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Now that Sam Adams is police commissioner what is he going to do about the unaccountable PPB?  We now have three citizens shot and killed by police in three months. This is outrageous. When are these cops going to be fired so the community can feel safe again? When is the Portland Police Association going to be held responsible for shielding out of control and unaccountable police that are endangering our community as oppose to threatening and putting them at risk.

posted 3 years ago
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contiued from above:

For this reason it is not surprising when well meaning police label young black men as inherently criminal. It is their training and institution that requires them to do so. It is also not surprising when police are unable to deal adequately with real community safety issues such as mental healthy crises, domestic violence, child abuse, and environmental pollution. They have not been trained to provide safety but rather to act as a militarized force keeping people within an acceptable range of behaviors. In the safety situations above, the line around acceptable behavior becomes very blurred and complicated. It takes many more skills than just brandishing a gun and hauling people to jail to deal with the majority of problems faced within our communities.

Unfortunately for many well meaning police officer, they are the front lines of a much larger problem. The most obvious symptoms of this problem is the lack of humane and satisfying ways to provide ourselves with healthy and sustainable livings. Most of the “criminal” problems in our society stem from our collective inability to provide for the basic needs of our fellow community members from adequate healthcare to healthy housing to fulfilling work. We can continue to narrow our scope of problem solving and continue to try deal with symptoms of a problem rather than looking at the larger issue, but our interests would best be served by looking at police abuse in a much larger context and putting our energy and time towards changing the underlying problem from which an institution such as the police has arisen.

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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Including both a historical and broader context for policing and its purpose can help frame this debate in a much more useful way. Historically the institution of policing was created during slavery and after its abolition as a force to control slaves and former slaves and enforce a color line between whites and blacks. The default position of police at this time was that slaves and later freed blacks were always at fault in a crime and that whites were not just innocent but rather un-deputized police.

Over time as people of color received citizenship, voting rights, and slavery was abolished, the overt policies of police as maintaining a color line were dropped while also broadening the scope of its mission to become one of keeping inline those considered “anti-social” or outside the norms of societal behavior. The inherent problem with this mission is how these norms are defined and what is consider “anti-social”. While many well meaning police exist within police bureaus, the real problem is the inherent nature of policing in our society and the formation of policing as an institution. As an institution, policing is at its core reactionary, racist, and repressive. Its purpose being to enforce a definition of society and acceptable behavior that corresponds with the identity of very few citizens of our country. The acceptable definition of society being white upper class usually men and the acceptable behavior being the behavior of this group of people. For example, why is it that rates of white collar crime have been rising more than most other forms of crime yet the rates of arrest, indictment, and imprisonment of these types of criminals are very low? Because police are not looking for white collar criminals...they are the very definition of civilized society that their job is to enforce.

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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