The time for fixing the police through reformation, whether from the top or the bottom, through training, through accountability, is past. That opportunity is gone. We’ve been able to track police brutality as a nationwide problem for more than a century. We’ve been able to track systemic racism by law enforcement and the justice system for more than a century. We’ve made all theses suggestions before to no discernible effect.

These are circumstances are engraved in US history. They are not in dispute.

We also know that police-involved violence is a problem. Even though it’s been only popular to track police-involved shootings (which some news agencies now do) since 2014 and non-profits have been tracking them for (considerably) longer, the FBI has been mandated by congress to track them all since the 1970s, and has refused to do so (interestingly without punity). Police departments don’t even diligently file reports on officer-involved shootings, on injury and death, and outside organizations have to track them through coroner reports, obituaries and news reports.

We’ve tried multiple times during this last century to improve matters, and failed every time. We are beyond trying to affect the system we have.

We have two options:

Option a) Dismantle the entire justice system.

~ This includes the DoJ including the hierarchy of attorneys has proven to be just as corrupt, just as racist (feel free to look at the recent LWT on Juries).

~ This includes the courts, in which judges routinely dismiss Blackstone’s ratio and are happy to funnel warm bodies into our privatized penal system. (especially warm bodies of color, but low-income warm bodies work fine)

~ This includes the penal system, facilities of which are nothing short of gulags and labor camps the likes of which offend our conservative sensibilities and how dare we compare our lovely American establishments to them, but the COVID-19 epidemic sweeping through our detainees and inmates have stripped off the facades.

~ This includes our courts of appeals. The political maneuvers to capture the Supreme Court of the United States with Federalist Society agents has demonstrated the corruption at the top isn’t even discreet anymore. Our government by the people is lampooned by the federal system every day.

All that needs to be torn down. Or…

Option b) Wait for public rage to get insurmountable, at which point we’ll accelerate the gunning down of people in the streets and the razing of police precincts and establishment structures to a national state of emergency (which won’t mean much. We’re already sending federal goons to stomp their jackboots on faces forever). We’ll watch / participate as a quarter of our population massacres / gets massacred by another quarter of our population. And considering the current regime is unable to govern fairly, it is also unable to stop the violence, except by killing them all (which it might decide needs to be done, say through an extermination program). We’ll probably have to go through a military dictatorship or five before coming to a society in which guerilla fighters are not routinely firebombing government facilities. It’ll take decades. Maybe a century or two.

Right now, the latter option is the option being chosen by the people and government of the United States. It’s the default option. Police are still killing people and brutalizing protests. They may they succeed in silencing the protests for now, but they’ll keep killing, and we’ll keep watching as it’s revealed that even the organized tracking methods above aren’t catching all the police involved murders. It’s worse than we think, and the unrest will continue to be fueled. Eventually it will turn into organized terrorism.

I don’t think it’ll be a stand up war, but it’ll be like the Axis Occupation of Serbia in which fires, bombs and death are in the news today, and everyone knows someone who recently perished.

We’re heading right into Option b) It may be inevitable, since rich powerful people like being rich and powerful and having a security contingent to keep the peons in their place. If we get too far in dismantling the current law enforcement, they will likely shoot first.

It’ll be messy.

None of us here will have a say over what the end result is. We may get to watch as several radical intermediary regimes rise to power to take control, only to have law enforcement keep shooting people and SWATTING houses and the guerillas keep retaliating. But those regimes will have profound nuclear capacity, which might make the rest of the world nervous. In the cold war, cool heads prevailed, but it’s not a gamble I’d want to raise again, especially as the US economy tanks and our rich and powerful start feeling expansionist.

And during all this time (which could take well over a century) we’ll continue to poison the global ecology advancing towards a state where the human species can no longer be sustained. If you don’t think nature’s hammers are not falling now, wait for 2035 or 2050, and by then the fascist police state problem of the US may have long become moot.

So yeah, all these votes for small change: elect new directors or vote! or train more or add more accountability are votes for Option b) We’ve been proposing all these small change ideas for over a century now, and all that time the police have been murdering people and covering up for it when covering up for it was easier.

Now, the people have internet and phone cameras and can make sure the whole world knows the horrors of interacting with US law enforcement. How they’re getting murdered in the streets by establishment.

Doing anything less than abolishing the current system for a new one is going to default to Option b) above. A vote for reform is a vote for letting police officers murder innocent civilians and SWAT houses until we’re neck deep in civil war, blood and fire.

But feel free to pretend otherwise.