Welcome to the Vegan Police Department

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Comin Straight From the underground

“Both of our major political parties have accepted the politics of austerity that globalized capital has imposed  on us. The neoliberal movement has been incredibly successful in normalizing the view that the only way to move forward is to unleash the creative power of a small number of economics elites by stripping away all regulations, worker protections, and financial obligations so that they can maximize their wealth at the expense of the rest of us.  For thirty years we’ve been told that the result will be rising tide for everyone; a trickling down of the spoils - but we’re still waiting. Wages and living standards for all but the wealthiest continue to decline. The middle class is being eviscerated, poverty and mass homelessness are increasing, and our infrastructure is collapsing. When we organize our society around fake meritocracy, we erase the history of exploitation and the ways the game is rigged to prevent economic and social mobility.

When people complain about these realities, they are told it’s their own fault, that they didn’t try hard enough to be part of the glorious “1 percent,” that they don’t have what it takes and thus deserve to be degraded.  This justifies defining all problems in terms of individual inadequacy, calling those left behind the architects of their own misery. Rather than using government resources to reduce inequality, this economic system both subsidizes inequality and criminalizes those it leaves behind - especially when they demand something better.  The massive increases in policing and incarceration over the last forty years rest on an ideological argument that crime and disorder are the results of personal moral failing and can only be reduced by harsh punitive sanctions. This neoconservative approach protects and reinforces the political, social, and economic disenfranchisement of millions who are tightly controlled by aggressive and invasive policing or warehoused in jails and prisons.

We must break these intertwined systems of oppression.  Every time we look to the police or prisons to solve our problems, we reinforce these processes.  We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the ‘threatening’ young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time.  Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on coercion violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counter productive, and unjust approaches.  We should demand safety and security - but not at the hands of police. In the end, they rarely provide either.“ - Alex Vitale, The End of Policing

They have the authority to kill a minority

“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’ve stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.” - Fred Hampton Jr.

They mace me to blind me, but that shit don't work

“I have to re-read this and get a quote I’m sorry. FFXIV Shadowbringers just came out and I’m terribly busy.“ - Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Readin' my rights and shit, it's all junk

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination — employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.” - Michelle Alexander,  The New Jim Crow

Yeah, I’m a gangsta, but still i got flavor

“When we talk about people who commit violence as monsters (or “superpredators,” if you prefer), we often viciously deny them the benefits we afford to people we consider fully human, but we also do not hold them to the obligations to which we hold people whose humanity we do not question.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair