To nip this in the bud, all of my comments are being made within this post are operating that we're living in a world of governments which I view as unjust.
Everybody has to understand that policing is always a mixed bag. Police span from traffic cops to homicide cops. We have cops who spend their days writing tickets to meet quotas and we have cops who spend their days dealing with the latest junky who cooked a baby in a microwave because it was crying too loud.
If we're going to live under these governments, we have to start to be realistic and nuanced about this issue.
Of course, there are people who are far too ready to defend the police.
We can understand that officers have a dangerous job. I wouldn't want to be pulling people over every day knowing that the guy that I just pulled over for a busted tail light could have felony warrants, be armed, and just waiting for me to get to the window before he shoots me in the face.
I can also say from personal experience that any interaction that I've had with traffic cops, except for my car accident a few years ago for which I wasn't at fault, have been negative. I actually had a cop pull me over because my registration sticker in my car had inexplicably fallen off; and, when I showed him that my registration was up to date, he still delighted in intimidating me with threatening to impound my vehicle.
On the flip side, if there were more traffic cops in Las Vegas, maybe Henry Ruggs III wouldn't have killed that woman.
People on the right need to understand that there are cops, far too many, who join because it pays better than their other options and it gives them an excuse to be macho and authoritative. A lot of them believe that the law is always right and the law breakers are always wrong and they feel justified in treating people like scum. The last two years have shown that cops are often willing to enforce unjust laws with alacrity.
One area that I'll paint with a broad brush when it comes to policing is drug enforcement. It helps nobody and hurts everybody. Stop it.
It's really on the "abolish the police" side that we have some real problems though. For the hundredth time, yes, I understand the difference between "defund" and "abolish;" still, I'm not convinced that everybody who says "defund" understands the difference.
Yeah, abolish the guys like Chauvin; but, do you want to abolish the homicide cop who's investigating a serial killer?
What do any of us mean when we say that we should legalize sex work? Yeah, one side is to get the police off of the backs of sex workers and to allow sex workers to report when they've been assaulted without fear of facing charges themselves. The other side is that we're presuming that sex workers would then be reporting those crimes to...wait for it...the police.
All the "abolish the police" people who are also (laughably) "trained Marxists" are the people who hate Kyle Rittenhouse. So, we should abolish the police and, even though Rittenhouse wasn't a vigilante defending property let's pretend that, people shouldn't be allowed to defend their own property either? Okay, when somebody does defend his property with the police force abolished, who is going to arrest him? When the courts issue the arrest warrant, who will serve it? When he skips out on the court date, who will arrest him and take him to court? Are you going to join me on the Anarcho-capitalist side and support the right of people to bear arms and defend themselves and the use of security contractors; or, are we just going to leave the questions of "who's right" in every conflict to who has the biggest fists?
The simplest and easiest step toward improving the problem of policing is to make police less important. We do that by having fewer laws. But, until we get to that place, we have to be willing to understand this issue with nuance. Punish the bad cops and reward the the cops who act with integrity and bravery.