What’s the worst year for homicides in Oklahoma City?
Obviously, it’s 1995, the year of the bombing. In a single day, there were 168 homicides.
So what’s the worst year for homicides in NYC?
Officially, it’s 1990. Unlike OKC, the 2600 World Trade Center deaths due to a terrorist murder never made it onto any crime statistics, so those numbers lie outside of crime statistics despite the irrefutability of the harm done.
In the same way, it’s only by carving out exceptions for harm caused by police, jailers, and prison guards, and by considering irrelevant all the harm done to people who are questioned, arrested, and incarcerated that our “crime” rates are as low as they are right now. Because we don’t care about the people harmed in this way, a lot more of it happens overall. What else would you expect when there’s no consequences for the perpetrators whatsoever.
(CW:SA) We know that only about 1 in 200 sexual assaults will result in actual incarceration. But that’s without factoring in all of the sexual assaults that happen *because* people are imprisoned and either not worthy of being protected from other imprisoned people or actively preyed on by the guards.
Consider also that forcibly jamming digits into someone’s orifices against their consent would be considered a form of sexual assault in most any other context, but it’s habitual in prisons in the name of cavity checks. (/CW)
The same goes with violence: in Seattle this week, there have been dozens of simple assaults, aggravated assaults, and assaults with a deadly weapon that have gone completely unpunished during the protests, but it’s not people in their homes; it’s police officers in riot gear escalating confrontations and hurting protesters. However, those will never show up in a crime statistic and therefore are treated as no harm.
So to the specific question “What would you do without police if someone broke into your house?”, that seems like a heck of a question given how Breonna Taylor just died. Police may not be likely to break into you’re home if you’re white and particularly if you’re of a certain class, but they’re breaking into a lot of houses right now. They’re threatening a lot of people with deadly weapons right now. As of 2015, law enforcement asset forfeiture was taking more from people than burglary was.
Absolutely, we need to invest more in public education, stop kids from getting exposed to lead, and have a strong social safety net.
But we also need to defund the police because their existence hurts a lot of people, we just don’t include it when we count, like the deaths on September 11.
ADJ 