get - a 5-minute visit if you've had a break-in, a crime number to use in the unlikely event you could afford insurance, and a few pamphlets about securing your home, while you hear anecdotes from people in the private houses a couple of roads away about the great service they had from the Old Bill. Why should I have any confidence in a group of people who've only ever actively attacked me, or treated me as somehow worth less of their time because of where I live and how I speak?

I never said it was enough, and I'm not here to stick up for the police.

I was simply pointing out that this debate seemed (on the first page particularly, from what I saw) largely framed around the role the police play in public order, and that they actually have a far wider remit than that. A remit which needs to be fulfilled, even if I concede that the service they provide falls far short of adequate for most people at the moment.