The "Abolish the Police," Movement is a Childish Fantasy that will Never Become a Reality.

People Must Face Reality & Understand Organized Police Departments in Every Culture are as Much a Necessity as Surgeons, Fire Fighters, Nurses & Garbage Collectors. Police will never be abolished.

There is a fringe movement that has gained popularity in the last few years, primarily since the horrific 2020 murder of George Floyd by a terrifyingly callous and corrupt police officer, Derek Chauvin. The movement calls for the abolishment of all police departments and all prison systems in the United States.

The Abolish the Police movement is an unrealistic fantasy promoted by radical idealists with no little or no understanding of public safety, how it is achieved and why it is maintained. Could abolishment of the police and the prison system ever actually work?

Perhaps we should take a realistic look at why this extreme fantasy is being lauded as realistic or even doable, considering the deviant behavior of all human beings and the centuries long savagery that defines human behavior and how human savagery plays into the need for police and prisons in the first place.

The deviant criminal behavior of all human kind, and all Americans bypasses all recognized genders and all racial backgrounds. Deviant criminal misconduct is what unifies us as human beings.

Crime is not only a black issue or a white issue, but a reality which impacts all human beings of every hue or shade, the globe over. In other words, black people are not the only people being incarcerated in prisons in either the US or elsewhere.

One radical supporter of the movement, Mariame Kaba, author of “We Do This ‘Til We Free US: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice” claims that while she’s aware of the “brutality and inequity” in societies at large, she also feels that “…abolitionists are the realists here, and their critics are the ones wandering around with their heads in strategically placed clouds.”

Kaba doesn’t seriously consider the huge impact violence and murder places on cultures worldwide, and on American citizens in general. Violent crime results in millions of dollars spent on hospital recovery expenses, rehabilitation from violent attacks and mental health costs. Nor does Kaba honestly recognize the loss of human capital which results from violence and the incapacitation many victims of crime experience after surviving trauma.

Kaba promotes the release of violent offenders, but not the protection of victims of violent offenders, despite claiming to support women and their protection. This is a common theme among radical sects of police/prison abolitionists. It is also entirely misogynistic in nature, as most crime victims are women and children and most offenders are indeed, male. What abolitionists claim to value and what they actually want changed with respect to police and prisons, are two entirely different things.

In a 2021 article supporting Kaba’s ideas, “Abolishing the police and prisons is a lot more practical than critics claim,” her perceptions are laid out clearly enough for the reader to see her extreme bias as well when she writes: “Abolition is rooted in the experiences of incarcerated people and criminalized people who were some of the first people who called for the end of these systems. And they call for the end of these systems because they're in them and directly impacted by them and understand their harms.”

The failing of Kaba’s statement above and in her entire philosophy is that she is speaking only from the perspective of criminals. A vast subculture of individuals impacted by alcohol addiction, drug addiction, mental illness, illiteracy and criminality—in other words, criminal offenders who are mostly male. Kaba does not realistically acknowledge the existence of victims of crime, (mostly women and children) nor the important need to protect vulnerable victims from violent crime.

Crime victims include those impacted by sexual predation, sex trafficking and murder. And murder which involves more than only random shootings that result in death but the more complex motivations of sexual sadists, again primarily men, who kill for the pleasure that it gives them.

Nor does Kaba have any background in understanding the origins or complexity of homicidal impulse. In many ways Kaba is completely naive of the true motivations of many sociopathic offenders who murder, rob and rape.

Many offenders derive quantifiable pleasure from harming and injuring those people who are weaker than they are. They do this through domestic violence, forcible rape and torture inspired acts of murder which can involve strangulation, bludgeoning, or even a grotesque behavior called “Piquerism.”

Piquerism is defined as a homicidal behavior which gives, “sexual satisfaction through the infliction of stabbing wounds,” and is generally perpetrated by men who suffer from impotence and cannot create sexual intimacy, generally with a woman. The knife becomes the erect penis they cannot achieve and becomes the instrument of their attack and the avenue to the sexual pleasure that the act of murder affords them.

Can you, as the reader imagine anything as gruesome as Piquerism? Does Kaba even know what it is? These are valid questions. How much does Kaba truly understand about the psychotic motivations for violence and how it serves the needs of the disturbed offender?

Kaba claims that “…people who defend current police systems” are uninformed if they believe that “police work is beneficial” to others. She claims to get her perception of police solely by “talking to Black people and people of color—especially youth, queer people and sex workers — who deal with police every day.” So, when police protect a woman from rape or murder, how is that not “beneficial” to everyone involved?

By her own admission Kaba is completely biased and in her research has not contacted an adequate cross section of people to interview. Kaba engages only with people who will confirm her own highly questionable ideas on criminal causation, and the abolishment of police. Has Kaba spoken only to people of color? Has she not spoken to white persons, in an effort to get a complete perspective, from all those people impacted negatively by police or the prison industrial complex? White people often have black relatives? Does Kaba not know this?

