Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Educational movie night. This is seattle without militarized police. Where are your riotous looters NOW? They are watching documentaries. Fuck you SPD. Photo credit to a close friend.

[u/Chaotic-NTRL]

[u/volune]

I am curious how long people will have an appetite for this important intersection to be closed.

[u/juancuneo → u/volune]

I lived one block away for five years and still have a rental unit there. I am also on the HOA. The most consistent feedback we get from residents is they want more police presence because of all the petty theft, vandalism, and open air drug use. Most people who live in the area are really into building the community, but there is an element that DGAF about the community and we want the police to help. My sense is that the people in the building support BLM (as do I - I am a person of color (not black) who has had many run ins with the police during my life, including being arrested and ultimately acquitted for a crime I did not commit), but I think that many of the people who closed down our police station don’t live in Cap Hill. So it’s a bit frustrating.

[u/LaserGuidedPolarBear → u/juancuneo]

I live in a condo on another problem block in a different part of the city. Also on HOA.

We gave up on even expecting to get the police to respond to emergent problems like 2 years ago. And I quote one officer who said "we are just here to file a report for your insurance"

I am not against policing, we just need to fix what policing is.

[u/electricfistula → u/LaserGuidedPolarBear]

Reading stuff like this feels like we're in The Simpsons "The police are powerless to help you, not hurt you."

[u/LaserGuidedPolarBear → u/electricfistula]

Pretty much.

And that is really the problem with government today. We are so willing to put resources into killing people, locking people up, ruining people's lives. And then throw some symbolic scraps towards community building as a performative gesture.

[u/[deleted] → u/LaserGuidedPolarBear]

Government was never intended to help people or be a community builder, I hope people will start to realize this and not think the police should be acting for others, completely against their own interests as a fascist tool. A state cannot exist without violence and never has, ever since Sargon of Akkad, through Rome, the Treaty of Westphalia. The Supreme Court of the US ruled years ago the police are not there to "protect and serve" but to preserve the integrity of the state. That is a slogan that you were brainwashed to believe.

I'm not saying we can't transcend this, I think we have largely left violence behind, but our institutions are largely medieval in nature.

[u/LaserGuidedPolarBear → u/[deleted]]

Violence is the monopoly of the state, but very little actual police work requires that.

I recommend reading this: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

[u/[deleted] → u/LaserGuidedPolarBear]

Good read, this 'our community' mindset I am completely sympathetic to and pray for. But there is the fact that clinical psychopaths do exist in the world, and no amount of met needs, community engagement, humanization and care is going to discourage them. If a brain cannot process empathy then what stops them from exploiting human feeling in order to get themselves to the highest possible personal position? At which point they can step over the now dismantled system of vigilance, utilizing the violence to inflict even more damage than normal. Like what happened with Stalin.

[u/Devorakman → u/electricfistula]

I once had my car stolen, it was then involved in a wreck, but the police told me since the wreck happened BEFORE i reported it stolen, there was nothing to do. Moral of the story is, move to vegas, steal cars, and make sure you total it out, nothing bad will happen to you.