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[return to "ACLU sues Minnesota for police violence against the press"]
1. fallin+ky[view] [source] 2020-06-03 21:24:47
>>sorami+(OP)
I’m pretty sure the problem of police abusing their power is never going away, so long as we have policing in its current form rather than some sort of unarmed or lightly armed community helpers. The reason they are always equipped with lethal weapons and so quick to use them is that their role is mostly to protect the people who have property from the people who don’t. And in America that’s always going to have a racial element. Black people in America are mostly still used as cheap labor- human capital stock. Unless they are willing to start redistributing wealth away from the super wealthy towards the least wealthy the ruling strata will always have to use violence to maintain order. And that means journalists too.

That is why if you want to highlight who is holding the real power and address the issues of inequality, the best place to start is to attack the police directly. Because it’s something that they are structurally unable to fix without fixing a whole bunch of other stuff first, and it places the focus right in the center of where the violence is coming from. It forces a confrontation by making a demand that they cannot ignore but also cannot actually address.

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2. smiley+tP[view] [source] 2020-06-03 23:02:22
>>fallin+ky
> I'm pretty sure the problem of police abusing their power is never going away

The next handful of years is going to be interesting. Between civil forfeiture, marijuana decriminalization, self driving cars (and for the shorter term, coronavirus reduced driving) - police departments will be losing a significant amount of their current income streams; especially if unemployment returns back to its lows.

Everybody looks at automation in the food or retail industries; or health administration and insurance; but we have a police and prison system designed with illegal marijuana; that could shrink to 1/8th of it's size with relatively few changes in laws (drug law repeal, mandatory minimums, crime act).

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