At least for me, this comment loses its thrust with this hashtag. It takes a potent observation and adds unnecessary partisanship. It's also connected with the mother of all blowback slogans: defund the police.
It’s not partisan to dislike police, it’s just misappropriating anger with the system onto a single component of the system. It’s incredibly myopic and counter productive to defund police in places where they depend on police for their safety. Missing the forest for the trees.
My experience with the police has been universally terrible. They think they are above the law and trusting them to do the right thing or “tell the truth and you’ll be fine” is extremely bad advice. Get a lawyer and be very careful around these people is my more nuanced take on them.
Edit: I commented before you made your answer more nuanced so I’ve changed mine too.
> You probably don’t have much experience with the police, would be my guess
It's a bad guess.
EDIT: Police in America have a "thin blue line" problem of reflexively defending peers' mistakes. Their cultures look disturbingly similar to gangs, though I don't think that's intentional--they're better described as fraternities with guns. (Which also describes gangs. Convergence.)
That said, new recruits aren't corrupt. And most cops are trying to do the right thing. More fundamentally: most Americans want a police force, and when the police stop working, the most proximate token is torched.
So yes, I get the drive behind the slogan. But it's counterproductive to a ridiculous degree. And it's nowhere proximate to a solution. On HN, I figure we can do better.
I do think it conveys something important about policing in the USA as a vibe, though I agree it's polarizing. In a similar sort of way to "defund the police" -- very catchy slogan which contains a bunch of nuance that's mostly not addressed by opponents.
As you say, I think a lot of cops do get into it for basically-good reasons, but the (hopefully-small) number who're in it for the power trip or who become dirty over time are fundamentally corruptive to the organization when combined with the "thin blue line" sentiment. If you can't trust any cop to help when you're victimized by another cop, "a few bad apples" will have spoiled the bunch.
Of course, I'll admit that much like "defund the police", it's kind of an umbrella term that gathers a few different views together, and you can't tell whether the person saying it holds the view I expressed above (which I think is the most mainstream position), or whether they think that policing is inherently corruptive and should be removed from society somehow.
The slogan may be counterproductive to achieving its stated aim, but it's also opening the ol' Overton window to a range of possibilities beyond the usual vague but well-funded "reform". If that's what it takes to get a marketplace of ideas, I'd say it's productive.
> it's also opening the ol' Overton window to a range of possibilities beyond the usual vague but well-funded "reform". If that's what it takes to get a marketplace of ideas, I'd say it's productive.
Slogans like #ACAB and "defund the police" shut down debate on reform. They're most successful at consolidating the pro-police position with moderates by presenting the entire police-reform spectrum as anti-cop radicals.
You've built up your very own strawman, and are arguing with it. ACAB is not "deeply connected" to defunding the police. And it's not also a solution to a problem: it's an opinion, a observation of facts. All cops are bastards, whether they're the young, new recruit that joins and inevitably ends up covering for the gang actions of others, the cops that have an itchy trigger finger the moment the person they're talking to is anywhere beyond #FFFFFF, or the captains that turn a blind eye to actions.
First off: this is not about America. Read the title, and stop being self centered for a moment. If you think France hasn't been saying ACAB for decades now, you're sorely mistaken. You know what my experiences are with the police, as a regular white dude ? Not what I see on TV, what I have lived. It's them not intervening when a neighbour in the middle of a psychotic episode stabs a passerby. It's them refusing to take in a deposition for sexual assault. It's them checking my arabic friends for drugs, but leaving me alone when I'm hanging out with them.
So, if you want more nuance: ACAB, and defund _this_ police. A few bad apples spoil the whole bunch, well the basket is rotting at this point.
The vast majority of interactions with police are peaceful and relatively mundane. Your view of police seems to be only informed by videos you see online.
The only interactions you see with police online are either extremely wholesome or extremely hostile. The mundane and boring interactions with police don't get seen, because they are boring and not at all noteworthy because it is standard.
