[in front of a protesting crowd, two characters are talking]
[blue, serious] Violence is never the solution
[purple, smug] Agreed, let’s disarm the police
[blue is now shown angrily gesticulating, sweating bullets]
NO,
NOT
LIKE
THIS
Some countries do have unarmed police (though usually there are special armed units).
It works really well!
Is this some American joke I’m too Norwegian to get? Yes, because our police don’t escalate, they don’t serve as some political tool to harass people for political gains, but they are highly qualified since you only make it to police school if you have high marks in most subjects…
In the US, you could be ruled out of a position as sheriff if you score too high on a damn IQ test.
See a pattern here, yanks? The more intelligent, the higher their chances are of being stable and capable of having empathy.
But then again, you do live in a country where the police used an attack helicopter to bomb a housing complex…
So maybe try community policing for a while?
“How about no police”
Yes, yes, and no laws, right? And no military… surely all these things are great ideas.
“How about no police”
Literally no one of any consequence is saying to do this, and this is in fact a right wing strawman regularly used to justify increased militarization of police and to smear anyone left of center calling for police reform. You should check your sources for bias, because you’re being manipulated to believe something about a nation you do not understand the judicial nuances of to make you engage with ragebait content
What people are calling for is to disarm all police except special response units (like civilized nations), abolish qualified immunity, require malpractice insurance and personal financial penalties for police, codify laws that force harsh punishments on police who knowingly violate the law and basic rights, disband police “unions”, standardize and increase training and licensure requirement across the nation, and move tax dollars away from turning the police into special forces operators and instead put it into community resources that prevent crime in the first place. No one needs to rob the gas station at gunpoint for a few hundred dollars and then get mag-dumped by a feral pig if they’re getting UBI and universal healthcare, make sense?
Oh, and before you tell me I don’t understand police or the criminal justice system and all of its flaws in my own nation because I’m a “dumb yank” or whatever, I was in the CJ field for over a decade. I am very aware of how fucked up it all is and what the solutions are.
Again, no one other than right wing grifters are saying “eliminate all law enforcement”. People understand the solutions a lot better than you think, but getting rid of over 200 years of entrenched racism and corruption when the powers that be actively love the racism and corruption isn’t an afternoon of work.
“Abolish the police” is essentially shorthand for ending the current institution. Community policing IS the ideal goal.
- This movement does need a better slogan. “Defund the police” doesn’t convey the idea properly.
- This cartoon says “Disarm the police”, which is also terrible messaging and a straight up stupid idea. I wouldn’t work as a cop in this country without a gun.
- Police of some kind will always be necessary. Violence and physical power trump everything else, which is why we need people who are allowed to use force on our behalf so that we can run our societies based on rules and not who is the best at violence. Our system allows the people to get together and collectively hire and fire the people that hire and fire the cops we interact with on the streets. I don’t know exactly how that got corrupted or how to fix it.
- We need specific police reforms and the folks leading the groups pushing for these reforms need to work on their messaging so they don’t have people yelling and tweeting things out that make them look like idiots and turning people off. You’ll never win over the boot-lickers, but better messaging could be a game change overall.
I wouldn’t work as a cop in this country without a gun.
99% of police work does not require a gun. You don’t need a gun to sit on an overpass radaring cars, to show up 8 hours late to a burglary to take a note about what items were stolen to then immediately lose it, to harass homeowners about their lawn or the volume knob position in their stereo, to write a ticket and leave it on someone’s parked car… Nothing of that vein requires a gun, and every time guns are added to that mix, someone fucking dies. The cops responded to a kid having an autistic meltdown with a small knife on his hands on his family’s lawn, and the cops literally dumped 3 mags into him FROM OVER A FENCE HE COULDN’T JUMP CAUSE HE WAS SITTING ON THE FLOOR. European countries DO have a subsect of police that is heavily armed AND HEAVILY TRAINED to deal with actual shooting incidents, but they’re only called when absolutely necessary.
Violence and physical power trump everything else, which is why we need people who are allowed to use force on our behalf so that we can run our societies based on rules and not who is the best at violence.
No. You build a better society through cooperation. This is literally about making the state the best at violence so everyone complies. Hard fucking pass, lib.
In the US, you could be ruled out of a position as sheriff if you score too high on a damn IQ test.
