we need a nonviolent state
The violence of poverty and slavery's inheritance cannot be met with the violence of the state. The state should adopt a strategy of absolute nonviolence. An officer of the peace should in fact put his or her life on the line. Inequities in the state cause the violence of the people. Disarm the state and you will have to cope with the inequities of the citizenry. Only if you disarm the state and place the burden of the violence of slavery and racism on the neck of the state that created them, will you create the conditions for change and reparation to occur. In the current paradigm, the burden of remaining nonviolent while suffering the trauma of systemic and state-sanctioned violence rests on the literal neck of the citizenry. That paradigm must be upended. The burden was created by the state, and its responsibilities, deaths, and inequities must be given back to the state. The day a black man who can only be dealt with on the terms of his own trauma holds down the neck of an unarmed officer of the peace is the day change will start to occur.
If the state has a monopoly on the use of force, and is using that monopoly to subjugate a portion of the citizenry, it makes me complicit to the extent that I legitimize the institutions that deploy violence in this way. I know that any police officer would challenge me to spend a day or a month interacting with crime and poverty and violence without resorting to dehumanizing tactics myself. I would come to hear "I can't breathe" and cries for "Mama!" with cynicism. This is the way that officers on the line are themselves traumatized: they have become weapons in an unethical war, on the wrong side of history. The state creates trauma by institutionalizing inequities that drain communities of resources, then monopolizes violence to constrain victims of that trauma into silencing their rage. The police officer is the tool of the state in the maintenance of a status quo in which the state scapegoats the victims it has created, and labels their rage as crime, justifying the violence it takes to subjugate the rage into an expectation of bland submission.
Police interact minimally with people who are not in poverty and trauma. I live my own life in an unpoliced world. My neighborhood is not calm because we have internalized a sense of fear of police, but because we have a sense that they serve the actual purpose of serve and protect. About looting, a quote read, "how is it that there are so many people in America with so little to lose?"
We are currently asking that citizens of the state live in fear that the state itself will kill them if they act in ways consistent with the trauma created by the state. The only way for systemic, restorative change to occur is for the state to assume the risks and burdens of the inequities it creates. Anyone choosing to become an officer of the peace should be assuming not a monopoly on violence, but instead a monopoly on actually interacting with the trauma created by the state. The police should be transformed into a force of drug counselors, social workers, physicians, nurses, babysitters, playground construction crews, foster parents, low-interest loan bankers, financial planners, and job creators. The fact that this sounds ridiculous and utopian is the extent to which we believe that violence is necessary to the policing of behavior. It is true that unarmed police officers would be killed. If the state has assumed the responsibility of those deaths, acknowledging that they are the result of inequities in the system, the state is then forced to address the system itself, if it chooses legitimacy over the scapegoating of its own violence.