Personally, I believe that A CAB. Yes, all cops are bastards, no exceptions. Yet I have met people who think that cops in socialist countries aren't bastards.
My reasoning is that it is a position of power over your fellow citizens/countrymen/people and only bastards would be attracted to such positions. While a person may go in with "good intentions", invariably they will be at some point in their career be expected to do something "not good": cover up for a colleague, arrest someone for law they don't agree with, beat somebody up, and so on. If they do it and remain a cop, well they are a bastard, no matter how many old ladies they help cross the street or whatever.
Let's also not pretend that a full communist utopia where every single law/regulation/rule is fair is possible in our lifetimes (or at all likely), there'll always be people who will want to abuse their power and take control, cops are an easily bought section of society that makes it possible for them. Historically, cops have always sided with the aristocracy/bourgeoisie/land-owners/those with money.
Your thoughts?
This is framing the entire world in the lenses of western liberal issues, its chauvinism to a degree.
ACAB makes most sense in the west, american police kill 1000 people+ a year in cold blood and oversee the largest prison population in humanities history, slave labour and racial terror.
Chinese police on the other hand, have killed about 20 people in 30 years.... and typically in response to being attacked first, or in response to mass terror events. They are simply not comparable.
The idea is they too eventually get phased out, but it is base idealism to think you can vanish the police over night. They get removed because of contradictions leading to solutions, as marxists we should recongise this; even after the revolution, or seizing power, or gaining power; we will still need to defend it, we will still need 'police'; the benefit is there will be no landlords, so they will not serve the landlord class, and we will direct them to serve socialist interests (read althussers theory of the state apparatus, they are the club of the brain of the state)
Since our end goal is the dissolvement of the state, it comes to think they will be disolved too eventually, and it is our end goal; but you cant jump straight to the end goal.
So have police in other Western imperialist/capitalist nations. If you're going by "murder by police" statistics to determine which police is better than others then the US police is in a league of its own. In some Western countries police don't even have guns on them 24/7. It's a poor metric.
In the OP I named things that I'm sure every cop in every country in history has done: helped a colleague over what's right/fair, enforced a law they don't agree with, beaten up someone, and things like that. Violence isn't only murder, there's false imprisonment, charging an innocent person with a crime, mistreating a prisoner, those are all objectively negative things that don't involve murder and make a police force "bad".
The metric im using is the one in which ACAB was born out of, as a response to the terror of american police, and largely in part due to the drug war.
Sure, its part of the 'monopoly of violence', it typically serves the ideological means of who ever is in control. We want that to be socialist as socialism/communism looks to phase this out by transitioning away from statism, untill then we still need to grappel with capitalism pitting everyone against each other so a police force is needed to stop violent acts. We all know the police do 'bad' things, I do believe they can be controlled to do what we want though, as ultimately they will just do whatever who is paying them tell them to do.
What would you suggest a socialist country do? Pull the rug out from the police and abolish the whole institute? What about domestic abuse? It would inherently hit the vunerable; thats why I called it 'idealism'
That view ignores the history from which the police was born out of (not just a slogan). Police were bastards long before the US war on drugs in the 1970s. From their inception the police was a violent, mercenary group that did the bidding of the landed elite. The police crushed workers' protests in the 19th century, long before the war on drugs.
No, it is not. A people's militia could do the same, or the army/national guard, citizen-soldiers, a people's army, whatever you want to label it.
Precisely. So how can you
Sure. Police have been historically counter-revolutionary and if a capitalist wants to undermine your State they will first attempt to bribe the police. Because now they have an armed force that is present all over the country. Having the police in a socialist country is like having a snake in a kindergarten.
Wjhat about it? Do you think the police prevents domestic abuse? LMAO. To stop domestic abuse you have to remove conditions which enable it: patriarchal capitalist society and its culture of "household breadwinner". There's also drug and alcohol abuse. These are all problems that the police can't fix. Police can however make them worse. Also, police officers are some of the worst domestic abusers, so I really don't know what your point is.
Neighbours who hear domestic abuse can stop it. But that requires that people actually give a shit about one another and take responsibility for the place they live in, and not just call "the police" and wash their hands off it.
