Reference: https://level.medium.com/the-demand-for-abolition-979c759ff6f
This is just a sampling of the most recent blatherings of this Kaepernick fellow, who obviously has taken a few too many hits to the head during his football career:
The central intent of policing is to surveil, terrorize, capture, and kill marginalized populations, specifically Black folks. . . . We recognize it as anti-Black violence and control while law enforcement and the injustice system see it as essential to the very nature of the job. . . . The political project of anti-Blackness has always been central to the enforcement of laws and legal codes in the United States.
Well, that’s certainly news to most of us. Consequently, he doesn’t just want to “reform” policing, he wants to eliminate police and prisons entirely. He thinks it is a good idea to get rid of public protection agencies and put that money into methods of addressing social ills. He writes:
By abolishing policing and prisons, not only can we eliminate white supremacist establishments, but we can create space for budgets to be reinvested directly into communities to address mental health needs, homelessness and houselessness, access to education, and job creation as well as community-based methods of accountability. This is a future that centers the needs of the people, a future that will make us safer, healthier, and truly free.
It is certainly true that, like teachers, police have had a lot added to their plate during the past 20-30 years. Now they are expected to be social workers, mental health experts, constitutional law experts, and punching bags to boot. And it is certainly true that some of these tasks are better left to people more fully trained to deal with them, rather than relying on armed officers of the law to be first responders to events that do not warrant potential armed intervention or resolution.
But it is folly to believe that the police do not serve significant public purposes, such as protection of the citizenry and the investigation of crime and to deal with the armed criminal element. Always unaddressed in these types of conversation is the fact that the police may kill 1-2 dozen blacks a year – justitifed or not – but the black community itself kills hundreds of its own members each year. Seems to us you’d get a bigger bang for your buck by addressing the root causes of black-on-black violence rather than jumping on the police on these actually quite rare situations of blacks being killed by law enforcement.
Of course, the rejoinder to that is going to be, well, black-on-black violence is caused by systemic racism and white supremacy. Well, bollix to that. The failure of the black community to take any ownership of its own problems and blame them on others, that is, whites, is a fundamental failure in its messaging. If the black community wants to get whites on board with addressing all this alleged systemic racism business and defunding and disestablishing law enforcement, then they’d better get their own house in order first. And, notably, every study or poll we have seen indicates that by a wide margin the black community wants no part of this defunding or disestablishing the police. Kaepernick should talk to his own people rather than committed academics and social justice warriors before he starts to advocate for things that aren’t wanted or needed.