DEFUND POLICE

If you're following the news about the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, you're now seeing headlines like these:

• Cops Didn’t Stop the Uvalde School Shooting
• The Police Timeline of the Texas School Shooting Has a Lot of Holes
• Texas school shooting: Questions mount about law enforcement response to massacre

There's good reason for these headlines, and you need to see it for yourself:

Desperate Parents Wait Outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas

As you watch this footage captured by someone outside of Robb Elementary School, keep in mind that kids trapped inside the two adjoining classrooms with the gunman were calling 911 while 19 cops waited in the hallway. Meanwhile, armed and armored cops outside the school were busy pinning a parent to the ground and menacing others with a Taser.

The police aren't paid to protect you, the average person, in an emergency. They aren't even very good at solving crime after the fact. The police are paid to maintain "law & order," with a heavy emphasis on the order part. They are not paid to enforce laws that would protect you or your loved ones. The laws they do enforce are aimed at protecting "order," and that order is this:

The preservation of the wealth and property of the rich and powerful above all else.

It's been this way since the very start of organized policing in this country, and it will continue to be this way for as long as we allow ourselves to be ruled by oligarchs and corporations, as long as we allow ourselves to believe that some lives are more valuable than others. Until and unless we learn to live outside the bounds of fascism, all cops will always be bastards.

It doesn't have to be this way. We have the power to fix this. It starts with taking money from our bloated, militarized, and oppressive police forces and distributing those funds to programs and services that would actually help decrease poverty, crime, and violence. We need to stop funding state-sponsored thuggery and instead fund healthcare, education, infrastructure, and affordable housing. It's that or continue to see more school shootings, more homeless camps and riot police, more preventable, state-sanctioned harm.

DEFUND POLICE