In the U.S. sheriffs ARE elected and it’s a bit of a nightmare. They do not need to be qualified as long as people vote for them. They are not accountable to anyone but the majority of voters. They can violate rights, plant evidence, murder. It doesn’t matter if all those actions are public knowledge as long as people continue to vote for them. And that may sound absurd, but there are plenty of examples of sheriffs doing whatever the hell they want but continuing to get elected.
There are horror stories of child murdering serial killers going free for decades due the the incompetence of sheriffs.
It’s a lot harder to organize a recall election than to just fire a corrupt or incompetent law enforcement officials.
We already elect ours, and it is a clusterfuck. Elections need to have public interest or they just become a contest to see who can whip the most weirdos into the booth.
Where I am, the sheriffs are elected and the police chiefs are (generally) appointed. Honestly, both get up to the same level of mischief. The problem isn’t how they get to the position, but rather accountability. There isn’t much. It’s a mismatch between the amount of power they hold and the responsibility to which they are held.
Elected sheriffs are the .most corrupt people you’ll ever meet. Total shit show.
The police should not exist
Cops don’t even keep the peace. What peace is there to be had if you have no money? The cops are trained to deal violence on behalf of the rich. Their training and experience is inextricably linked to the objective of preserving capitalism, and is therefore useless for whatever comes afterward.
For these reasons, we need to fully abolish the police while simultaneously establishing alternative systems outside and in opposition to the State to keep each other safe.
Never capitulate to right-wing framings.
I don’t think defunding the police is a right-wing framing 😆
I argue that it is, in fact, a right-wing framing 😁. It’s a liberal framing, and liberals are right-wing.
“Defunding the police” is a liberal distortion of “abolishing the police”. Defunding the police uncritically reinforces the notion that police are a necessary part of a free society, but only need to be “debloated”. The militarization of police is not a bug; it’s a feature! It’s the police evolving into exactly what they are meant to be.
And the defunding the police issue perfectly reveals why liberals are right-wing: because liberals do not object to capitalism. The primary purpose of police is to deploy violence against the subjects in order to maintain capitalism—an oppression liberals have no problem with. Sure they are the left-wing of capital in the United States, but that still makes them right-wing in the large because they advocate for the unjustifiable hierarchy of capitalism and the existence of police to enforce that power.
