The Issue of the Day: Anarchists and Police Reform

Ah, the Russians again. It's almost nostalgic, especially since once again there are no actual Russians.

“I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days — but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook,” Rice, who served as national-security adviser to president Obama, said in a CNN interview on Sunday. “But we cannot allow the extremists, the foreign actors, to distract from the real problems we have in this country that are longstanding, centuries old, and need to be addressed responsibly.”

These aren't 'little green men.' They're organizations that have been gathering loose armies of indoctrinated college kids for decades, and training them to think and act like Communists. Most of these people are not foreigners, although some of the funding for this (again, loose) network may be from abroad.

They're not less dangerous for being loose; the IRA was organized loosely in cells, just because it made them nearly impossible to finally break. You could shut down a cell, maybe get at two others connected to the one you broke, but there were always more.

I do take the point that there are serious issues in need of real reform, especially in terms of the relationship of the police to the community. I've written about that often, but here is a post that gets (in a calm and non-aggressive way) at what I think is the heart of the problem. Here is another post aimed at anarchists who want to protect marginalized communities. Here is a proposal for replacing professional police with volunteer citizen units. Here is a piece on why professional police tend to be non-accountable to the public more than armed volunteers.