Will clarify ahead of time that my relationship with the ACAB crowd is nuanced (while considering the word “bastard” such as in “All Cops Are Bastards” is not in my daily or sometimes even annual vocabulary). When you live in a semi-rural area, it’s harder to register your opinion of cops as a dichotomy. Questions always come up, like… do you view city cops differently (for me, the answer is yes at least in some ways)? Do you view the cops the same way off-duty (for me, not all that much)? Do you have a “favorite” cop (since you can often count the cops you encounter on one hand, and/or because you often know these people on a personal level)? Things like that.

If you put a gun to my head and asked for a brief opinion, I would indeed say law enforcement needs a hard reform in key areas and that, at least in some countries/cities/towns, the distrust for cops is natural. However, the more I ponder this though, the more I think about other occupations. And the one that always comes up in conversations is teachers. Hence the T in ATAB. Teachers don’t have a “line of duty” where the stakes are life-or-death, but they do exercise an absurd amount of power and immunity, with effects on social life, how much education you can say you’ve reached, and even on law enforcement itself.

Which then brings me to often asking people if they believe in ATAB like they may or may not believe in ACAB. And this in turn brings me nothing but confusion nine out of ten times, as the majority of those who adhere to ACAB will call me crazy for bringing up ATAB. I can in fact understand both sides of ACAB, the side that says it’s applicable and the side that says it’s not, and I can understand both sides of ATAB, but to say ACAB is righteous and ATAB is wrongful? People have even adhered to ADAB (“All Doctors Are Bastards”) for a lot less than it has taken for people to adhere to ATAB.

Unless the mindset for some reason was to focus on the exact stakes, I would not believe in ACAB if I was going to be shunned for believing in ATAB, especially if we take ACAB close enough to the end of the scale where we’re going to say there’s no such thing as a good cop, and help would be needed in understanding why this is wrong if it is (I don’t see it).

  • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    17·
    22 days ago

    Teachers: try their best to instill good education and morals in students despite extremely low pay and long hours, are beholden to a fucked up administrative system but often find ways to work around it, usually at their own expense, for the good of their students.

    Cops: actively benefit from enforcing laws that fuck people over, are extremely well paid despite doing minimal work, often supplement their already too high income with illegal activities that they would gladly throw anyone else in prison for, actively perpetuate a ‘brotherhood’ of covering up each other’s illegal activities, abuse and exploit power dynamics over marginalized and vulnerable populations.

    This guy: these two things are the same

    • Comrade_Spood@quokk.auEnglish
      4·
      22 days ago

      This is easily the best response to this question. If op thinks that the ACAB crowd’s reasoning for hating cops means they should also hate teachers, then op DOESNT understand why the ACAB crowd hates cops and op doesn’t understand what the ACAB crowd wants done.

      This is further backed up by how you differentiate between city and rural cops. Rural cops are just as bad as city cops. The only difference is rural cops tend to be people you know personally. Sometimes that does lead to them being chiller, but not always. Since you want to use anecdotal evidence to admonish rural cops of their bastardness, I will use anecdotal evidence to prove it wrong.

      My partner used to live in a rural town, and her dad (native american) was constantly harassed by police and eventually framed for a crime. Someone (if I remember correctly) sexually assaulted a woman. Despite the description of the perpetrator not matching a description of my partner’s father, local PD decided it must’ve been the brown guy we dont like. This is also further despite the fucking victim said it wasnt him. Despite all that, he was still found guilty and it remains on his record.

      We hate cops because they enforce a system of power that is inheritly oppressive, discriminatory, exploitative, and violent. And because cops enforce this system, they are given stupid amounts of power, and zero accountability. This attracts the worst of people to want to do this job. Some ACAB people want police reform, but some also want the full replacement of the legal system. Abolishing cops, prisons, punitive justice, etc and replacing them with community defense and rehabilitative justice.

      As someone in college to become a teacher, teachers have authority issues, and the institution of education has a problematic history (particularly in the US). Like how US police are rooted in slave catching, education has roots in cultural genocide and indoctrination. However, unlike law enforcement, education has had considerable reform already to separate itself from that past (there is still a lot of work to do). Education also provides a valuable service to the community (something ACAB folks argue the cops don’t provide). Education needs reform to decentralize the classroom and empower students. Law enforcement needs a full replacement.

      Tl;dr: If a teacher teaches in a non-authoritarian way, are they still a teacher? If a cop stops arresting people and sending them to prison for legal slave labor, are they still a cop? That is the difference I see.

  • schmorp@slrpnk.net
    4·
    22 days ago

    I can see where you come from. I live in a rural area - local cops are bastards. They are also the sons of friends and neighbours. My father was a teacher - he’s the mildest, most patient and tolerant guy I know. Yet he also has decided to uphold and perpetuate a system of injustice he was smart enough to understand. So he’s a bastard, and he’s also my very kind father … It’s almost as if using words like ‘all’, ‘always’, ‘never’ and any kind of slurs isn’t really helpful for navigating actual reality. I can’t really forget that people are people, some of which make horrible decisions.

  • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    22 days ago

    Tell me you’re still years away from “graduating” without using those words. 🤦🏼‍♂️😏