The sheriff is an elected position for the record. You mean police officer. Not sheriff.
Don’t police in Norway also have their guns locked?
Let’s get some stats, shall we?
Since 1982, in the US, about 1130 people have died from mass shootings.
American police in that same amount of time has killed over 38000 people.
The problem has never been AR-15s, or the lack of background checks, or anything of the sort. It’s always been the pigs. But liberal suburbans enjoy the benefits of the pigs protecting their property while they kill poorer people, so telling them this makes them stare blankly, or they double down and continue to whine about weapons of war, to which I say: If you’re so concerned with weapons of war being in the streets, why does every law banning AR-15s add exemptions to the police?
That’s just bad statistics.
Not at all. This article with a spreadsheet by Mother Jones show that there’s been about 1128 mass shooting deaths in the US since 1982, using active shooter incident data. And this paper by The Lancer estimates about 30800 deaths by the police since 1982 until 2019. Adding the data from Wikipedia for police killings from the last few years (2019-2026) gives us about 38028 people killed by the American police since 1982, so I was a little off. Even so, taking all that into account, police in america is 33 times deadlier than mass shooters.
Wake up to reality, kid. Your pigs are worse than people who go to schools to kill children because they’re omegasuicidal.
Those statistics can’t be directly compared to each other because the number of mass shooters is significantly lower than the amount of police interactions with the public.
It’s like saying more people die in crashes with combustion vehicles compared to EVs. Of course that’s true because there’s more combustion vehicles on the road.
You need a ratio to do any comparison here.
we’re not calculating how much more dangerous a cop is compared to a mass shooter.
It showcases that Americans are more likely to be killed by a police officer than a mass shooter. and that police must change in a very fundamental way, from abolishing to defunding it and definitely disarm them from lethal weapons, and make it illegal for them to misuse force (criminal prosecution for assault with no police immunity)
we’re not calculating how much more dangerous a cop is compared to a mass shooter.
Then why, in your very next sentence, do you compare how dangerous a cop is to a mass shooter?
I’m not saying you’re wrong at all, I’m saying the figures being used don’t support that assessment. They’re just numbers without any meaningful context to compare them with.
How do you feel about doctors killing 50-100x as many Americans per year as cops do?
Do you make the same calls to abolish medicine and hospitals?
it means you’re an idiot. the cops aren’t preventing death with limited success, they are the ones killing people.
Abolishing cops (use funding for actual community) will lower the amount of death they cause. Abolishing doctors (already a thing given it’s provatised and therefore not even in the same conversation) will only increase death.
Please take a chance to think before you type
What question are you answering with that?
How do you feel about XYZ?
“it means you’re an idiot.”
or
Do you XYZ?
“it means you’re an idiot.”
Lots of people want medical practice to be changed. If you’re fat, a woman, a POC, a trans person, or neurodivergent, you’d know why a lot of those people just don’t fucking trust doctors at all.
I haven’t heard a single person call for doctors to be abolished, despite them being 50-100x more deadly, and yes, despite them being just as bigoted as cops, as you rightfully point out.
This is about both of those as a collective, not per capita. The context is pretty clear here.
The context here is throwing out numbers unrelated to each other and coming to conclusions based on feelings.
Making it a per capita ratio is how you add the context.
When we’re trying to do an Apples to Apples comparison, implying cops are more deadly than mass shooters, context is important.
Put a kid in front of a mass shooter, they’ll shoot them.
Put a kid in front of a cop, they’ll shoot them 0.00001% of the time (citation needed, feel free to do the math on total police encounters vs. shootings of children).
That’s bad, but to state or imply that they’re even close to as bad is ridiculous and makes people interested in police reform look ridiculous.
implying cops are more deadly than mass shooters, context is important.
Context doesn’t bring dead people back to life. Reducing higher numbers of dead to a “per capita” statistic is straight up lying to dismiss the pain of communities destroyed by police violence.
Put a kid in front of a cop, they’ll shoot them 0.00001% of the time
Unless they’re black and holding something, on which case it becomes 100%.
makes people interested in police reform look ridiculous.
You cannot reform the police. If you heard what they say about civilians in a daily basis you’d be demanding all of their heads on pikes like everyone who wants ICE to be abolished and every agent trialed for crimes against humanity.
Context doesn’t bring dead people back to life.
