Annotated 45-14
FB: Cop feels.
Lia, looking out the window in Panel 3: “Well, shit, that looked fun. If I’d known he was going to do that, I would’ve asked him if I could do it.”
I’ve seen Flo use an “ACAB” avatar, and Xan is normally as anti-government-authority as our characters get (and remember, Guilded Age has characters who are literally going to overthrow the governments that were once theirs). So Xan’s lines here, written by Flo, are surprising on a number of levels. But one reason I prefer writing fiction to squawking around on social media is that fiction allows for a lot more nuance. Real life is messy and isn’t well served by the simplified, stark positions that online life encourages us to take. Xan seems to be groping toward understanding that as he sifts through his feelings here. From our screen junkie, that’s major growth.
Cops can and always have served a purpose. The issue is that the purpose was also always slightly corrupted by things like money. Cops are paid with tax money, but act like private security, and often are used as weapons against the weak. Homeless in particular are regularly pushed away by cops and that’s ignoring everything they to do minorities.
This is coming from someone whose father and grandfather were cops. Police have strayed far from the ideal we would hold them too and were never used for that ideal, not really. The only reason things seem different now is there’s a lot more light being put on things they’ve been doing for years.
How do I know? My father got away with trying to kill me because, in a matter of minutes from arriving, they were treating him like an old friend. He was states away from the place he served as a cop and they didn’t care.
yikes…
Now, now Xan. We don’t know that. Even rotten cops have answer calls sometimes. And sometimes even rotten cops get splatted.
Yeah. Rotten cops might actually be more cocky about their guns and power and so more Likely to underestimate JJ… (hey, I can dream).
Problem is that who polices the Police is an age old question, and having Police is better than the likely alternatives (martial law, or lots of competing private security firms that inevitably end up owned by the rich – either persons or corporations). I suspect more training in dealing with people and less in armed conflict would help in the US. Active and responsive community policing with the genuine involvement of communities seems to be cost effective when done worldwide, but there are always some folks who don’t think it “tough on crime” or something, so like prison reforms that are demonstrated to reduce recidivism it seems hard to implement politically. It is always sadly interesting that the same politicians who want to break other unions seem to love kowtowing to police unions that are terribly prone to the equivalent of regulatory capture and are complicit in the problem.
There’s a lot going on in the US and big part of it being trust issues. The whole nation would need to do some sort of trust fall exercise.
But yeah, the shoot first and ask questions later isn’t easy to handle when the people that need be questioned tend to shoot first too. Like gun control, the thing is, remedying it is not easy and there will be hell of a lot of problems for a long time if they want to fix either. Like really fixing them.
But it can be changed in long term. It can be fixed. But like fixing a bone that has set itself wrong, you need to break it a little first to have it start setting properly again.
Too bad even that costs the arm and the leg you’re trying to reset to begin with…
But heck. Other countries have guns. Other countries have police. Our even has amazing singing ones in social media. Sure there are aholes here too, but they are not the majority.
Things could be different in States too. It’d “just” take A LOT of hard work. And it would probably be painful for a while.
Point was Xan had a very black and white view of the world and had already labeled authority figures as the bad. I mean, Xan is just showing empathy though it’s kinda ham fisted imo but it gets the point across why they don’t call the cops later. They all feel responsible for what happened.
And Xan, for all his faults and merits, ain’t dumb. He can recognize actual good deed and effort to do better when he sees it, even if he wouldn’t want believe it when witnessing it.
It’s definitely one of his better qualities.
But still. Could have been couple of bad cops that got cold. It’s a sorta win-win. Either they proved that there can be such a thing as decent cop, or they got just stopped from doing any further bad.
Wow, just throwing the phone out the window? I mean, I get that it’s tainted by being uzed to contact police and all that, but thoze older phones were often surprizingly durable. You should really take more time to ensure it’s fully nonfunctional and then dispoze of it properly.
Think Xan just wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible as tossing it is faster than taking it apart. It’s also visually dramatic, why so movies do it.
I thought that too. But if it’s a burner, paid with cash, and used only for this or other limited and controlled things? Probably not an issue. And the longer he holds it, the more useful the location data is.
The last time I had a phone that looked like that, it didn’t have a GPS chip. No location data.
There are still ways to track it. You have service? They can track you pretty easy.
That’s what I meant. They know what tower your call connected through. If your call last long enough to useuptiple towers, they know more about your path.
It’s my understanding they can usually get a pretty detailed location this way. You only use one tower at a time, but your phone is usually seen by multiples, allowing triangulation of your location.
Then turn it off when not in use.
“ACAB” doesn’t really mean “there are no good cops, not a single one” but rather “the institution as a whole is rotten to the core, which incentivizes, trains and rewards cops to be bastards while silencing, forcing out, or straight up murdering those who refuse to follow that culture”.
It means that doesn’t matter if there’s 1, 10, o ten thousand good cops. They have been put in a position where their goodness is immaterial to stop or even diminish the bastardry of the force, its leaders and its more visible representatives.
I feel like, if you have to rationalize your slogan / the name of your organization to help laypeople get the sense that you’re actually aiming for, something’s wrong. At the least, you suck at marketing, but more likely you’re just more about shrill attention-seeking than actually convincing people to consider change.
Tell me you don’t understand marketing without telling me you don’t understand marketing.
The slogan is not for the cops or their supporters and it is neither for self-righteous moderates who spend their time criticizing a slogan instead of taking action again a widespread, deadly issue that affects millions. Its purpose is not to inspire reflection or to change minds, because it knows that mere words can’t change culture, especially if it’s backed by profit.
It is a rallying cry, a unifying sentiment. The people it is made for, all of us, understand what I explained above.
Apparently not, because you keep having to explain it.