Columbus, OH: police pepper spray a double amputee, then *disconnect and take his prosthetic legs*

[quakerboy]

18. Id go so far as to say many police officers are very nice people and wonderful neighbors

And yet ACAB is still true. While they may individually be mainly wonderful well meaning people who want to make communities a better place, The plethora of bad apples combined with the nearly complete institutional corruption means that not one single officer on duty can be trusted to do the right thing.

As to the rest.. Slowly implementing changes has gotten us nowhere. Its been a work in progress for longer than my life, and yet actually gone the wrong direction over that time. Reform has failed. Its time to end them and start over. Not necessarily in that order exactly.

But even worst case, we dont really need them except maybe as a temporary stopgap until we put a new system into place. And that level of need leaves no reason not to do some extreme budget cutting right now. Any city that cuts any services other than police budget right now is making a mistake.

We can get into my personal experiences and why I dont think we need them to respond to crimes if you like, but thats a longer message than id care to get into if you aren't actively interested.