During the course of this debate, in response to the idea that All Cops Are Bastards and that the police need to be abolished or at least massively defunded, I've tried to raise a point which seemed to me to be a really obvious one.
Post 16
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...we are discussing the very imperfect world of the US where the police are armed and the citizens have a constitutional right to be...In England hardly anyone does shoot anyone, but in the US you have that 2nd amendment thing, which in retrospect seems like one of the world's great bad ideas.
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Post 18
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The US alone among rich countries has a huge problem with gun violence that the rest of the world just doesn't. Why should it be that imagining something different to this is to imagine an "unachievable perfect world?"
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Post 89
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Right now though, no country on earth has no police force. For the US to be the first, or even to have a considerably scaled down version of what it has now, doesn't the heavily armed elephant in the room have to be addressed, the one I was talking about back in post 18? The fact is that the US has gun violence and ownership on a scale massively exceeding any comparable high income country.
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Nobody seemed to want to engage with it, so I thought maybe I was missing something, though I couldn't think what. I thought about this again yesterday when I read this article on the BBC news site about a police killing of a black woman from last year. It's a horrible story. An elderly man called the police because he was worried that his neighbour's front door was open and he knew that the woman wasn't very well. It transpired that she was in hospital and her 28 year old daughter was house sitting with her 8 year old nephew. They were up late playing video games and just hadn't shut the door, as (presumably) was the older woman's habit, so this raised the neighbour's suspicions. The police officer crept round the back of the house and shot the woman through the window.
BBC News - Atatiana Jefferson: 'Why I will no longer call the police'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-53052917
It was only when I googled the story from a different source that I learned the woman had become scared when she heard noises out back, reached for a (presumably) legally owned gun that she kept in her purse, and was pointing it toward the window when the cop appeared there. So from the cop's point of view, he shot someone who was aiming a gun at him. (You can see the gun in the still frames at the end of the bodycam footage on the BBC link above, though as I said it isn't mentioned in the article text).
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbc...mp/ncna1105916
This is still an example of absolutely terrible policing, which rightly led to criminal charges. Why he didn't just stand at the mysteriously open front door, loudly identify himself as a police officer and ask if everything was alright I have no idea. But for the BBC to completely omit the fact, to my mind a
fairly important one, that the woman was armed and pointing a gun through the window seemed weird. I could only think that it just didn't fit the current narrative, which is one of systemic racism/racist cops. When mass shootings happen, the narrative seems to always be framed as a battle between liberal and conservative voices over the issue of gun ownership. I just wonder why in the current debate this factor seems to be not just absent but sometimes, as in this case, even deliberately hidden.
There is institutional racism in the police force and there are racist cops, absolutely.
Cops generally are far too trigger-happy and/or willing to resort to violence, absolutely.
But also, the US citizenry, as well as the police force, has a deeply disturbing, though constitutionally sanctioned, relationship with guns that is utterly unlike anywhere else. I don't see how this can't be part of the conversation.
I'm sure lots of people will roll their eyes at this point, as if a British person imagining an America without (or even with considerably fewer) guns is hopelessly unrealistic and naive. Yes, I know. The 2nd amendment. But it doesn't seem any less unrealistic or naive than the current calls to abolish the police and end all systemic racism. Why isn't the first conversation at least being had along with the second right now?
Anyway, I did some googling and found at least one interesting article which was addressing this.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...rticle/613258/
Edit: I realise, of course, that George Floyd wasn't armed nor was he killed with a gun. But surely the sheer prevalence of guns – the citizens know the cops have them and the cops know the citizens may well have them – makes for an absolutely toxic stew.
Edit 2: Short version – I think the conversation that always happens and then dies away after 20 people have been killed in a shooting spree needs to keep happening. And keep happening. Until something radical actually gets done.
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