particularly over these last few days, everyone seems okay with blatantly unveiling their political sensibilities (whether they realize that's what they're doing or not, we found out a lot about our "friends" this week).

so here's one of my beliefs: ACAB. all of 'em. each and every.

your buddy from college. your uncle. my uncle (true story). eww, your husband?

yes that one pig gave you a ride home and let you off with a warning and comes into your work sometimes with a smile and a joke...on the other hand, the Goebbels family had a great strudel recipe and it's not the first thing you think of now is it?

whether their malfeasance is intentional or incidental doesn't really matter in effect...the fact is that anyone on that side of the "blue line" has chosen their career poorly and with inadequate consideration of socioeconomic reality.

even "good cops" enable the rest to operate...a bad apple SPOILS THE BUNCH.

you learn this stuff early...they try to bash you over the head with a stick for skateboarding on the wrong section of Earth's surface, they show up to the party and kill the vibe (and maybe the dog), they detain you for a few hours because you "fit a description" that could have covered most other teenagers in a 10-block radius.

in fact, I was educated even earlier than that...right along with stuff like "make sure you tie your shoes before you start running around," "look both ways before you cross" and "make sure you turn off the lights before you leave" was "minimize your interactions with police."

they were kind enough to leave the subtext unspoken..."or you could fucking die."

as an adult, you see it: they will respond to your call, fill out a form, and laugh about it later...you'll be lucky if they don't victimize you again on your way out.

their haircuts are stupid.

they are class traitors just the Gestapo...who also had great pay, full benefits, and formal unis.

never trusted mfs in suits, even as a kid. I was a pretty sharp kid, turns out...they will place you in the gears of the machine for a few extra coins.

cops are, as a profession, fucking fascists...and as we all know fascism starts at home. in the old country, almost half of them beat their wives...and that's just the ones brazen enough to admit it in a poll for eventual public consumption.

you want a good cop, check a couple meters south of ya. maaaaaybe in the retirement records...but statistically not.

you see, in a past life I worked in the legal field, which is in many places a machine that turns 4th graders into passive income for private prison investors (which include the companies that supply them, ever think about how much money you can make selling phone cards and ramen noodles at inflated prices to a captive audience?).

that's where I got an up-close look at the gears of the machine, the broken homes and shards of bone left in its wake.

I watched rap sheets grow into life stories...some bird-chested kid would get caught pocketing some overvalued widget and catch a retail theft charge, spend a few months in juvie, then the next 40 years getting locked up again and again because there ain't a lot of 9-5 options open to the Convicted.

in a social setup where they say petty crime hurts local economies most, I watched conviction rates AND prices rise continuously...as points of pride!

I watched, day after day, my coworkers head off to court with their stack of case files for the day piled dozens high, as if the accused could expect their publicly appointed counsel to mount any meaningful defense in the ~7 minutes they had to dedicate to each case...make peace with your plea deal, yeah?

...and this, my friend, is why the old country leads the league in "prisoners per capita"...for all the talk of "strongmen" and "authoritarian states" in this world, you're statistically most likely to end up caged in the Land of the Free...as true in the 45 Era as it was before and most likely will be after.

it is Benson, Stabler, Peralta, that one dog from Paw Patrol, and the real-life everyday beat cops that inspire them that work to uphold this system each day.

oh indeed, there's no shortage of reasons why you yes you could end up stored in an impenetrable concrete box at great taxpayer expense. 

you can be arrested for being homeless...maybe for "loitering," which is the illegal act of inhabiting a human body at a location. 

you can also be arrested for stuff like "disturbing the peace," "disorderly conduct," or "interference," which is whatever tf a cop says it is.

hell, you can be arrested for resisting arrest, even if, like, you shouldn't be getting forcibly restrained and involuntarily transported.

they protect not people, but interests. they serve not society, but capital.

they will bust your strike...as in physically disrupt it and attack participants, ask around in West Virginia.

they will drag you out of your home in the dead of night and ship you to a place you can't point out on a map.

they will murder you in the streets under broad daylight and be praised for their effective police work.

it is they who stand guard at the slaver plantation, who will turn you away from fresh water after a hurricane on threat of death, who will make sure no one hurts the shooter in the school until his kill streak is over. you have seen all of these things come to pass.

...but the worst thing about them is that they cannot accomplish their stated goal as currently implemented. as overfunded as they are--the NYPD is a mid-sized European army--they are not equipped to bring us a better future.

the world we want won't come out of a concrete cage. enduring positive change comes from stuff, housing, food, stability. 

you can tell a lot about someone from how they view a fellow human sleeping outside on the sidewalk: people post every day how angry and unstable they are in the morning before they've had their coffee...can you imagine the hangriness from starving in the streets? "you're not you when you're hungry," isn't that it?

everybody would probably be way cooler if they lived recognizably modern human lives.

...so for me, "crime" is an interesting concept.

like, the enforcement of this stuff is super selective: for the crime of causing an actual half-decade shooting war, the Confederates got forgiveness on Christmas.

Nazis mapped out the Holocaust, fled the results of their diligent work, and got promoted to key positions around the world.

Netanyahu presides over a genocide today and tomorrow, passes through airports freely and is warmly received in many places.

J6ers got full pardons when they should have been full of lead...at least, if the law is what it purports to be.

...but it ain't, now is it? 

we all know the premium version of life, the one behind the Big Paywall, takes off all the restrictions. typical modern subscription service.

cops don't apply to the rich and powerful, the long arm of the law is too short to box with the false gods of our time.

hey, remember last year when that one guy was arrested for his 34 felony offenses, tried in a court of law, and sentenced by a judge to...nothing at all?

if laws are just rules for the poor and powerless, then the only purpose cops serve is as the right fist at the end of empire's global reach; the smoking gun in the left hand of the body politic.  

it all has to end. it starts with them. 

I am not sorry for seeing that...if this makes us not friends, we never were.

all power to The People.

--Flor!