@omgshiftercat Abolition of ICE has massive popular support, and it doesn't need to be replaced with anything. How is it not obvious to start with that? On the other hand, if you're abolishing police, what are you replacing them with? If someone asks, "Okay, I get that the police overall suck, but who am I supposed to call if someone has broken my window and is now threatening me with a knife?" and you don't have an immediate and concrete answer for them, you're not going to get very far with that agenda. Figure out an alternate public safety system FIRST and have it ready to go. Yes, this means extra steps. Yes, it means it might have to be on the back burner compared with other agendas. But the alternative is asking people to replace a sucky system with nothing. One of the people I follow elseweb is a leftist anti-fascist organizer. She's sometimes criticized for calling the cops on Nazis who stalk her in her home. The way she puts it is, "Yes, police are a crappy tool, but they're one of the few tools I have right now, and it's not doing anyone any good to let the Nazis terrorize and assassinate people."
Yeah, like... that's a super weird comparison.
If we abolish ICE tomorrow and replace it with absolutely nothing, not even a stopgap... a whole lot of not much at all will happen, except for the targeted groups feeling less afraid.
I mean even if some conservative fearmongering isn't completely off base (and to be clear I absolutely think it is, please don't misread this!) that would maybe be, what, a couple more gang members, maybe, someplace? We already HAVE those! And gangs recruit! They don't have to import!
Where if we abolish the police and replace them with absolutely nothing, what does that antifascist organizer do? Just cope and keep herself safe as best she can, because at least then she's "no longer being punitive?"
Is it *really* a moral sin to be punitive to a Nazi anyway?
I mean, of course ideally we're also trying to deprogram him. I'm not one of those people who is like, "yeah, if you chose to be a Nazi you chose to get punched." These young men are recruited.
But the idea that any kind of punishment as any kind of consequence to any kind of bad behavior gets moral evil on you just... it sounds like the leftist iteration of that right wing thing where if you allow your kid to be in the same room as a gay guy he'll catch queer.
It doesn't make any sense.
(Also, I bring it up every time and I'm kind of tired of typing it, but I do social service work. If we abolish the police and we rely on community groups to reform violent people, we're asking people like me to fix rapists and the like. I've already talked on this blog about how providing peer support to a rapist very much convinced me doing that was above my pay grade. Then AND now. We can't just assume by magic that community groups will be equipped to take that on.
And if your reply is any flavor of, "Oh I don't expect it of community groups, I expect it of county social workers," I refer you to my OP. It's above THEIR pay grade TOO.)