Dear God, I really need a haircut.
All right, guys, you've seen the title of this video.
This is about the Uvalde shooting, about police brutality,
about racism, and the horrible overreaches that police do
in the name of oppressing us.
So if that's not your jam.
Come back later when you're feeling like you're in a better place.
That you could do something like that for the rest of you.
Well, you've been warned.
So I think that anybody who has been following the news in
the last few weeks has been made aware of the horrible shooting that happened .
And Uvalde, a Texas.
And. Well, I think there are a lot of important conversations about the role
guns should play in American society that I'm not going to wade into today.
Another issue that has been ongoing and developing over
time has been investigating the extremely perplexing, perplexing
police response to what happened.
Essentially, the story is that the police didn't
go in to save the children
that were under attack by a lone gunman.
In fact, instead of going in and trying to save the children, 19 of which died,
the police instead stayed in front of the school
and spent their energy harassing parents
who were urging them to go inside and save their kids.
The parents got so frustrated that some of them tried to go into the school
to rescue their kids themselves, of which the police tried to stop them.
And one of them even brandished a taser.
And Charlie Rose Gomes actually was apprehended
and arrested by the police officer until she was eventually let go
and she ran in to rescue her own child, which, you know,
getting the kids to safety, you think, would have been the purview of,
say, those police officers that were spending all their time
and energy arresting her.
And there appears to be decent evidence that the police did actually
go into the school.
But only to rescue their own children.
Some people have blamed this on the police
being underfunded or them being undertrained.
But we have plenty of evidence to show that they had plenty of both.
Not only was the Uvalde police flush with money very recently,
but they had just recently put in an entire protocol
for protecting schools against school shooters.
And so while the police were out there protecting lone
gunman from vigilante parents,
the teachers were the ones who put their lives on the line to protect their kids.
And two of them died in the process.
Maybe just remember that when they're talking about which budget
we should be slashing.
So when a Border Patrol SWAT team was eventually able
to take them out, 40 minutes had already passed.
So what's this video about today?
Essentially, this is about the police
and what it is that they actually do and what they don't do.
And I'll give you a hint.
What they don't do is help people and protect them.
And what they do do tend to do is more or less
exert the force of the state on people and a lot of racial suppression.
And I'm speaking up to this because a lot of the narrative
in the mainstream press is that the police failed at their job.
But really what they did was fulfill
exactly what the function of the police has perfectly, and it's actually standard
police practice to keep themselves safe, even if it means that children are dying.
The behavior of the police officers at Robb Elementary School is not a surprise.
There's a narrative out there that the police are this sort of thin
blue line between order and chaos and that their job is to keep people safe.
But that is really not the case and never has been.
Keep in mind the police have their origins in colonial counterinsurgency groups
as well as slave patrols.
Their job isn't so much to protect people as it is to maintain order.
And by hold the order, I mean that they're empowered
by the state, by absolute impunity, to use violence, to essentially
hold up the racial capitalist hierarchy of society.
And if you think of police in that sense,
that it's not really shocking that they would rather harass
parents than try to save just a few children.
So, yeah, the policing profession and sort of the mystique
that we've built around them, that they're these like sort of rescuers and heroes
and things like that is built around a bunch of reinforcing myths and society.
I'm going to kind of get into those a little bit.
The first one to talk about is the myth that policing
is a extremely dangerous profession.
You look it up, you'll find out that policing is actually not
even in the top ten most dangerous professions,
and that it's much more dangerous to be a delivery driver,
a logger, or even a roofer than being a cop.
Furthermore, the number one source of cause of death
for cops in the last two years
has been COVID because so many of them are refusing to get vaccinated.
The other myth is that they solve crimes
when they actually solve less than 2% of crimes.
And studies of police officers find that the vast
majority of them make like one felony arrest a year.
And if they make two.
That's essentially them making employee of the month.
So if they're not out solving crimes, protecting people, what do they do?
Well, they mostly respond to things like noise complaints.
They do things like issue parking and traffic tickets
and a lot of like small things that don't involve
crime that you definitely would not need an armed person for so many ways.
Their job is not to prevent crime as much as it is to criminalize people.
They are there
as part of essentially state surveillance and to enforce the power structure.
For example, 90% of the black people stopped by the New York police
under the stop and frisk program hadn't committed any crimes at all.
And that as police departments get these huge overinflated budgets,
they do more surveillance, but they don't actually seem to stop any more crime.
I think one emblematic case is that there was one case of a spree shooter
who was apprehended by civilians.
The police weren't there.
They were actually a few blocks away destroying a homeless camp.
One example of police surveillance is what are called sorrows,
which are essentially officers who are posted in schools.
