Why do socialists demonize the police?

http://libcom.org/library/violence-against-police-commune

http://libcom.org/tags/police

there is loads and loads about this on libcom man. The latest article written by Ramona is short and snappy

http://libcom.org/blog/political-policing-or-business-usual-06062011

Ramona also started a forum topic a couple of weeks ago before writing this piece which has some valid points,

http://libcom.org/forums/general/articles-about-policing-political-or-otherwise-02062011

The last post Joseph Kay wrote I think is quite pertinent.

And just a quick point, there is no such thing as 'semantics aside', especially through the medium of textual based communication

Well I personally believe the production of ideas does not happen in one person's head alone, it is exactly through so called 'semantic squabbling' that ideas are forced to be developed and change to the challenges that the interlocutor sets out in front of them. So called 'semantics' therefore are of prime importance.

again, I still don't agree, and I think your example of the police is rubbish. The police as an institution right now is a spade (massive DNA databases, deaths in police custody, on the street interpersonal micro-authoritarianism, pre-emptive arrests, the demonization of protesting as a whole, the list could go on but it is all covered in the links offered by Roy Ray and myself). When people critique it as it works at the moment but don't throw the baby out with the bath water, this is not another spade.....

But if this is your minor quibble with SOME socialists lets just forget about it.

Generally, I think most of the arguments on your threads revolve around your tendency to ask questions which a) use wrongheaded assumptions about what anarchists mean when they use terminology (like "authoritarian" or "socialisation" for example), which may explain why people keep engaging you in semantic arguments (ie. you're working off definitions which the rest of us aren't and thus your conclusions about what we think are wrong) and b) which you mix in with questions about something entirely different.

If you actually mean "what alternatives to societal protection through policing do anarchists propose" that's a different question to "what is the anarchist critique of policing within capitalism." Both are going to need lengthy answers, which have generally been covered elsewhere, hence the links. If after having read the existing literature you still have questions, feel free to ask them rather than leading off on a confrontational "your critiques are hiding from the issues" line which seems designed to wind people up rather than help you to learn - particulary given that you cearly don't actually know what anarchists have said on the subject.

The key here, yoda, is to realise that the fundamental purpose of something is not always the only or most common manifestation of it. Indeed, often 'most of what they do' can appear benign and helpful, but it can be obscuring a deeper problem.

As an example think of Jaycee Dugard, who was taken from the street by Phillip Garrido in 1991.

In the last twenty years, he has housed, clothed and fed Jaycee and her children. 'Most of the time', that is exactly what he has been doing for her. But do we draw the conclusion that those apparent good acts tell us anything of the reason why he took her, or why he continued to hold her?

Of course, we all know now that he is a paedophile, who kidnapped a young girl for sexual purposes, raped her and made her pregnant.

But, on the surface before he was exposed, tried and jailed, he appeared as a normal married man, living with his wife, daughter and grandkids in the suburbs, to those who saw him outside with Jaycee and her children. He wasn't raping her 'most of the time' for twenty years. Most of the time, she was sleeping, eating, raising her kids, etc.

So, what does this illustrate?

The police can appear 'most of the time' to be helpful, as you say, "enforcing speeding laws are in the public interest, for instance, and not a bourgeois conspiracy".

But the real reason the police force exist is to protect the property of the rich. This becomes really obvious during social turmoil, strikes, riots and revolutions. The police don't continue to prevent traffic violations, or detect burglars, capture rapists or arrest murderers. They retreat to their fundamental purpose, to protect the property of the rich. Police officers are taken from all their other duties, and the worse the uprising against the powerful becomes, the more police are diverted to that task alone.

Finally, that is all they are doing; the 'truth' is exposed for all to see. The people all on one side of the barricades, and the protectors of the property of the rich on the other. Even a strike gives a little glimpse of this social truth, where the police break, rather than enforce, democratically-decided picket lines.

Well, it's not semantics. After the revolution, a 'police force', meaning 'a body to protect the property of the rich', won't be required.

Any requirement to enforce social rules will be under our collective control, not the control of a few.

'Police' means 'property'.

Hope this helps, mate.

Ah I see, so you don't want to actually know the answers to your questions, right then. Forgive me if I can't be bothered to read your lengthy posts any more, instead I'll just write about what I think's wrong with you from a position of compete ignorance .

.

.

.
Well, mate, we've answered your initial question.