No, the vulnerable are the victims of police violence. You are the one who want to believe the police can be a force for good. I'm saying that "the police" as in "people who's job is to police/control people and effectively rule the streets" are inherently negative and cannot be reformed, they have to be abolished.r
It doesnt ignore this, again we're focusing on the american conception of the police. Of course a state born out of slavery and genocide will continue to evolve its police based on its own ideological conception. Other countries dont have this same relationship; the chinese police where not born out of a slave state, they where born out of a socialist revolution.
That would ulimtiately just be a 'police', renaming it something different doesnt make it different.
Where have socialist police ever been counter-revolutionary?
Again, yes in a capitalist system they often make things worse. Im asking how you would deal with issues like domestic abuse in a hypothetical that we just deleted the police from existance, some form of sanctioned violence needs to be weilded in the function of a government, its idealist to think otherwise.
And replaced with what? Im fine considering your ideas, but you need to consider what comes after, otherwise a vaccum emerges and the people who rely on others to exist (the disabled, the vunerable) will be easy pickings for people with bad intentions.
You are. Cops were present in 17th century Britain, they served the aristocracy, the landed elite and the rich. They were tasked to round up "vagrants", poor people, etc.
Nope. Because the difference is the scope of their powers and where they are recruited from. A "police offcer" shouldn't have any authority outside of their neighbourhood/village, for example.
Every socialist country where the revolution was crushedt: Yugoslavia, ~~Soviet Union~~, Burkina Faso, ... in each of those countries the police was instrumental in taking power away from the people and giving them to the capitalists/imperialists. There's a reason why historically the communists have allied with the army and not the police.
Pretty sure I answered that. By having a society where people give a shit about one another. If a neighbour hears/sees domestic abuse going on, they should do something. The other solution is to remove the causes of domestic violence, like I already wrote.
A neighbourhood watch. The problem is the scope of powers. Have a police, but have the police officer only have authority inside of his neighbourhood or a demarcated, small area. Why should a cop have city-wide powers. Do we expect the police officer to be familiar with every neighbourhood and people in a city of 200-300k people? There's just no way. And that's part of the problem why the police behave the way they do, they are effectively ruling over strangers, and not people they have to see/meet every time they go to the grocery store.
So your solution is to have thousands of indiependant police cells in countries that have billions of people and expect it to just work out without any centralization of methodology or ideology and accountability to any central power? I can think of 100 ways this falls flat due to abuses of power....
Ah yes, lets just rely on our neighbours to violently de-escelate something, better hope your neighbour isnt a 70 year old women, il be moving into the bloc of MMA fighters and body builders to ensure my safety.
The police in the USSR didnt crush the revolution, america did that economically, they also didnt act as houndogs for landlords.
I think we agree in parts though, the best way for a socialist country to get rid of cops is to eliminate all the conditions that require them, thats what i was getting at with 'contradictions leading to solutions', total abolishment is shock therapy.
Most countries aren't that big. China and India account for 3 billion people, leaving 5 billion people across some 190 countries or so. It's not "thousands of cells" and "billions of people" in countries. I said neighbourhood/village. You're assuming that there's "crime" going on every second in every square km of a country, that's simply not true. You don't need that many cops to be "patrolling" the streets. And what are they doing anyway? Looking for petty criminals and people who are circumventing tax laws and regulations mostly.
The police doesn't "de-escalate", the police comes and beats people up and throws them in prison.
Does the police ensure your safety right now, or will they come after the fact to "investigate"? That neighbour who calls the police for you could also have stopped whatever was happening. The police can't teleport themselves instantly.
First thing any new socialist country should do is throw all the police into the prison, then politically educate and hire a new cadre.
OK? You don't think cops in AES countries beat people up or throw them in jail? They just come with blankets and cocoa? If you need the country you "defend" to be perfect in your eyes for you to defend it, I have bad news for you. I can recognise negative aspects of a country and still defend it and say it is preferrable to another.
"Simply isn't true that cops in AES countries beat people up and throw them in jail" lmao
The state police (like Stasi, for example in the DDR) subdue enemies of the state. Police are literally there to "clean up the streets". How can you be ignorant of this difference?
Is the American idealist in the room with us now? Or are you calling me an American idealist? Insults aren't going to help your case. You are having a knee-jerk reaction to a difference of opinion. Grow up.
How many have you?
As opposed to you, The Great Understander and Knower? Should I make assumptions about you? You traveled to AES countries as a tourist and got treated nicely, because that's how they treat tourists with money.