United States | News & Politics

That's the definition of qualified immunity. It's not a law, but an understanding in the courts that cops are special. Ending qualified immunity means passing a law that states cops aren't special and should be held to the same standards as regular citizens, with grants to do specific things to act in their official capacity (e.g. detain and arrest). [...]

Unfortunately, this is not correct.

Qualified immunity means you can't attempt to sue individual cops when they break the law and do you harm. With qualified immunity, those harmed will sue the city, the county, the state, and so on. The individual cops are not part of this because of qualified immunity. I think we probably agree on that much.

The problem is that the actual cop themselves will not receive any direct consequences from a suit even with qualified immunity removed. This is because they are indemnified by being on-duty. There are precedents for this and the individual cops didn't have to pay jack. It still came from the city, county, or state.

Realistically, cops cannot be reformed in this way. There are a very large number of roadblocks baked into the system. You will basically have to repeatedly lose, not actually gaining the desired reform, until it escalated to a very high level and passing a very high bar of organizational work on our parts. It's difficult to maintain momentum when you have to lose 1000 times before winning your goal. You'd need a stronger approach that keeps up energy and finds material intermediate wins.

The most practical thing we can fight for in the immediate future is to defund the police and redirect the money towards the root material causes of crimes (and to decriminalize many things that shouldn't be crimes in the first place). This can be done at a local level by going after city councils and running proposition campaigns and so on.

We should absolutely be fixing broken windows as we come across them.

????

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/poverty-journal/blog/how-to-actually-fix-a-broken-window/

There are more radical and correct framings but even mainstream analyses know that broken windows theory is really just a racist criminalization of poverty that throws a ton of people in jail over minor "offenses".

But he does. He got a lot of people out voting who wouldn't have otherwise. They didn't have a clear, actionable goal, but they did have a clear message: "drain the swamp."

Like I said and you are now saying,, he just has people that will vote for him. That is every single Democratic or Republican candidate. That is not actually a movement. He can't actually mobilize them. They aren't involved. They don't train each other. They aren't organized. They don't have an agenda. They're just good sheep to pull a lever.

The lack of meaningful change was because Trump (their spokesperson) doesn't care about change, he just cares about being in the spotlight. We can learn a lot from his messaging and turn that into meaningful change.

Trump is a part of the ruling class. One among many grifters that make large piles of money based on other people's work, knows that Washington really works through money. His self-interest is the same as the rest of the class. He's just ruder and more direct about it, not being a classy liar.

He didn't change much because yes, he didn't want to and therefore received institutional backing and did not confront substantial pushback from moneyed interests. Just like every other President.

That's just not true. Look at the American Revolution, which was pretty much the exact opposite: classical liberals (individualists) fighting against authoritarianism.

The American Revolution was an inter-bourgeois civil war, more or less. The national bourgeoisie of the colonies wanted to rule itself and keep its cash and whipped up a fervor based on that. They succeeded at that, indeed. They were just as "authoritarian" (a word that means almost nothing in liberal discourse). There is nothing more authoritarian than shooting your enemy in the face so that you get to be in charge now. Remember, the liberal "individualists" we're talking about were slavers and settler-colonial genociders. Their words are a fairy tale, a myth, used to manufacture consent for ruling class interests, namely sending your kid off to fight in a war.

As a bourgeois revolution, it was relatively top-down in nature. It received its support from a large faction of the existing ruling class, not ground-up organizing against the ruling class. This is not the kind of movement we are talking about and I hesitate to even call it a movement.

Yes, but we don't know if he would've been as successful without doing it. Given the political and social climate at the time, I think King made the right call (for the movement, not for his personal convictions).

I do because I organize. I see how respectability politics tends to result in self-marginalization and defeat, usually crushing attempts in their infancy. A front group is fine, but when you begin to excise your comrades that know how to build from a coherent material base you only hurt yourself. Your movement will peter out. And the civil rights fight did. It was mollifies via legalization of some protections, the targeted murder and blacklisting of its leaders, and the integrating of some of its leaders, usually junior ones, into the ruling class order as politicians that told defanged false histories (ones compatible with using the false promise of ruling class tools) so that correct and useful strategies are not rediscovered.

Sure, broadly speaking, but you can kick out specific individuals that will distract from the message. That's what King did, and I think his movement was successful for it. That's called compromise, and it works if you're careful to not compromise on your core message.

Every time you try to organize, the ruling class will hire a PR firm to identify how to split your groups up and therefore interfere with your ability to act in unison and to make use of more effective strategies. They will promote the least effective groups and strategies, the ones they can control and defang, and demand the exclusion of the more effective groups by using marginalization and vilification. "Kick out specific individuals" is not an accurate framing of how this functions.

The Civil Rights Movement benefited from already having substantial momentum and a subset of socialist organizing tactics by the time the purges began. Had it happened earlier to the same effect it would have been crushed just like it was several times before.

I'm not talking about his later work, I'm talking about the Civil Rights movement.

That doesn't change the relevance of my response.

My apologies, they're similar terms and I align with neither, so I sometimes confuse them. King appeared to be more of a social democrat than a true socialist, though he did associate with more radical socialists.

King identified as a Democratic Socialist and became more radical over time as he recognized the same lessons I'm talking about.

No, BLM failed because they didn't have consistent or lasting messaging.

This is a counterproductive nagging that mirrors the criticism of the white moderate made by King. I've already explained how it's factually inaccurate, but it is also wrong in its basic emphasis. It is the reactionary Obama tut-tuting that would do nothing because it did nothing. Every major city I helped in had unified and clear messaging. It did not get the goods. It is the logic of our opponents who pretend to be our allies but do nothing to help and actually instead promote the logic of self-defeat and false rationalizations. It has no basis in the on-the-ground reality and constitutes inventing realities rather than embedding with the actual people impacted and following the course of events.

It is unserious and a bad faith argument. I suspect you are just repeating it based on hearing others say it and don't mean it in bad faith yourself.

There are multiple ways to get that, and they did none of them. Chants don't change laws, actual proposed laws do, and protests and whatnot are there to get media attention for those proposed laws.

There were 4-8 very clear bulleted demands shared by every city movement I worked in that could be implemented with relative ease by any city council. For example, cut the police budget 50%. This does not require, in any way, some technocratic approach or special legalize. Councils are constantly in the business of changing the police budget, they do it as a matter of course. The demand and leverage are all that is needed. Their messaging was consistent and they had dedicated media teams presenting the information and having everyone redirect the press to media liaisons. There were occupations with those demands clearly laid out and tabling to engage community members.

They had exactly what you say was needed. They failed because of your ideas. In thinking that would be anywhere close to enough. In failing to understand leverage and the necessity of having your demands in-hand before giving up anything. And that all of this necessitates core organizing competencies and a coherent internal political line that identifies the enemy correctly, because otherwise you will lose to the internal continents that use your exact logic to defang and break the movement. To focus on messaging and the assumption of good faith from politicians. Of being surprised when you are met with maximum pressure from your alleged liberal allies. Of not knowing on which side their bread is buttered and how to organize to create the power they can't take away from you using their preferred tools, or asking you to give up your leverage in exchange for their false promises of what your power looks like and how it's built.