Yeah, you're probably better off trying to stick to one issue, making sure you're happy with the answers that you've received, and then starting a new thread for further questions.

If you keep quickly jumping from one question to another, almost without acknowledging that you've put some time and effort into understanding what other posters have put time and effort into writing, then it can appear that you are a dilettante who easily discards others' efforts.

Not a strategy for winning friends...

Simply put, the role of the police is protection of property and social control. Yes, they do engage in some socially productive tasks, but when push comes to shove and capital and/or the state is threatened, they are the armed enforcers of class society. Fuck 'em.

I don't know where you're from but in the general area I'm in, the activities of the police include beating and murdering people on a regular basis.

The thing is that in the poorest neighborhoods, beating and murdering people is an important strategy for the police (though they don't restrict themselves to only these areas). Moreover, violence has always part of the approach for a human wishing to assert dominance. Having little to lose, having the threat of jail already over their heads and living in a society little different from jail, the impoverished can indeed be quick to resort to violence if they're facing an authority who isn't inclined to use overwhelming violence on a regular basis. Capitalist relations can turn the most impoverished zones into "jungles" where police and gangsters terrorize the population at large to assert their dominance.

Sure, among those labeling themselves either anarchist or communist, there are those imagine a world almost like the present except for there being a massive democratic apparatus to make sure everything is "just" or "fair" or "rational" or some combination of these. We'll commute to work in an egalitarian manner, we'll produce plastic flowers in our green factories in an egalitarian manner, we go home our impersonal but equally divided suburban subdivisions and pay our fairly alloted labor tokens to see concerts by the latest pop-stars fairly chosen on "Anarchist Idol" and we'll go to many, many meetings to keep it all fair (Bob Black's "Anarchy After Leftism" is useful as a fine statement of this divide despite Black's many other problems...).

It's natural that folks think this way imagine "something like" a police force to enforce the fair laws of this egalitarian machine (and perhaps to drag people to the meetings?). But I don't really view those using this approach as being comrade in a common project - such people tend to like the, uh, police far too much and not-strangely, far more than the average non-political person (even the average "middle person" here in da' USA has an antipathy towards the police having seen their corruption, their bullying, their stupidity etc).

Now opportunists such as Maoists, attack the police while having plans for even harsher policing once they attain power. In the world of those imagine a non-different society, how much one is going to attack the police depends on how opportunist you want to get - "in our society, the police will be honest, courteous and fair".

Totally agree with RedHughs here.
Instead of the abstraction about cops "after the revolution", let's look at a concrete example (please note the bolded sections):

http://libcom.org/news/protests-spread-tunisia-12012011?page=16

You don't need specialists in Order: you need to rotate the tasks necessary for the development of proletarian community, "to take it in turns with security".

As for yoda's praise of the cops enforcing speed limits: do you know how many people are killed each year by speeding cop cars?

All coppers are workers. The SPGB take on the original question why socialists demonize the police

http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/01/all-coppers-are-workers.html

(We had a long moronic debate on whether teachers are workers a while back too...)

Who cares whether cops are workers or not. Is it that hard to believe someone can be a worker and a sack of shit? I'm inclined to believe the cops are more or less part of the working class, just a part that's going to be our enemy during the entire time it exists.

The cops don't work that hard or face that much danger. But when they are working, their work consists primarily in imposing capitalist property relations with varying degrees of violence, up to and including shooting people trying to avoid paying transit fares.

That might not mean they are "inevitably" counter-revolutionary. But violently (and usually corruptly) defending capitalism is kind of the worst place to start as far as oppose capitalism goes...

Well, this isn't strictly true, is it? According to the article (which might be lying in favour of the police or simply mistaken), the two men were shot for violently attacking the police, not for trying to avoid their rail fares.

While I can imagine police officers, in some societies and at some times of stress, actually shooting people for fare dodging, in answering yoda's question and explaining why we are opposed to the police, it doesn't pay to lay on the rhetoric too thickly, because it undermines, not strengthens, our case, when the questioner actually reads the 'evidence' provided.

