Oregon State Police tried to conceal this controversial SWAT recruitment email when The Oregonian/OregonLive requested it. Now state police are distancing themselves from it.
I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB
Well…ACAB is not just an assessment of all officers’ individual characters [1]. It’s an assessment of their role in society. Even a polite, protocol abiding, perfectly gentle cop is, on their best day, a member of the enforcement arm of the State, i.e. they are part of the organization that imposes the will of the capitalist class on the rest of the community every single day. Anything else that individual cops or individual police departments do is subordinate to the designated goal of enforcing the will of the capitalist class. In almost all cases where police departments attempt to do things beyond their primary function
I.e., literallyall cops are the enemies of the community by design, regardless of the internal character of an individual officer or department. ACAB communicates this sentiment as well as you can do in 4 letters, i.e. something that can be graffitied in a pinch.
[1] To be clear, like 99.99% of all cops are still shitty people, even if the “cop” portion of their life is assumed to be separable and then ignored. And like you, I really don’t like black and white thinking, so the leftover 0.01% does not represent any cop I have ever personally met or read about; I’m only leaving open the theoretical possibility that there exists a person who would otherwise be a good person if they were not a cop. This observation is almost a corollary of the main point of ACAB, and then plug in the statistics about officers beating their partners and history of police brutality, violating their own protocols, enforcing heinous laws, etc…
Well…ACAB is not just an assessment of all officers’ individual characters [1]. It’s an assessment of their role in society. Even a polite, protocol abiding, perfectly gentle cop is, on their best day, a member of the enforcement arm of the State, i.e. they are part of the organization that imposes the will of the capitalist class on the rest of the community every single day. Anything else that individual cops or individual police departments do is subordinate to the designated goal of enforcing the will of the capitalist class. In almost all cases where police departments attempt to do things beyond their primary function
I.e., literally all cops are the enemies of the community by design, regardless of the internal character of an individual officer or department. ACAB communicates this sentiment as well as you can do in 4 letters, i.e. something that can be graffitied in a pinch.
[1] To be clear, like 99.99% of all cops are still shitty people, even if the “cop” portion of their life is assumed to be separable and then ignored. And like you, I really don’t like black and white thinking, so the leftover 0.01% does not represent any cop I have ever personally met or read about; I’m only leaving open the theoretical possibility that there exists a person who would otherwise be a good person if they were not a cop. This observation is almost a corollary of the main point of ACAB, and then plug in the statistics about officers beating their partners and history of police brutality, violating their own protocols, enforcing heinous laws, etc…