If an interaction with the police revolves around something that is not criminal, such as speeding tickets, that involve a fine, you are effectively their customer so they are polite as long as you are, unless you make them feel in danger by reaching suddenly for things or being born into some stereotype or prejudice the officer has.
If the interaction involves criminal behavior, you are now "other" and you get to see the yucky side. My friends who were in law enforcement fell into people who got high on the control, people who got high on the adrenaline (worse), or people who came from legacy law enforcement family or just wanting to make a difference, trying to do the right things but knowing there were rules to follow and a line to maintain and thus got pulled down with the other two.
I have only had one interaction with police. It ended with them trying to pin the robbery of the store I was working at on me. They had footage of another person running, but couldn't see his face. They couldn't ID his car. The officer on the scene misquoted me and they used that against me. They took me for questioning without telling me I could have a lawyer, and without telling me that my parents should be present (I was under 18). They told me I had to take a polygraph test and tried to use that to bully me into confessing to something I didn't do. I was a child.
If I, a solidly middle-class white guy can have that experience, what is the experience like for marginalized kids?
Now, that is VERY anecdotal, I understand that. But why would I ever open myself up to that kind of liability again?
#AB - 'Auditing Britain', on youtube, regularly demonstrates why #acab can be seen to be a thing...in Britain, at least.
Given the power cops have - at their discretion, perhaps the #a can be dropped, but the police sure don't make it easy for themselves as far as the rest goes.
If you have been around a while, you will recognize ACAB from the tattoos of nazi skinheads or hells angels. I guess the enemy of your enemy is your friend even when they are fascist dickheads. Can we pick a new slogan or is there a reason we are attached to this one?
There is a reason racist extremists don’t like the cops. They want to carry out their agenda with impunity, and people use the power of the police to manage their presence in public spaces.
I've always hated the phrase 'ACAB', and I say this as someone whose username is Emma Goldman.
It's the institution, and its functional role in society, that's the structural problem. There are many well-intentioned, conscientious individuals in the police force. It is somewhat similar to the question of the attribution of moral blame for unjust wars. It is almost universally recognized that unjust wars are the fault of the aggressor country's leadership, and not the fault of the soldiers who fight them. Those soldiers tend to be poor, subject to indoctrination, and are often simply trying to dutifully help their country. In the same way that I don't think we should try and prosecute every Russian soldier fighting in Ukraine, or every American soldier to fight in Iraq, as war criminals - except for where they violate jus in bello - I don't think we should charge all police with responsibility for the injustices of the institution for which they work. Going back to where I began, Emma Goldman, one of the things I always found most powerful in the anarchist tradition is their belief in the basic goodness of most ordinary people - even when they are caught up in a fundamentally obscene system. I think I find the phrase ACAB grating for precisely that reason.
It's basically a simplification for life for some people. A lot of people don't like to think in nuances. Cops have a dangerous job and now that a large portion of the general citizenry hate them they have even more reason to be jumpy and sometimes aggressive. I think politicians could help a lot by ending programs like civil asset forfeiture, militarization of the police, etc. There is big gap between militant cops in small towns beating heads and what seems to be letting criminals do whatever they like in San Francisco downtown and then the DA letting them go because they did something less than shooting someone. I, for one, choose to live in a place with relatively stable "small town" cops even though they have sort of a bad rap in the neighboring city because they actually do patrol. I'm a brown person who has had zero problems with cops even though I have a lead foot.
> There are many well-intentioned, conscientious individuals in the police force
That's the issue though, I don't think this is true. Everything I've experienced personally and heard from others has shown me that cops will either 1) treat people like human punching bags or 2) stand by and laugh (or politely look away). Every single account I've seen from cops who've tried to stand up against police brutality has ended with that cop being retaliated against by their peers and fired.
If your premise were correct, then I agree that the slogan would be inappropriate. But I think the reality is that the police, as an institution, are extremely good at either excluding or converting otherwise well-intentioned, conscientious individuals.
