What Do We Want From Law Enforcement?

[sheshe2]

Trigger Warning:

It is clear that the American system of policing does not work and that at bare minimum it needs wholesale rehabilitation.

But in order to accomplish this, we need to establish some foundational facts and answer some critical questions.

Foundational Facts

Whatever happens next, we must continually consider America’s original sins of genocide and chattel slavery. It is often (correctly) pointed out that American law enforcement, especially in the South, was built in part to uphold this evil institution and to help carry out the genocide of the indigenous people who lived in the continental United States for thousands of years.

Every profession in America is complicit in upholding chattel slavery and participating in genocide, from lawyers and doctors to social workers and newspaper editors. So if you are going to argue for getting rid of law enforcement because of its history in the United States with slavery and genocide, you have to abolish the medical and legal professions as well. It’s the same if you are going to argue its present systemic racism.

So much more at the link. What I posted does not touch on it by half.

https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves

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How the medical profession treated blacks.

U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

The U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service.[1][2] The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African-American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States.[3]

The United States Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a historically black college in Alabama. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama.[3] Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected.[2] As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care, but were deceived by the PHS, who disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment.[4] The men who had syphilis were never informed of their diagnosis, despite the risk of infecting others, and the fact that the disease could lead to blindness, deafness, mental illness, heart disease, bone deterioration, collapse of the central nervous system, and death.[5][6][7][8] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the men were told that they were being treated for "bad blood,” a colloquialism that described various conditions such as syphilis, anemia and fatigue. "Bad blood"—specifically the collection of illnesses the term included—was a leading cause of death within the southern African-American community.[2] The men were initially told that the study was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years.[2] After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that by 1947, the antibiotic had become the standard treatment for syphilis.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Public_Health_Service_Syphilis_Study_at_Tuskegee