This is just the “bad apples” take, repackaged. You think bad actors are to blame, and that if you weed them out the institution will be cleansed. You miss that the problem is the institution itself and it’s very nature, not individual actors. If you reformed the institution to not be this way… Then you’d effectively be doing abolition, the thing you think that you’re not looking to do. And it would likely be a much more radical change than you envision it to be.
What I mean is that I am rejecting the anarchist notion that there should be no such thing as law enforcement, reformed or otherwise. Because they reject the notion of a state at all.
You think you’re looking to reform it, but I think you’re actually looking to abolish it and you don’t yet realize that. If you understand that the problem is institutional and not individual, and you intend to reshape the institution to correct this, if you are actually effective and complete in those efforts (And sensitive to why a law is enforced rather than merely the act of doing so for it’s own sake) you will probably wind up with something that looks like community defense. Which is fundamentally different from policing in both form and mission.
This is just the “bad apples” take, repackaged. You think bad actors are to blame, and that if you weed them out the institution will be cleansed. You miss that the problem is the institution itself and it’s very nature, not individual actors. If you reformed the institution to not be this way… Then you’d effectively be doing abolition, the thing you think that you’re not looking to do. And it would likely be a much more radical change than you envision it to be.
I am looking for a reform of the institution.
What I mean is that I am rejecting the anarchist notion that there should be no such thing as law enforcement, reformed or otherwise. Because they reject the notion of a state at all.
You think you’re looking to reform it, but I think you’re actually looking to abolish it and you don’t yet realize that. If you understand that the problem is institutional and not individual, and you intend to reshape the institution to correct this, if you are actually effective and complete in those efforts (And sensitive to why a law is enforced rather than merely the act of doing so for it’s own sake) you will probably wind up with something that looks like community defense. Which is fundamentally different from policing in both form and mission.