Anybody that looks at the structure of this society can see that is an extremely unfair, unequal arrangement. The question is how and why does it survive? It survives because the powers that be, the state, have several lines of defence to prevent any real change taking place. One of the first lines of defence is the standardised education system, teachers are the soft police of society. Where they fail to get acquiescences and acceptance of the system, the second line of defence comes in, the police, followed up by the judicial system and prison. When these lines of defence fail, the state will have no hesitation in bringing troops onto the streets to repress the people and any demands they make for real change to the structure of society.
It is obvious that the first line of defence, the "education system" is failing, as we are seeing more brutal and militarised policing taking place in countries across the globe. The police's duty, first and foremost, is to protect the power and property of the wealthy and the status-quo.
This is an extract from an article on the police, from the latest issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
Anarchists know (or should know) that individuals who enter institutions usually come face to face with possible conflicts between institutional norms and their personal integrity. Those who remain end up perpetuating those norms regardless of any possible intention to alter them. But the observation that institutions change people is not the whole story. Power corrupts, but the already corrupt and the easily corruptible seek to join powerful institutions precisely so they will have professional opportunities to exercise their corruption.Read the full article HERE:
The laughable institutional excuse of supposed bad apples continues to be deployed at press conferences. These supposed bad apples are the ones who join the police in order to harass queers, beat up detainees, demand freebies from sex workers, steal from dealers, frame suspects, punitively deploy crowd control weapons, exercise disproportionate violence, and antagonize and terrorize non-compliant people — up to and including murder. .And who then have the bad taste to get caught. But no Field Training Officer has to teach them how to do these things. When there’s a too-big- to-be-ignored episode of alleged misconduct, all the good cops and their supporters line up with the bad apples, making every person standing with them complicit. Institutional self-preservation doesn’t dissipate even a little in the wake of embarrassing multi-million dollar settlements to survivors of police abuse.
