Damn, larceny looking easy as fuck to get away with.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Abolition of police and prisons
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Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.
See Critical Resistance's definitions below:
The Prison Industrial Complex
The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.
Abolition
PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
From where we are now, sometimes we can't really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn't just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It's also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.
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Honestly I think as a "regular citizen", this is somewhat aligned with what I want the police to deal with? Like assault, robbery, murder, they're somewhat dealt with. The big problem is with Rape, but theft being the vast majority of crime with the vast minority of effort, that's totally fine.
I guess my views on police have strayed from the norm over the last several years. Just about the only style of policing I respect now is what Victor Cizanckas was trying to build in Menlo Park several decades ago.
The cops under him went back to the trend towards militarisation as soon as he was gone though, the roots of oppression run too deep for one man to change the culture.
What do I want from police? End the 1033 program and everything like it in other countries, divest all military equipment and uniforms, return to Peelian principles at a minimum or demilitarise entirely, ban police unions, and invest in struggling communities rather than funding cops to oppress them. And fire anyone who ever attended a David Grossman seminar and liked it. For starters.
They are way more successful in doing what they are actually for: Class struggle and keeping systems of opression in place.
Surely there is more recent data than 20 years ago.
This was what the video used and the research paper this is from is from 2020. I did a brief search to find something more recent but wasn't able to find anything that gave these statistics. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to look away from these figures because they're so damning. If you can find better please post an update.
Fair, I appreciate you investigating just because I’m being picky.
Love to see this kind of data but I have two questions:
- Cleared means the case led to charges, whether convicted or not, right?
- How are there more convictions than arrests for rape and sexual assault? Surely to be convicted you must have been formally arrested? A quarter of all rape convictions being in absentia doesn't seem likely either.
Can anyone help me understand?
That's not the burn you think it is
Care to elaborate?
It would be significantly worse if the conviction rate was 100%, or close to it, as that would likely mean a lot of innocent people getting caught in the crosshairs?
That still implies that police suck at their job (not that I want them to be good at it). But also it's at the other end of the spectrum, should we be expecting the conviction rate to be around 50%?
You don't want to target any percentage.
Any charge should be tried on its merits, not as a score card.
That's true when talking about trials in general. This chart is more about the police accurately nabbing criminals. Hypothetically, if they were perfect at their job (find the person responsible, sufficient evidence, no corruption) wouldn't we expect close to 100%?
Though this discussion doesn't matter that much to me anyway. I prefer the argument that the linked video lays out. TL;DW crime and policing don't exist in a communist society, harm reduction and justice should have much more nuance than is currently given. (the latter part being similar to your point)