I think my biggest pet peeve with this line of thinking is that it's not a reform slogan and it's not productive. If someone actually thinks that, then where do you go from there.
I don't think that's true at all, most people I've come across use it in an off-handed way to express solidarity with victims of police violence, or their general distaste for racialised and/or militarised policing. Full-fledged abolitionism is rare.
They really say it because they hung around in left-wing spaces for a few months in 2016, and it's vaguely anti-authoritarian. It's the same place they got "tankie" from, although they think it has something to do with Tienanmen Square.
My point exactly. I think the concept of police abolition is detached from reality toxic. It aims to delegitimize the police in hopes that up better system will arise, without having a workable better system.
All of the proposed alternatives are delusions and fantasy.
It's like jumping off a cliff because you think you can learn how to fly on the way down.
The Police watchdog in France (IGPN) has no independence whatsoever and has always been heavily criticized for being a whitewashing institution more than a real watchdog.
The police violence is not as normalized - see riots because they executed a minority race teenager for no reason, something that would be seen as pretty normal in US - but the culture is definitely as messed up.
If cops are practically mandatory in a state, how is that statement meaningful? Why not just say state equals violence?
Or are you saying humans don't need to control each other? If they do, how does it make a diffrence under which label the oppression is practiced?
Saying all cops are anything is exactly the same thing as saying all blacks are thieves, all Jews are greedy, or any of the other blanket statements that can never apply to any large group of people. It’s disgusting.
While it's true that not every cop is actively corrupt, or violent, they have this whole "Blue Code" thing that means that if you ever report a coworker for being corrupt or violent, you're out. The cops who enable bad behavior, and perpetuate the bad system, are just as bad as any other corrupt or violent cop. So yeah, they certainly can all be bad.
The idea behind the phrase is that cops are either bastards or they sit by and let other cops be bastards and are themselves bastards. Any cop who doesn't sit by and let other cops abuse citizens isn't a cop for very long.
> It's a profession, every cop out there can just... not be a cop.
Yeah, and every coal miner can just stop complaining about tough working conditions and decreasing number of jobs in their field, and instead learn how to code. It is that simple[0].
Coal miners don't have any sort of authority over you, cops do. And they carry deadly weapons with them, and they overreact. Not all the time, but let's say a noticeable amount of times.
While it may be a profession, it's also a critical community service. Unlike some professions that come and go, or could theoretically disappear tomorrow, we'll likely need police for the foreseeable future in at least some form.
Binary positions like "every cop out there can just...not be a cop" are a form of false choice fallacy and ignore the reality of what this would actually entail.
"Just don't be a cop" is not a solution to the systemic problems, and introduces a whole new set of problems that I think most would argue are just as bad, and likely far worse.
Ultimately all of this distracts from real policy discussion.
No it’s not the same. One of them is an institution conceived through organisation of people, laws, traditions and customs, the existence and membership of which is a choice. The other categories are associations made by accident of birth. I don’t have a horse in the race but it is important to understand that those situations are not the same. When people say stuff like ACAB they are free to criticise the existence of the police as an institution as they please.
> The other categories are associations made by accident of birth.
Just because someone says you are a Christian because you were baptized or whatever doesn't make it so. Religion is just as much a choice as an occupation.
> Just because someone says you are a Christian because you were baptized or whatever doesn't make it so. Religion is just as much a choice as an occupation.
Hard disagree here. I didn't choose to be born to parents of a fundamental baptist cult. I didn't choose to be subjected to physical abuse in the name of that religion, or to be sent to seminars ingraining deeply harmful ideas about self and the roles of men/women. I didn't choose to spend my entire adult life in therapy unwinding the bizarre ideas that had been hammered into me as a kid.
Yes, you can "choose" to leave your religion behind, but many cannot choose to avoid the indoctrination, abuse and twisted mental models that can come from the experience.
I left my faith behind around age 18. 20 years later I'm still actively working on getting rid of the rest of the baggage.
