I have this book here, and it’s good.
What’s weird is that it was written in 2017. So, this book
is just a rundown of why we’ve moved past the need for policing and how it is
bad for society in its current form and even in its history it was never good.
It feels like a response to the protests of 2020, but it wasn’t.
Sometimes you read a book and it is really grounded in its
time and place, but this was timely a few years ago and is even more timely
now. It is amazing how you have internalized and normalized the way that policing
happens in this country, the good old United States. You don’t really think
about all the contradictions unless you are at the sharp end of the stick, or
you are paid to study it.
But it’s not good and it doesn’t really keep us safer and is
just more or less designed to protect property over people. It’s sad and even
sadder knowing how entrenched it is so that even the mildest reforms are met
with howls of indignation not just by those who wield the stick, but the oppressed
as well.
