police ness
adding page while reading errico malatesta’s at the café:
58
You are deceiving yourself however, my dear friend. Humanity is good or bad according to circumstances. What is common in human beings is the instinct for self-preservation, and an aspiration for well-being and for the full development of one’s own powers. If in order to live well you need to treat others harshly, only a few will have the strength necessary to resist the temptation. But put human beings in a society of their fellow creatures with conditions conducive to well-being and development, and it will need a great effort to be bad, just as today it needs great effort to be good.. t
hari rat park law.. let’s do this first
59
GINO: All right, it may be as you say. But in the meantime while waiting for social transformation the police prevent crimes from being committed.
GIORGIO: Prevent?!
GINO: Well then, they prevent a great number of crimes and bring to justice the perpetrators of those offences which they were not able to prevent.
GIORGIO: Not even this is true. The influence of the police on the number and the significance of crimes is almost nothing. In fact, however much the organisation of the magistrature, of the police and the prisons is reformed, or the number of policemen decreased or increased, while the economic and moral conditions of the people remain unchanged, delinquency will remain more or less constant.
On the other hand, it only needs the smallest modification in the relations between proprietors and workers, or a change in the price of wheat and other vitally necessary foods, or a crisis that leaves workers without work, or the spreading of our ideas which opens new horizons for people making them smile with new hope, and immediately the effect on the increase or decrease in the number of crimes will be noted.
rather.. need something deeper than food, work, et al.. ie: org around legit needs
The police, it is true, send delinquents to prison, when they can catch them; but this, since it does not prevent new offences, is an evil added to an evil, a further unnecessary suffering inflicted on human beings.
And even if the work of the police force succeeds in putting off a few offences, that would not be sufficient, by a long way, to compensate for the offences it provokes, and the harassment to which it subjects the public.
The very function they carry out makes the police suspicious of, and puts them in conflict with, the whole of the public; it makes them hunters of humanity; it leads them to become ambitious to discover some “great” cases of delinquency, and it creates in them a special mentality that very often leads them to develop some distinctly antisocial instincts. It is not rare to find that a police officer, who should prevent or discover crime, instead provokes it or invents it, to promote their career or simply to make themselves important and necessary.
GINO: But, then the policemen themselves would be the same as criminals! Such things occur occasionally, the more so that police personnel are not always recruited from the best part of the population, but in general…
GIORGIO: Generally the background environment has an inexorable effect, and professional distortion strikes even those who call for improvement.
Tell me: what can be, or what can become of the morals of those who are obligated by their salaries, to persecute, to arrest, to torment anyone pointed out to them by their superiors, without worrying whether the person is guilty or innocent, a criminal or an angel?
GINO: Yes… but…
60
GIORGIO: Let me say a few words about the most important part of the question; in other words, about the so called offences that the police undertake to restrain or prevent.
Certainly among the acts that the law punishes there are those that are and always will be bad actions; but there are exceptions which result from the state of brutishness and desperation to which poverty reduces people.
Generally however the acts that are punished are those which offend against the privileges of the upper-class and those that attack the government in the exercise of its authority. It is in this manner that the police, effectively or not, serve to protect, not society as a whole, but the upper-class, and to keep the people submissive..t
You were talking of thieves. Who is more of a thief than the owners who get wealthy stealing the produce of the workers’ labour.. t
You were talking about murderers. Who is more of a murderer than capitalists who, by not renouncing the privilege of being in command and living without working, are the cause of dreadful privations and the premature death of millions of workers, let alone a continuing slaughter of children?. t
These thieves and murderers, far more guilty and far more dangerous than those poor people who are pushed toward crime by the miserable conditions in which they find themselves, are not a concern of the police: quite the contrary!…
GINO: In short, you think that once having made the revolution, humanity will become, out of the blue, so many little angels. Everybody will respect the rights of others; everybody will wish the best for one another and help each other; there will be no more hatreds, nor jealousies… an earthly paradise, what nonsense?!
GIORGIO: Not at all. I don’t believe that moral transformation will come suddenly, out of the blue. Of course, a large, an immense change will take place through the simple fact that bread is assured and liberty gained; but all the bad passions, which have become embodied in us through the age-old influence of slavery and of the struggle between people, will not disappear at a stroke. There will still be for a long time those who will feel tempted to impose their will on others with violence, who will wish to exploit favourable circumstances to create privileges for themselves, who will retain an aversion for work inspired by the conditions of slavery in which today they are forced to labour, and so on.
then to me.. red flag doing it/life wrong.. takes a lot of work ness et al
just need a deeper blue.. and today have means for that
GINO: So even after the revolution we will have to defend ourselves against criminals?
GIORGIO: Very likely. Provided that those who are then considered criminals are not those who rebel rather than dying of hunger, and still less those who attack the existing organisation of society and seek to replace it with a better one; but those who would cause harm to everyone, those who would encroach on personal integrity, liberty and the well being of others.
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graeber man with stick law et al
m of care – may 25 – on andrew johnson’s bureaucrats w guns – on david graeber‘s giant puppets and police ness
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be you. 