Why would Kaba not speak with white people, unless of course she is an unbalanced and bigoted radical? Are white persons not arrested by police, or not killed by police each year in lethal force situations?

Kaba further explains, in the article that each summer she “watches police stop, frisk, harass, bully, intimidate and arrest young people she knows and cares about over and over again.” The article then states that black people make up 32 percent of the population in Chicago and account for 72 percent of police stops, according to the ACLU of Illinois data. This data is likely quite accurate.

What Kaba doesn’t take into consideration, or what she may actively refuse to accept is that a significant portion of black youth in Chicago, California and elsewhere are members of violent street gangs and actively kill each other. The biggest and most serious threat to a young black man is another young black man, rather than a police officer or a white person.

Kaba does not acknowledge or comment on these documented facts.

*The reality of black on black crime and murder does not negate that there are instances when police unjustly shoot and kill a civilian or dangerous criminal with a long criminal record, who may or may not be resisting arrest. We have all seen the videos of that very thing occurring, and those situations are always emotionally devastating and discouraging. No one will deny there are corrupt and careless police officers in the world, and in the US. However, statistics prove most officers never fire their weapon once during their entire careers, and attempt to be effective officers who observe the policy restrictions they learn from their police Academy training.

Statistics also reveal that in the millions of police interactions that occur per year in the US, most are handled well and peacefully, and do not result in loss of life. But these facts often are not what police critics want to believe.

In the article Kaba pontificates on how police and prisons came to be, again not acknowledging their complex antediluvian history, which goes back to Roman times. She believes that the procedures and politics of police and the prison system have become so “entrenched” that it would be difficult or impossible to change or improve them in any way.

Kaba’s viewpoint regarding the abolition of police and prisons is radical, polemic and limited. Her inflexible assertion that nothing can get better with improved or regular police training methods defies the logical understanding that with proper support, training and funding, anything can improve, including police science.

The article offers more of Kaba’s perspective: “The current prison system, she notes, is a historical artifact. It was itself the result of reforms. Quakers in the 1600s and 1700s advocated to replace capital punishment or physical punishment with penitentiaries, which they believed were more humane.” This bit of historical minutia is interesting but essentially irrelevant. The Quakers of the 1600s and 1700s have nothing to do with modern policing methods or training and should not be used as a red herring by rational people as sound reasoning behind the abolishment of current policing systems.

Kaba is further recorded as stating: “People built these systems, you know. They came from somewhere.” That casual statement shows an incredible lack of awareness regarding the true history of police and prisons and how they have existed in one form or another going back millennia.

If Kaba were truly informed, on a historical level, she would know that modern man did not invent the police, or prisons, they have existed since ancient times.

Kaba goes on to say that less money should be spent on police training or equipment because if it is used to fund police, “…such actions allow police to harass and incarcerate marginalized people with greater efficiency.” Kaba doesn’t seem able to understand that a well-trained police force, with adequate numbers of qualified officers actually results in better outcomes. As opposed to a stressed underfunded department, lacking enough officers, who are often forced to work longer hours, and double shifts as a result. When officers are overworked, they become exhausted due to overtime hours, which most officers generally don’t want.

The Defund the Police craze that spread across the US after the horror of the George Floyd murder, which promised an overnight Utopia, did not result in less crime but in more crime and more vicious predation occurring nationwide. In Portland, Oregon for example, there has been a 210 percent rise in shootings and murder since 2020 when PPB was defunded of several million dollars and the Gun Violence Reduction Team was terminated against the advice of several police and law enforcement experts.

In 2021, in Portland, there were 92 murders, most resulting from gun violence perpetrated by people of color. The majority of the murder victims were also people of color. This was the largest number of homicides in one year in the entire history of the city of Portland, Oregon.

The Defund the Police movement was a crude and hastily created “social experiment” at best and a complete failure when all was said and done. This according to a thorough and complete analysis written and published with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The actual human cost of violence since 2020 and the Defund the Police craze which took the nation by storm has cost the US multi-millions of dollars in lost human capital.

Like a lot of anti-police radicals, Kaba says that body cameras on police are “worse than useless.” When many police critics argued for years in support of the use of body cams, many of those same people now back peddle and say that body cams can’t be trusted, or what they record.

Despite some recorded instances of police turning body cams off, what body cams do reveal, currently, is the complete and fluid process of an arrest and what actually happens. Now, with many officers unable to “turn off”cameras the devices are filming continuously, even as they relieve themselves in public restrooms. As a result, body cams are actually highly effective in illustrating when an arrest is proper, safe, and done with a high level of procedural correctness.

