Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

The headline of this post is the title of a featured op-ed in the New York Times.  Unlike the Tom Cotton op-ed for which the Times apologized in a revealing act of genuflection to its far left editorial staff, I doubt there will be an apology for this one.  But very much like Sen. Cotton’s piece, this one tells the truth:  The Left in this country does not want “reforms” in policing, and only wants to pretend to want them until after the election.  Believe me  —  and more importantly, believe them:  What they want is abolition.  And if the Left-leaning politicians win in November, this is the sort of thing you can expect to see filling every Deputy Assistant Attorney General and every Deputy Assistant Secretary position of the dozens Washington has to offer.  It’s hard to imagine the catastrophe to public safety that will ensue.

The first four paragraphs provide a taste:

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

This view of the police is hardly the antiseptic, “science oriented” account the Left constantly advertises.  It does not take root in any kind of scholarly, balanced or fair-minded view of policing.  It takes root in hate.  There’s no other honest word for it.