The police are the first physical line of defence for capitalism, whenever you do anything that stretches the thin veneer of ideology that covers capitalism and act collectively in any way shape or form they are the physical force first arrayed against you. Any demo or picket you go, ten to one they'll be there. They enforce your poverty collectvely and individually, when your skint and buying bake beans at the end of the month, its them that makes you do it.
When the scabs need to get through a militant pciket line, its the cops that let them through.
Its fairly understandable then that most anarchists and socialists and indeed many other workers are going to spend a disproportionae amount of time disliking the police, because they come into contact with them more than say the army, unless they happen to live in a warzone or a country where the police and army are merged to some degree (eg brazil).

I would agree that many anarchists present a decidedly vague idea of the society they want to see. As such instead of talking about how a smaller amount violent, mentally unstable and/or anti-social behaviour will be dealt with (eg using courts, laws, detention centres and shock horror police) too many opt for the fuzzy ''there will be no crime after the revolution'' line, which as you say is a cop out. As you pointed out even in a society where everyone feels they have a stake in things, you still need traffic police, because inevitably some people will sometimes speed, drive badly or drunkenly. That said there would be a lot less cars on the roads in an anarchist society as people wouldn't commute (no profit motive to do so) or drive their kids miles to school (local catchment area) and public transport would obviously be much more efficient and more prevalent in a collectivst society. As such the number of traffic cops would be massively smaller.

Personally i'd see the logical solution being a very small number of professionals to deal with inestigations and forensics, and a larger force made up of volunteers who stayed in the job for a year or two then moved on so as to prvent the rise of barracks mentality which is one fo the worst aspects of contemporary policing. That said in total 'police'' numbers in a communist society would be pretty minute, the majority of prisoners in a capitalist society are there for petty theft, gang related crime, prostituion or low level drugs offences. None of which would exist in a communist society because there would be no economic rationale behind any of them. One would hope that other crimes to do with power and anti-social violence would decrease also.

Well, that does assume that the private automobile continue its dominant role also...

The man was pursued for skipping fairs (and pursuit implies violence may come next). He supposedly shot for shooting back at police. However, transit police in the San Francisco Bay Area have a fairly long history at this point of fabricating stories of the people they murder having weapons. In this instance, I believe the weapon was supposed to have been stolen by a bystander and so will not ever be produced at trial, if there ever is a trial.

I supposed giving the back-story on all this would have been useful.

At the same time, I'll assume we're all adults having spent some time in capitalist society rather than Robinson Crusoes having just walked out of the state of nature. Either you have seen and researched the behavior and know that significant percentage of their actions are not as they seem or you're kind of being willful ignorant. "He was running after stealing/looting/etc but he had a gun so we had to kill him (but the gun was made of dry ice and just evaporated)" means... "we shot him for stealing/looting..." in general, in modern society.

By definition a police force would not exist in a anarchist society since the police force enforce law and laws would also by definition not exist in a society without a state to make, interpret or enforce them. This should not be confused with the believe that there would be no rules or unnacceptable behaviour in a anarchist society.

A group of people with forensic skills who attempt to find out who did something does not a police force make. The responsability of policing a community would be shared by all those within that community, in a functional anarchist society members of your community would not accept you driving dangerously through the place were they and their children live.

If somebody is running around murdering people and their are no factors in society that have lead to that person being dangerous then that person needs medical help. Not somebody to beat them up and lock them in a cell for life.

"shooting people trying to avoid paying transit fares"

I'm not being ignorant: they weren't shot for 'fare avoidance', which your statement implies.

They were shot for, allegedly, threatening the police officers' lives.

You and I both know that police officers, all over the world, shoot innocent people. So, for the purposes of your illustration, which I agree with you trying to do, why not select a case in which that is exactly what police officers have done?

Otherwise, people who aren't convinced at the moment that police officers do do this, but have their suspicions and read our site, won't follow a link that doesn't clearly show police officers actually doing what we both know that they do, ie. shoot innocent people, but find something that they can imagine themselves doing, ie. defending themselves against violence. This only gives the police more sympathy - 'they've got a tough job to do'.

Yeah, we both are, and I think we should assume that people reading this site are too, and have the power to read what's actually written in 'evidence', and can draw their own conclusions.

I'd just prefer that they draw conclusions for which we both know plenty of evidence exists, and don't think that a dodgy inference is the best we can do.

Care to expand on that?

Also, it's worth noting that they didn't just threaten an officers life out of the blue. Whether or not they really shot at the officers in the end, the situation escalated from them evading transit fares.

lol well, that killed that discussion.

Since when did I say rules would be 'sensed' spontaneously rather than being decided by the community.