Kaba states: “Paying for body cameras is giving money into the very system you want to actually shrink. The cameras are turned on you, the citizen, not on the cop. The cops will have control over all the footage.”

Police do not have control over footage and certainly not the arresting officers. Moreover, when most officers have body cams, and are interacting with each other, the camera is recording what an officer is doing from multiple perspectives, and angles, so Kaba’s previous statement is incorrect and not factual in any way.

What body cams have done in recent years is show the ways that civilians who resist arrest are often complicit in their own fate of injury or death. If a resister tries to grab an officers gun, or to attack an officer with a knife, or other dangerous object, or weapon, they may in fact be shot and killed as a result of their own behavior.

This is often described as Suicide By Cop and there have been hundreds of documented cases of it happening in recent years. Police are trained to de-escalate Suicide By Cop situations, but many times, they simply cannot and to save their own lives, or the lives of an innocent bystander they are forced to kill the suicidal person who is also threatening to kill other people, generally with a knife or gun.

Many police critics have backtracked on the push for body cams because they show most officers are doing their jobs effectively and anti-police critics don’t want to be proven wrong in that regard. Once they realized body cams work in support of effective police work, they immediately backtracked, pulling their support of body cams.

Body cams also show officers in instances of misconduct and those situations are useful too, as those kinds of officers must be recognized, isolated and dealt with. Officers who engage in misconduct must be seen as the danger they are and removed from the departments where they are employed. This process of weeding out “bad apples” is a continuous process and occurs regularly in police departments nationwide.

Police work can be one of the most demanding and difficult professions in the world. And there is no doubt officers suffer through experiences the common man and woman will probably never experience. Police are human beings and despite the objectifying element of the uniform, it is important that police critics do not carelessly ‘other’ police officers as nonhuman entities. They are as human as any other person.

Police are subject to witnessing people at their worst behavior and often at the worst times in their lives, during moments of crisis, so officers see horrible violence and the gruesome aftermath of violence. This can lead to burnout in only a matter of years. Generally fifteen years is when officers begin to demonstrate signs of burnout and the extremely dangerous “adrenal fatigue” which can put officers and civilians at risk.

Police suffer higher levels of suicide, cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure than most Americans working in other professions. They often die young because of the constant stressors of the profession and the consistent elevations of Cortisol and Adrenalin stress hormones which flood their bloodstream several times each working shift. It is for this reason police departments must be funded properly so that not only will officers receive regular training in how to contend with lethal force situations and de-escalation techniques, but also so that they are able to get the mental health support they deserve, when and if they need it.

When critics only focus on the small number of lethal force incidents that occur, rather than the millions of police contacts that are positive and resolved efficiently, and when they prioritize the rights of violent predators, over the safety of the public and crime victims, they lose credibility as a movement. This is the major weakness of most Abolish the Police organizations and movements. They urge the release of violent criminals with no practical solutions in place as to how to supervise those explosive and disturbed individuals who invariably act out violently.

And again, it is women and children who suffer the brunt of valuing violent male offenders freedom over the safety of women and children.

What people from all walks of life need to understand is that police perform a necessary function in all cities, and in all countries in the world. They protect the vulnerable residents of cities from the predators who prey on them. The idea in America of “we the people, for the people” is what governs the American desire for a regularly funded policing system that works for everyone—this includes the protection of all people of color, the elderly, and women and children.

There is not a civilized country in the world that does not have a policing system in place, for all of the reasons I’ve included here. Because that is what “the people” want. People don’t want rapists, child killers, or serial murderers running loose in societies. They want those deviant persons isolated and kept away from the vast majority of people who are not predators, but working people trying to raise and protect their family members.

Could we also say that the movement to abolish the police is inherently woman hating? Yes, any reasonable critic could say that. When you consider that proponents of the Abolish the Police movement want to release violent male offenders, who will go on to victimize women and children, many believe that the Abolish the Police movement is inherently misogynistic.

In Portland, Oregon, another abolitionist militant, (and also a blue-eyed white woman) Amanda Trujillo, (featured below) founded a nonprofit called The Portland Freedom Fund. The purpose of Trujillo’s nonprofit was to bail out “Black and brown” people of color after being arrested, individuals who are primarily men.

Amanda Trujillo recently bailed out a violent domestic abuser, Mohamed Osnan Adan, a man with a long criminal record for domestic violence. After Trujillo bailed out Adan, he cut off his GPS ankle bracelet, used to monitor his activity and whereabouts. Later, in the early morning, he found his wife, Rachael Angel Abraham, and strangled her and stabbed her to death in a horrific murder which occurred in the family home, and in the presence of their six young children.

