A mistake is that it's wrong to arrest people for tearing down buildings/statues. It's a mistake to think that arresting people won't help the issue.
This is a batshit crazy justification for abolishing prisons. Using that same logic, The Purge should be a 365 day a year documentary. We should have no laws since some aren't solved.
While I was asleep last night, did man become perfect? If not this is another batshit crazy idea. PDs definitely need more training and better people, but abolishing all police is insane.
I have explained my position on why we should not support prosecuting this protestor. My understanding of mass incarceration is that a liberal belief in following law and order politics and the institution of setting "race blind" procedures for sentencing or prosecutorial discretion directly contributed to its explosion. From a book called the First Civil Right:
Democratic retreat from pro-civil rights carceral modernization is apparent in the transformation of their national party platforms since 1972. The 1972 Democratic platform endorsed felon re-enfranchisement, community-based rehabilitation facilities, and work-release furlough programs, and the 1976 platform promised "jobs, decent housing and educational opportunities [to] provide a real alternative to crime." The 1980 platform attributed crime and drug abuse to "the cumulative effect of joblessness, poor housing conditions and other factors." By 1984 however, the Democratic platform renounced "permissive liberalism" as the answer to crime and in 1988, Democrats embraced the drug war as a defense for "the security of our nation." By 1992, the Democratic platform echoed Nixon's 1968 pledge "to restore government as the upholder of basic law-and-order for crime-ravaged communities," adding that the "most direct way to restore order in our cities is to put more police on the streets." When President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, with its 100,000 new police officers and its 60 new capital crimes, he lionized the enactment as "the toughest, largest, smartest Federal attack on crime in the history of our country. Adjectives in that order - tough, large, and then smart - marked Democratic priorities.
So when you and Numbers say "prosecute this person because they broke the law," you are implying that we can do this fairly in all cases, without considering all the economic and political decisions that go into the this great carceral machinery. It is naive to say that public political pressure is a constraint, but that constraint literally hasn't worked in stopping mass incarceration.
Abolition is not a new idea. Because you are unfamiliar with it, does not mean it is batshit crazy and should be dismissed. There also existed a time in our history before mass incarceration. Because it is difficult to imagine a world without these institutions, does not mean that we shouldn't try.
If you read about the 60s and 70s, you will find much different political perspectives on incarceration. "Nixon's 1973 National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice recommended closing juvenile penal facilities, as well as a 10-year moratorium on prison construction. Many organizations endorsed sentencing guidelines as a mechanism to reduce incarceration. The American Bar Association, for example, supported tiered, non-carceral punishment, beginning with fines, restitution, and criminal forfeiture, jumping to community supervision and intermittent incarceration,..."
I don't have my Attica book with me, but I know that in the political fall out from the Attica riot, lawmakers from both parties acknowledged the failures of incarceration and recognized a world without prisons. Many of the Attica prisoners requested to see Republican representatives.
Your Purge comparison does not seem relevant. I'm not advocating for vigilante justice or the absence of laws.
Police abolition is also not new. The history of police reform has shown us that the more we think we can fix issues with more training and better people, the more we perpetuate the militarization of police. Budgets go up, but meaningful reforms are not made.