They're supposed to make schools a safer place, and they very much don't.
It has been almost 70 years, if not over 70 years, since police
officers started having an increasing presence in America's schools.
And as the amount of these police officers in schools
have ballooned in the last two decades,
there has also been a massive increase in the amount of school shootings.
And sociologist Alex Vitale has pointed out that there's actually no evidence that
these police officers are even capable of preventing mass shootings.
There's no evidence they do.
There's no evidence that we're aware of.
Would love to see it if it exists of having police in schools
as a way to make schools safer or prevent school shootings.
And if you're curious, if school installed police officers
have any racial overtones to it, very much so.
They are a big part of the school to prison pipeline,
which typically harasses black and brown people.
But furthermore, their existence there in general was as a response to the civil
rights movement when desegregating schools became a hot button political issue.
Schools themselves became parts, places of contention
for civil rights, and police started entering the schools
in order to impose the state's will in those situations.
And that speaks more to what police actually do.
Their job is to criminalize people of color and the poor.
One journalist named Katie Way.
Who runs a substack called all cops or posters, looks into the social media
posts of police departments and police officers in general.
And the Uvalde Police didn't seem to have the energy
to, you know, take out this shooter, the elementary school.
But they're posting history shows.
They have spent a lot of time essentially trying to arrest
and cage people who seem to be an extremely desperate circumstances.
And of course, included in
that are men, women and children who are trying to cross the U.S.
southern border.
Because you've all day is close to the American border with Mexico.
This isn't even something that is like, you know, the difference
between their mandate and their actual actions.
This is legally protected.
A 2005 Supreme Court decision essentially stated
that the police are not under any duty to protect people
because the safety of people is not what they're getting all that money for.
You know, sometimes upwards of 45% of municipal budgets, United.
States police are trained to maximize control
over situations while minimizing their personal risk.
That translates into beating parents while a rampage
shooter executes their children just as easily as it does.
They're rolling up on a kid with a toy gun and executing him seconds later.
And this is why when a police officer brutalizes
a black person, they are seeing that as them doing their job.
And so despite the fact that mass shootings are on the increase
and that it seems
that police aren't doing anything to stop it, the response on both sides
of the American political spectrum seems to be
to answer it with more cops.
I would argue stricter gun laws might be the answer,
but apparently we're just going to go with more of what isn't working.
For example, in New York, there was a mass shooting a few months ago
and the mayor, Eric Adams, has essentially,
instead of, you know, trying to do something that might work, has instead
vowed to essentially increase the police budget.
And even though after every major mass shooting, there
are these overwhelming cries to do just some form of gun control.
It never happens.
And instead, more money goes to police officers
sometimes if they're feeling real spicy.
They make wacky proposals.
Like in Uvalde, there was calls for doors, I guess,
or to design schools like they're frickin CSGO levels.
But one of the most common refrains is that we don't need less guns in school,
but more guns in school.
This is like really weird underground program to try and arm teachers, which I
don't know about that one, but especially because it's been tried before.
After a mass shooting at a school in 2018, Florida passed a law
that allowed teachers to carry guns to schools,
and it was instantly followed by many incidences
of accidents and a lot of injuries related to it.
And so I guess then the next argument you might try to make is that, well,
we should still increase the funding for the police,
but we need to make sure that they are reformed.
We need to have sensitivity training and body cams and all those kinds of things.
The problem, though, is that it goes
completely against the point of the police as an institution.
At the center of policing is the surveillance
and micromanagement of communities that are either poor and or
communities of color.
They have their origins in Europe in the age of imperialism,
where their job was essentially to surveil and oppose
any groups that tried to oppose the power of the state.
And then through like the,
you know, original police force of the London Metropolitan Police,
it then spread over to the United States, where it was
primarily made for the control of poor and nonwhite communities.
And that's just in the north, in the south.
Policing literally emerged from slave patrols in the 17th and 1800s.
Their job was to catch and return runaway slaves.
Over time, the mission changed, but that is how it started.
And in the north, police became mostly focused on quashing the labor movement.
I've said this on this channel many times, but I feel like it bears repeating.
So I know I'm being a little repetitive, but it's an important part
to know about American policing.
And I would also be remiss if I didn't talk about the other arm of policing
that was very important in this particular case,
which is Border Patrol police, which stems from the economic exploitation
of migrant workers from Mexico starting in the 1800s
and seems to also operate off of nativist sentiment.
It's not like the police being corrupt or violent or repressive is a new thing.
There have been multiple cases over and over again of the police
being investigated and investigations proposing reforms
that then just never come to light.
One example was the 1894 New York let's our committee,
which basically looked into police brutality,
specifically their habit of beating people with nightsticks and blackjacks.
