Policing is weaponised by the state to reproduce systemic exploitation. The fundamental issue with the US police, is that its sole purpose is to prop up the oppressive ideas the American state is built on. The police are being used to manage the issues that have grown out of an unequal society. Rather than solving those problems, we continue to expand the police to contain them in the name of 'public order'. They are therefore a key element to the form of austerity politics that characterises the modern state. Without them, the state would have to confront its manifold socioeconomic problems and the inequalities they depend on. Proponents of this group include author and commentator Alex S. Vidal.
The argument
The systemic racism in the United states of America has allowed the police to become the executors of state-sanctioned violence against African American members of the population. A study from the University of Chicago found that “ too much deadly discretion is given to police officers in the US” as they looked intently at the “ lethal use-of-force policies of police in the 20 largest US cities” and found that “not a single police department was operating under guidelines that are compliant with the minimum standards laid out under international human rights laws” . For years the police have been given too much freedom to conduct themselves and therefore violent behavior has been allowed to thrive and stay hidden under the guise of law enforcement. By not taking action to see that police are to be carrying out justice and not racially motivated violence, the government is complicit in sanctioning this brutality. The recent deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Tayler are all examples of victims of state-sanctioned violence. As the systemic inequalities in the government grow more clear, it becomes more apparent that police reform is the only solution to end this reign of discriminatory violence in policing .
Premises
Counter-arguments
Some believe that systematic racism is not an inherent part of the United State's governmental structure and that the police are not a tool for state-sanctioned violence. In fact, the Statista Research Department just posted a graph that depicted police killings by race and it displayed that white people were more than twice as likely to be shot to death by police than an African American is.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The named deaths establish that these killings occurred, not that they express state policy. The premise needs a mechanism linking individual killings to a system that authorises them, and instead offers its own conclusion — that systemic racism has made the police executors of such violence — as the support for itself. [Rejecting P2] The use-of-force finding concerns discretion in general: it reports that no department's lethal-force policy met the minimum international standard, a defect affecting everyone those departments police. As stated it supports a claim about unaccountable policing rather than about racially targeted policing, and the argument never bridges the two. [Rejecting P3] Complicity through inaction is a serious charge the premise leaves unevidenced, and it also pulls against the position it serves. If the failure is that government has not constrained the police, that is a case for the reform this position urges — but the argument's language of an executed policy points instead to the sibling position that the institution cannot be reformed at all.