Quote:
Originally Posted by Rusty
Where I live at. We have one full time cop and 3 part time cops. When they are not on duty. If you call 911. You might get the state police in about an hour or so. Depending how many of them are on duty, and if they are in a different part of the county. Basically, you're on your own. The retired chief lives across the street, 2 houses up. I know the other ones. They all are good people.
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This brings up a good point actually. In a small town or more rural area, everyone knows everyone and the police are your neighbors, friends, acquaintances. It’s a lot harder to dehumanize and abuse folks you know even if you don’t like them, (assuming we aren’t talking about a straight up sociopath).
In large urban areas, without a strong concerted effort to walk the beat, get to know folks and engage in community policing, you tend to get a police force that looks like an occupying military with fobs in strategic locations and the cops running combat and recon mounted patrols. This builds fear and distrust between both the citizens and the police.
If the police feel like they aren’t part of the community they serve, and the people don’t feel like the police are there to help them, distrust, fear grow and leads to terrible outcomes.
Now, add in to the above, the catastrophic “war on drugs” which decimated communities of color disproportionately And really began the militarization of our police forces, the offshoring of decent semi skilled manual labor jobs in the 70s on up (Baltimore’s docks are a good example), the criminalization of poverty, and of course our country’s as yet unhealed original sin of slavery, aka racism
And you get police brutality, it’s almost guaranteed.
This isn’t going to get better until we as a country acknowledge both the good and the bad in our history. There was a post a while back on here that very succinctly listed all the bad regarding African Americans/slavery and institutional racism from our earliest days to present.
At its core racism makes one group view another as subhuman, we do this type of thing all the time bc in order to commit violence on another group of people, or disenfranchise them, they must be viewed as other and worse than us, this also keeps public opinion on your side. War is a perfect example, we don’t kill our equal people who we respect and view as fully human, we kill krauts, japs, gooks, hajis etc. it makes it less traumatic and easier to justify. It applies from the other side too, Americans are evil capitalists, the white devil etc.
Europeans didn’t view Africans as inferior until the expansion of slavery in the 1600s. Then you suddenly get “science”, pseudo science like phrenology falling all over themselves to justify slavery bc “they’re” not equal. These attitudes are still engrained in our society today. The heartbreaking thing is, it’s unbridled capitalism that leads to slavery, after all the lowest cost for labor is free labor. Capitalism without ethics, or morals (if you want a more religious word) always leads to evil outcomes. It hurts the victims but it also hurts society and the folks that economically benefit from it too. Violence begets violence, the pre civil war south was much more violent than the north, even white on white violence bc when your surrounded by pain suffering, cheapening of human life, that’s what tends to get reflected back.
I am a patriot, I love and have sacrificed for this country and ALL her people. I believe in the aspirational ideals of our constitution and bill of rights. But those things and the American dream, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must apply equally fairly and justly to All citizens. We’re not there yet.