Another example would be the Wickersham Commission, which was.
A analysis into police brutality during the time of prohibition,
which unearths all sorts of ugly truths about the extreme overreaches
of the Constitution and the absolute brutality on display
in order to essentially suppress the sale of alcohol.
And 1967, there was the Kerner Commission, which sort of
came up after the uprisings in 1967 to investigate,
again, brutality in the police departments, mostly pointing out
that half of the major uprisings that happened in 1967
were started as responses to police actions.
And even then they were proposing
a lot of things that sound familiar today, that the community needs to have
a closer relationship with the police and that their behavior needs to be
reviewed, especially their activities in communities of color.
And it just never seemed to change anything.
And that was when the police were a lot smaller.
The war on drugs has led to a sort of political
opportunism for the police, and now they become militarized.
Their budgets have ballooned out of control, and they have almost
complete legal immunity to any horrible things they want to do .
And despite that, despite all of that, people who are calling for the defunding
of the police, i.e., to strip back their hugely inflated budgets
and use that money to put in other forms of social work
and other sort of community assets and organizations
that would fill the real problems that cities have
and not just use the police to essentially beat it into submission
or even more spicy and more in the line of your boy here.
Complete police abolition and realizing that the function they play in
society is really not one that benefits us at all.
They call us the the unrealistic fanatics for proposing these things.
But it does seem weird that we keep having these crises,
we keep having these overreaches.
And the answer always seems to be more money for cops.
More money for cops.
Maybe we can just give them more money and we'll train them better or something.
There's always like some reform or some budgetary need,
and if we can just give the police all of our money and they just get,
you know, PhDs and ethics, then we'll be fine.
But it never seems to it never seems to be the case.
It seems like more and more just kids getting put into it, and yet
we never seem to see any improvement.
The police don't get any less violent.
They don't seem to protect people at all or any better.
And so maybe, maybe, maybe
it's time for some new approaches.
If we're going to do anything, we're going to really need
to look at the legacy of policing, look past the myths, past the lionizing,
and look at what they actually do functionally,
what they actually have in their legal mandates,
what they actually perform on the streets and realize that
what we are paying an astronomically high amount of money
for doesn't result in anything or what it does.
Result is not something we want because essentially at the end of the day,
a police officer's job is to control.
It is the state's fist that goes from street to street and tries
to find anybody who is homeless, who is a sex worker,
who is organizing political resistance, who is struggling with drugs
or maybe is trying to go into an active shooter situation
to rescue their kids because you're not and essentially harass those people.
The only responses
I have found that come with reform is essentially to give police more rules.
But we have many cases showing that police don't listen to rules.
And with the legal system we have now, they essentially get away with it
all the time. And it's not even subtle.
We have seen in the last few years police harassing and intimidating journalists.
We've seen them push old men onto the ground.
We've seen police officers slash tires.
And Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who murdered
Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold, hidden face.
Any repercussions whatsoever?
Despite the fact that his crime was literally filmed
and all of the rules in the world in Minneapolis didn't seem to end
the career of Derek Chauvin, who had 17 misconduct reports on his record.
And in all of those, nothing seemed to stop him from getting to the point
where he illegally killed George Floyd on camera and got away with it.
So if reforms haven't done anything, why do we think they're going to work now?
The only conclusion I can come to is that in order to keep people safe
from the police, we need to minimize contact
between these two groups of people, which means essentially
greatly reducing or eliminating the institution altogether.
There are other ways to fulfill the jobs that have essentially been gutted
from other departments to just be filled by this one.
Brutal. Armed fist of the law.
There are community programs, there's economic investment,
support services, political representation for poor and marginalized people.
These are ways that we could replace policing
with things like community empowerment and justice.
I don't know.
This whole giving the police
analyst money and complete legal immunity doesn't seem to be working.
Maybe it's time we try something else.
That's all for this time.
I really have to thank my patrons for being so patient
as I go through all of these life transitions.
And there will be more content coming soon regularly.
I'm just adjusting to my new life, so thank you all for your patience.
But I'll see you guys all next time.
All right, Tristin, I'm going to go ahead and read you a line.
And it's going to be the best line
reading you've ever heard in your gosh dang life.
Here's a here's a wacky one.
Let's just throw a wacky one in here.
There's no evidence that we're aware of.
I would love to see it if it exists.
So, Cici.
Oh, and then I disappear in a puff of smoke
and they.
You'll do a better sound effect there.
But that's what I tell Abby. It's like.
It's like a wizard of a wizard of gun safety appears.
Oh, I hate to break it to you, but there's no evidence that we aware of.
That's. That's how it's going to go down.
So just edit that together, and I think that'll make the video.
All right. Bye bye.