964
"bUt iT's oNLy tHe dAnGeRoUs oNeS!"
I loathe law-and-order rhetoric in any nation, but most certainly in America. Tough On Crime policies have led to the dumbest fucking things that have ever existed in the United States. People are voting for a serial liar and conman who will probably ship them off to Dijbouti or El Salvador just to stay away from someone who broke the law once, or who is likely to break the law. The lesson we should all learn is to stop going nuts over "crime waves". If the news claims that crime is "going through the roof" or that there is an "epidemic of crime", make sure to remember:
- There are way, way bigger threats to public safety than a few gangbangers, for example tech companies, evangelicals, and Nazis.
- Criminals are people too. They have hopes and dreams, motives, economic conditions, and opinions. Consider why someone is committing a murder or robbery, rather than assuming it's because of greed.
- There are for-profit security forces and prisons that all benefit from fear of crime. The news will often blow crime out of proportion to satisfy their sponsors, and downplay authoritarianism likewise.
- Police officers are often just as dangerous as criminals. It's better to think of crime as a situation that can be escalated and de-escalated (cops are notoriously bad at this) than as the result of Bad People who need Good People to stop them.
- There are a lot of good resources for reading about crime in a productive way. Although I am not quite Anarchist, the Anarchist Library has a lot of thought-provoking material on what makes law just and unjust. There's a big difference between "murder is wrong because the Law says so" and "murder is wrong because killing people is wrong".
- Some people are so evil that they need to be killed, i.e. Real Estate CEOs.
_portrait.jpg){kind=link}