Police found a blood soaked carpet, and a dead woman covered by a sheet, with children wandering in the home, nearby. This after the children had already witnessed countless episodes of their father beating and strangling their mother. Abraham told police Adan was a Methamphetamine addict and had begged for protection, fearing he would murder her. Her children are now essentially orphans and wards of the state who will deal with the trauma of having witnessed their father murder their mother for the remainder of their lives.

Amanda Trujillo is another woman, an obvious misogynist who believes in abolishing the police and allowing violent criminals to run free. Trujillo is reported to have written on a placard, “Free them ALL!” She bails out violent male domestic abusers who then go onto commit murder. What kind of person does that? Are they crazy? Illiterate or just hopelessly misguided?

After Trujillo’s naive and woman-hating actions led to the murder of Rachael Angel Abraham, Trujillo wrote this hollow statement, which was posted on Facebook: “Our thoughts are with the families and communities affected by this tragedy, particularly the children who have effectively lost both parents. It is a profound tragedy when any person is harmed.”

Trujillo’s statement reeks of the type of hollow posted sentiments, made by some conservatives, when school shootings occur and they post on social media, writing that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the victims.

Abraham’s life was reduced to “thoughts and prayers.”

There is mention of Rachael Angel Abraham’s six children, but no mention of the absolute terror, fear and abject suffering that Rachael Angel Abraham experienced, herself.

*Rachael Angel Abraham is not important, clearly, not to a female misogynist like Amanda Trujillo.

It is safe to presume that Amanda Trujillo and Mariame Kaba are both seriously and dangerously misogynistic in ways that perhaps they do not even comprehend, yet? Yes, I believe so. The toxicity of female misogynists influence in the world is becoming more and more well known. And in Trujillo’s case, what she did was morally reprehensible as it resulted in the murder of an innocent woman. Trujillo’s complete lack of insight is indicative of someone who is not intelligent, not well-educated and has not one ounce of garden variety common sense.

What these radicals have to offer are not solutions to violent predation but merely additional violent chaos. Claiming that “social programs” that help with food insecurity and job training will tamp down all complex forms of violent crime is as ludicrous as stating that a vegetarian diet will stave off serious heart disease requiring a cardiologist who can perform a needed surgery.

Clearly Kaba and Trujillo value violent male offenders more than women or children who are victims of crime. This is the true definition of what it means to be a woman hater. And they are. They are women and they are woman haters.

The idea that police and prisons can be abolished is an unrealistic fantasy, based on a hatred of any form of authority, even those forms of authority which benefit all people coexisting in a community. What abolitionists fail to understand is that until the nature of man is changed, from savage to something else, there will always be violent offenders and they will need to be located, arrested and incarcerated somewhere away from the general public, who are not violent offenders.

As citizens of this country, and as Portlanders, we need to ask ourselves what WE want. Do we want chaos, crime, violent assault and murder to become the norm in Portland, like they have become for the past two years? Or do we want to go back to a time when there was less violent crime in Portland and more police working the streets and more resulting livability?

Do we want city leaders in Portland who will promote common sense ideas about how to create and maintain public safety? Or do we want bedlam and our city to turn into some tragic example of the Hollywood film, Mad Max?

If we do want peace and safety to return to the streets, then we need to carefully select leaders who are educated, intelligent and can see the bigger picture. We need leaders who are Moderate and reasonable, and NOT radical extremists.

We need leaders, both male and female, who will NOT resort to promoting the fantastical ideas of radicals and militants, who have nothing to offer but their own dark and hidden motivations of subconscious misogyny that they may not fully comprehend themselves.

If you value the city of Portland, as I do, then ask yourself, what do you want?

In 1965, PPB had a total of 750 police officers, and Portland a population of 738,000 residents. Now, in 2022, Portland has less than 750 police officers, which includes detectives but a population that is significantly larger. Does that concern you, as a Portland resident? When response times have doubled, and even tripled, after calling 911, and when rape victims are ignored because there aren’t enough police officers to handle all the shooting and murder calls, does that concern you?

Do you agree that Portland, Oregon, with a “current metro area population” which in 2022 is at “2,197,000, a 1.06% increase from 2021” is at least 400 police officers short, as PPB and Mayor Ted Wheeler have suggested? Do you honestly believe Portlanders need less officers working to keep Portland safe from predators, rapists, murderers and pedophiles?

What do you think and how will you vote?

Will you vote for a politician who uses the dreaded words, “law and order” which some incorrectly believe implies white supremacy, (no they don’t). Or will you vote for continued chaos in the streets because you don’t want to come off like a “racist” or a “white supremacist” and believe you should vote for yet another anti-police politician, so you can seem “woke” instead?

What are you going to do to help Portland?

When the vast majority of murder victims in Portland, Oregon are young black men, who exactly are you protecting with your vote, anyway? Have you thought of that?

It really is up to you, isn’t it?

What will you do, then?

~Theresa Griffin Kennedy