True, but refutes nothing I said.
Reducing higher numbers of dead to a “per capita” statistic is straight up lying to dismiss the pain of communities destroyed by police violence.
I don’t think you know what “lying” means.
Unless they’re black and holding something, on which case it becomes 100%.
A straight up lie. See earlier point about ridiculous arguments.
You cannot reform the police.
You definitely can. Virtually all societies have improved their police over the short and long term.
If you heard what they say about civilians in a daily basis you’d be demanding all of their heads on pikes like everyone who wants ICE to be abolished and every agent trialed for crimes against humanity.
No I wouldn’t. I generally do not call for the execution of assholes, let alone displaying their corpses to out-do them on cruelty.
police in america is 33 times deadlier than mass shooters.
AI Overview Estimates of mass shooters in U.S. history vary widely based on definitions, with studies identifying roughly 172 to 298 “public mass shooters” between 1966 and 2024.
As of 2023, there were approximately 720,652 law enforcement officers in the United States, according to Statista.
Yea you’re just bad at statistics. Which is not mutually exclusive with ACAB btw.
Like this is the reason math teachers don’t accept just the answer. One can arrive at the correct answer while still being terrible at math.
Not each individual police officer, police as an institution is more deadly than society’s baseline rate of mass shooters. Surely that was obvious from the context.
Buddy ACAB all the way. But you and everyone upvoting you are shit at math. Hive mind af.
edit: Especially your bit about the AR15. WTF does that have to do with your stats? 90% of the police shootings I see are with handguns.
What I meant with that is that all the gun control push to ban AR-15s because they’re used in active shooter incidents from liberals is bullshit because there is a much bigger problem of police violence in America that suburban liberals refuse to address because they benefit from it.
Also, you posting an AI overview immediately makes me think you’re posting in bad faith.
AI overview immediately makes me think you’re posting in bad faith.
I’m literally just agreeing with the guy saying this is a bad use of statistics. Glad to see the reddit hive mind is alive and well.
I think you’re responding to the wrong dude. I’m not OP.
You replied to me and are defending OP so don’t complain that i’m throwing salt at your math skills.
The fact that your NOT op makes it worse. Means I nailed it with the hive mind accusation.
You defs missed the part about getting the right answer with the wrong math. I’m not arguing that police aren’t deadlier than shooters. I’m pointing out the math he used to back it up is bullshit.
you’re using statistics to absolve an evil institution.
Absolve? lmfao hive mind idiots. No wonder Americans let this happen to themselves.
Violence seems to usually be the solution. Waiting for the protests to no longer be peaceful.
Violence is always a solution. It’s just usually the wrong one being applied by incompetent jackasses against the wrong people.
I like how here it say disarm instead of defund or disband. But then disarming the police in US mean police is basically a sitting duck when shit happened because there’s like bazillion of people owning gun. I wonder how’s that gonna work.
like it works in nations where the cops don’t go around with tools to murder people.
Those nations have heavy regulated gun laws though.
and do they have mass shootings on the daily?
That’s not the point. The point is that you can’t have a police force that’s weaker than the criminals.
yes you can. have a special unit for those cases. the goons on the streets don’t need firearms.
Cops don’t need the option to murder me when giving me a speeding ticket.
Police in my country wear guns.
They never use them because criminals don’t shoot at cops.
You maybe get 1 crazy person per year that deserves to have a weapon drawn at them.
Your argument implies the inhumane and corrupt American police forces, which are an exception.
I dont think they’re saying the concept doesn’t work, I think they just mean that its to easy for a bad actor to legally get a gun in the US
In this case, the police are the bad actors getting guns.
maybe without them, they wouldn’t feel so comfortable escalating every situation.
Correct answer. Even in countries where by and large police aren’t armed, they still have a section of specific very heavily trained police who are armed who can be called in if shit goes down. For sitting on an overpass radaring cars, or showing up 16 hours late to write an incident report for the burglary they failed to stop, or harassing some homeowner about the length of his lawn or the volume knob position on his stereo, or any of innumerable other things the police spend most of their day doing they don’t need to be toting around guns. The majority of Americans don’t, and somehow most of us manage not to get shot on a daily basis despite theoretically rubbing elbows with most of the same criminals that the cops do.
By also disarming the people
Quite well from my perspective.
