this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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If money wasn't needed. If people had access to dignified work to pay for housing, food and health, they would have a choice.
Cop work is always available, on a very low entry bar, paying generally better than equivalent positions elsewhere. And shitty people get to vent their violence unchecked.
Nice cops "just" have to sell their should a bit. Some people get desperate and are willing to pay the consciousness price.
In my opinion these positions shouldn't even be available, the whole chain of command should be replaced by people representing the oppressed classes, committed to ending oppression.
I'm not defending police, I just think the criticism has to focus on the institution problem, not at the individual problem. Individuals are insignificant in the grand scheme of things, systems are everything.
Sure, like any other wildly unethical job there's a spectrum of different people's privilege and ability to easily cut out to a less cartoonishly evil job – I would hold Person A with a background in cybersecurity and no dependants a lot more responsible for every day they remain a cop than Person B who joined police academy straight out of high school and is supporting 5 children etc.
But saying that Person B should be excluded from "fuck cops" – that is, that there should be an exception to the general cultural work of making it socially unacceptable to be part of a murderous, racist, unjust, reactionary paid army – is supporting the institution that you're claiming to be against. Waiting until a complete societal transformation before campaigning for people to not take blood money (your euphemistic "consciousness price") is valuing Person B's economic solvency over the lives of the people they (or, being generous, just their colleagues) will harass, target, frame, and even kill.
Totally honest question: do you feel this way too about Russian soldiers in Ukraine, or IDF soldiers in Gaza?
I think it's fair to say that "nice cops" see themselves as civilians, and representatives of the population, trying to improve things.
Soldiers are military, and a very different category. But! I read many US military personnel go in there because superior education is not really accessible anywhere else. So, maybe there's a gray zone, there? Cannon fodder soldiers from poor strata die first, in any war. Most don't want to be there.
I have particular views about IDF being an genocidal maniacal occupation force for a colonising state that commits innumerable crimes against humanity. That you're probably not interested about.
And I have particular views about NATO using disguised Nazi Ideology in puppet states to seize and control it, that I also wouldn't think you wouldn't be particularly interested about.