Who is popular today?

The reality is that the police are often more likely to hurt women than to help us. Let’s face the grim facts
As uprisings have spread through American cities in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a once fringe leftwing position has become rapidly mainstream: abolishing the police. Police abolition means different things to different people, but to most activists “abolition” means a radical shrinking, defunding, and disarming of police forces.
The call to “abolish the police”, then, amounts not to a wholesale abandonment of the state’s enforcement of criminal law, but rather to a reimagining of the nature and responsibilities of that enforcement. Many abolition advocates imagine a future in which the police no longer constitute an armed group that surveils peaceful minority neighborhoods or uses force in nonviolent drug and traffic cases. The police, if they exist at all in an abolitionist future, would be smaller, disarmed, and just one of many community interventions to foster public safety. Continue reading...