> Religion is just as much a choice as an occupation.
That is a bit tricky.
Religion is definitely a choice if you're enough willing to make a choice, but most people just keep their parent's religion. People just believe what they were taught as children.
I'm atheist from atheist country so I don't necessarily get it, but it seems to be that way - see ratios of Muslim and Christians in Saudi Arabia versus Europe, for example.
Then there's more tricky cases where religion and ethnicity are heavily correlated or tied in even stronger way (e.g. Jews).
They cannot be serious saying that now law enforcement is better than a bad one.
The latter you can at least try to change by joining and being a good guideline on how to be.
I know that sounds idealistic... but what are the alternatives?
- A "new" police? What should make this better on second try?
- No Police? I cannot imagine what would happen with people
- A police that plays within the rules? Now i extend my argument on law people involved. They also have many bad actors and again the only chance i see is to be a good actor.
Only the one about blacks, no? Jew blanket statements that don't involve memes about noses attack the religion which is a membership to an organisation of people with traditions, laws and customs.
It's okay to dislike people for the bad things that they do. It's not okay to dislike people for the circumstances they were born into.
Every cop, at least in the US, made the conscious decision to join a broken system where they would be rewarded for greed and corruption, and be allowed to dehumanize any group they decide they don't like. People who sign up to be cops who try to change any of this end up not being cops anymore, so the tautology holds true.
Bring up the FOP under RICO charges and prevent people with a history of violence and drug abuse from being put into positions of authority, and then we can re-evaluate the situation, but until then, police can not and should not be trusted.
> It's not okay to dislike people for the circumstances they were born into
This seems rather incompatible with:
> Every cop, at least in the US, made the conscious decision to join a broken system
If you believe the system is broken, and if you believe police are necessary at least in some form, how is extending your dislike to every cop not similar structurally to disliking people for the circumstances they were born into? (I'm not making a claim of equivalence in terms of the impact - racism is clearly worse - but of a similarly fallacious generalization).
In other words, if prospective cops could join a different system, they would, but no such system exists. Many join thinking they can influence/change the system, and I don't doubt that they try, but clearly this doesn't work well. This is not the same as joining a system for the purpose of benefiting from its rottenness.
Don't get me wrong: the system is clearly broken. But it seems deeply problematic to throw out all nuance and embrace a binary position here. Categorical statements like "joining automatically means you plan to dehumanize people you don't like and reap the rewards of corruption" does not withstand rational scrutiny.
Then let's handle it like we do race: the average cop is a bastard. This is not necessarily true of all individuals, but it's statistically predictive.
If we want to be analytical, what is the definition of bastard? Does the average cop have a net positive or negative impact? How many rude interactions are negated by preventing an auto theft ? How many unjustified beatings are Justified by locking up a serial rapist or killer?
The police (in the US) have a long history of protecting their own, and punishing anybody who does speak up, even in the face of what would otherwise be compelling evidence of illegal behavior.
ACAB might be a bit hyperbolic, but the sentiment (that policing in the US is fundamentally broken) isn’t off base.
Fair. ACAB is kind of the asshole's version of "Defund the Police" (which is also problematic, as the "pro-police" side jumps straight to "defund and disband all policing", which also isn't what most people mean). Nuance doesn't work very well on Twitter (or online in general).
Blanket statements might be bad, but please do not compare people with a specific job to ethnic and religious minorities. Jewish and black people do not stop being who they are ever. Where as a cop is off duty, retired, or fired for misconduct. It's just a job title, but it comes with a lot of authority given on behalf of the state
It's going to sound crazy, but "The Profession As A Whole Are Bastards But That Doesn't Mean Each Individual Cop Is" rolls off the tongue a little bit less well.
ACAB doesn't mean that your cop neighbor that raises puppies is a bastard, it means that the institution he works with and for is lacking any kind of oversight. And as other said, good luck on stopping being black. I don't think you can send in a resignation letter for that.
