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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
This is a pretty shitty thing to be able to do, and this would absolutely be a cause worth fighting for...
...the problem is that the whole concept of police reform is now inextricably linked in the minds of at least half the populace with total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology. The whole subject is fucking radioactive now. I wouldn't lend my name to any such cause, for fear that it would, like nearly all causes, massively expand its mandate beyond the very specific issue I want to correct. I don't want to empower any of the other garbage.
In the UK, we have different problems, in that our police don't spend any time investigating actual crimes like burglaries, but will happily waste days and weeks chasing down speech crimes on twitter or illegal football stream watchers, but there's the same obstacle to overcoming them. To even breach the subject would require, at least to me, some kind of cast-iron guarantee that whoever was overseeing the reform was 120% free of any sort of wokery whatsoever, and that's something I can say about almost nobody in our political class. Myself and a lot of other right-wing people I talk to sense the formalisation of the two-tier quasi-racialised justice system that we already suspect exists is pretty imminent.
The trust is completely gone, and there's very little I can think of that would bring it back.
Here is a good punting off point for this video. It's Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray at The Hill arguing over a 13 year old carjacker that was shot and killed. Frankly, they get off in the weeds super quick with their speculation. The key exchange happens around 2:39 when Robby says nobody is obligated to stand by and allow themselves to be victimized, and Brie emphatically insists yes you do.
I see Brianha's perspective echoed endlessly from progressive sectors. They think the slow, plodding, overburdened criminal justice system should be the sole arbiter of criminal consequences. Criminals shouldn't even suffer the immediate physical consequences of their own criminal acts.
And it gets even worse when they argue about the severity of the crime, with Brie taking a perspective that carjacking isn't so bad around 5:15. It happens all the time. You shouldn't get killed over it. Robby of course retorts horrified that carjacking has become so normalized, that people need their cars. A world were you never know if your car will be where you left it is a worse world.
But it's not the Robby's of the world that will determine what the police reform will be. It's the Brie's. We see that amply in every American city post BLM. It's not even a question. The policies are already being experimented with, or just rolled out unilaterally, to disastrous results for normal people. So yeah, I can't be for "police reform", and I no longer trust anyone promoting it.
At 3:00, Joy Gray repeatedly asks whether a car is worth more than someone's life. I'm more than happy to bite that bullet and say, "yes, my car is much more valuable than the life of a robber, the robber's life has negative moral value and ending their life is a net good". I don't really know where to proceed from there in any conversation with someone that doesn't share that moral intuition because it seems entirely clear and obvious to me.
And it’s worth noting lots of people would agree with you, even if it may not be a within-Overton view. One of these days the motte should have a discussion about widely popular but outside the Overton window views, and what they generally reflect about society. But today is probably not that day.
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Those are some interesting polls. 64% think the death penalty can be morally justified, 60% say they favor it, so only 4% are balking on practical grounds ... despite 78% saying they don't think there are adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death. I guess that means a minimum of 75% of Americans think there aren't adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death but also that the safeguards are adequate to ensure that not too many innocent people will be put to death? I guess that might still be self-consistent, but only if we ascribe a level of non-binary thinking and consideration-of-tradeoffs that I don't usually associate with polling of the general population.
I’m totally willing to believe that the red tribe elite thinks this way but doesn’t have the vocabulary to express it. An actual conversation I overheard between regional red tribe elites- lower gentry or upper kulaks and their family members here- was almost literally that, it just happened to use a different set of words.
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