greaseonmymouth: navakka: When the police system of Finland, for example, is raised as a shining mod
greaseonmymouth:navakka:When the police system of Finland, for example, is raised as a shining model for a US police reform… it makes criticising the Finnish system more difficult. The police system here is racist, and does lots of things that harm individual people as well as communities. It makes me sad and frustrated when people look at one fact like the kill statistics and go “yay this is how the police should be”. No, that’s not the whole picture.Using this “reform the US police to be like the good cops of Finland / German / whatever” rhetoric might help the US to have a police that is little less bad. It sure is a soft approach, a stepping stone change that is likely easier to push through than abolishing the police. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, it also complicates the work of those elsewhere demanding the problems of the local police to be addressed. (And this rhetoric not questioning the existence of police in general is another issue.)I think it would be better to avoid suggesting any other police system is copied over to the US. We can point out the specific things going better than in the US but that shouldn’t equal to a blind acceptance of the police systems of other places, which it often seems to do.(I’m not an expert here so if you have constructive criticism of this argument, feel free to offer an alternative way to look at it! I do know this blind acceptance and praise is not the goal for almost anyone who shares the posts/tweets comparing the police in different countries. I’m just saying that as someone who discusses the topic with people in one of the common comparison countries, this is the effect I’m seeing.)Yeah this. Denmark has a system pretty much identical to the other countries mentioned here, but we still have issues with racism and police brutality towards non-white people. It’s not talked about much and the few times it is it’s presented in the media as a singular exceptional event when in reality our non-white citizens have been talking about this all the time.White Scandinavians, myself included, didn’t believe we had those police brutality issues for a long time (I only learned about them a couple of years ago) because my experiences with cops have been largely positive - when I was a kid I wasn’t scared of the patrolling police cars in my tiny Icelandic village, because the most they’ve done “to” me is stop me and ask why I wasn’t wearing a bicycle helmet (mandatory by law for under 18yos) and offer to drive me home to get it. In Denmark as an adult it’s been stuff like, being mostly alone on public transport at night, feeling followed after getting off, and then just walking up to the nearest police car…who’d then just drive me home and admonish me to stick to well lit areas.Non-white citizens get very little of this protection. Nightclubs call the cops on young people standing in line to get in just because they’re brown. Police rough them up. protests and demonstrations (which I’ve attended a lot) - which are largely peaceful in Denmark - usually have police present to protect the protestors from aggression, yet there are numerous examples of the police treating non-white protestors in those groups as threats and roughing them up and arresting them. Our prisons might be nicer than American prisons, but the percentage of non-white prisoners is out of proportion with the percentage of non-white citizens in the population - a factor that drives racism and islamophobia bc if so many of them are in jail, then they really are all criminals, the whole bunch of them, amiright? No. Scandinavia and Finland have massive problems with racism, including in our police forces and justice systems, and we need to remember that in this discussion. -- source link