Is ACAB true or false?

I grew up in a working class area and anti-police sentiment was completely normal. People didn't necessarily plan to get rid of them and probably didn't even think that it was possible. A bit like taxes or something.

People don't choose to be born, they do choose to become cops.

And, equally, you can't get fired from a racial/ethnic group, Scottish people don't have to attend annual reviews where they demonstrate how they've met their haggis-eating KPIs or whatever, but people do have to perform certain behaviours to stay in their jobs or else they get fired. That's why it's not an inaccurate generalisation to say All Receptionists Answer the Phone and Greet Visitors, or All Academics Write Stuff, or All Taxi Drivers Drive Taxis or whatever.

Pretty sure the bar for being a "bastard" is a lot lower than you seem to be putting it. Your original question was "are all coppers bastards, true or false?". Isn't "ACAB" more like a statement of values, rather than a question of empirical fact? (Though of course people hold values because they believe certain things are facts - in this case the structure and function of the police being some of them).

This thread appears to be going in circles, I just watch this video though on police that I found very well made and clearly argued.

https://kolektiva.media/videos/watch/2dded130-d97e-41a3-b5c3-fff8e2ea96c...

explainthingstomeeventhoughiwontbeinfluencedbythem:

No aggression from me could outdo your masochistic aggression towards yourself in the form of the little logo (or whatever it's called) by your name of an armchair that says 'this is my life'.

For what it's worth, whatever NA's motivations for posting here are, I don't think their main aim is or ever has been to be popular with libcom posters.

I don't know where you live, but I would be extremely surprised if police brutality isn't an issue there. Admittedly, I've not heard that much about police violence in Vatican City, but that could just be ignorant on my part. Anyway, I'm not sure what the point is of answering your question, because I strongly suspect that no matter how much I list you'll just say "well those are just individual examples we can't draw any general conclusions from them", but if you want to learn more about British police behaviour then I'd recommend these as a few starters:
https://libcom.org/library/come-and-wet-this-truncheon-dave-douglass
https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/?s=police
https://libcom.org/tags/uk-riots
https://uffcampaign.org/
https://www.inquest.org.uk/
https://netpol.org/
http://npolicemonitor.co.uk/
http://lcapsv.net/
http://campaignopposingpolicesurveillance.com/
https://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/
https://otjc.org.uk/about/
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jun/28/long-road-justice-hills...

I think explainthingstome is defending a position rather than openly discussing.

I used to not be anti-police, I thought it was bullshit posturing (and for some people it is) I read Police Riots by Rodney Stark and the Scarman (?) Report on the Broadwater farm uprising and they had a big effect on my view of the cops. And of course discussion with anarchists and communists.

Years back I got a copy of the scarman report from work for a mate to digitise, it doesn't seem to have made it to libcom. I had a look online and couldn't find it.

R Totale has posted this, which is intereting
https://marx.libcom.org/library/what-do-we-do-when-cops-fuck

Oh I actually have one of those, back in the day when student life was ending and we were all looking for jobs a friend of mine became a police cadet, the rest of my friends were in the TA apart from one who got a job at a local off license. I was going to join a TA engineering regiment to learn a trade, but when I got to the barracks I noticed it was a Para engineers regiment, so I gave it a miss.

Anyway, of my social circle my friend who joined the police quickly became very, very, bitter and quick to violent outbursts. Even acquaintances who had seen some combat in Afghanistan were shocked at some of his antics. He told me all about his training and even let me read some of the training materials while he was still a cadet. It was enlightening, in addition to pelting them with CS gas, they made the cadets be the riot shield walls while the older coppers pelted them with petrol bombs (the bottles were only filled up to a quarter) and drummed into their heads the ideology of policing.

When he went on patrols and house visits he told me all sorts of stories about the people who lived on the estates as if they were from another planet. I think the worst thing he did before I lost contact with him was after he policed a free festival. He looked depressed, and when we asked him what was wrong he told us he'd had a bollocking from some superior officer because he and four other police had been caught on camera by reporters beating a drunk guy up. I never saw it appear on the local news, so I guess they quashed it. But what really stood out and shocked us, was that the reason they beat the drunk up was because the guy laughed at their helmets.

Seriously, a bloke who had to much to drink laughed at their helmets, so four police officers (well one was still a cadet) slapped him around in a crowded public party. And he didn't see why we were giving him a hard time about how he shouldn't have done that.

He was never a pacifist but his attitude and world view did a complete transformation, and it only took about a few months before the changes were notable.

To answer the last question first: not at all, but pick the time and place when it makes sense. But, in my experience dialogue is necessary, but not sufficient. Doing something is. For example, showing up at picket lines or protests to provide support, workplace or school actions (whatever they may be), or do something like Food not Bombs which will put you in contact with a lot of people (the food is an excuse to connect) etc. Even then, you don't break out the anarchist talking points right away (unless they ask), again pick the appropriate time and place for when you think they'd be more receptive to anarchist ideas, and they will be more receptive if you've struggled with them, been a good workmate, support etc. Nothing is more tiring than some anarcho that is constantly shouting slogans or going on about the agricultural output in Aragon during the Spanish Revolution.

As Guy Debord said in "The Society Of Armchairs" -

As Marx said in "Theses on ACAB" (thesis ll) :

As someone else said:

explainthingstome:

There are kids of 10 who understand the simple expression ACAB. There are adults of 100 who don't. As Tina Turner said

I will try to get around to writing a proper reply to this thread at some point when I get time, but just posting this link for now, since it seems relevant: The deep history of police

Also, for a somewhat different perspective, there's this from the Invisible lot:

Yeah, I think this point is vital, imo it's hard to overstate the importance of the things we do over and over again for 8 hours (or however long) a day and the people we're around in shaping our worldview. Like, obviously not in a crudely determinist way where all workers are automatically fully communist or anything, but I think you can definitely talk about, for instance, a "retail/service worker's mindset". Among other things, that means that you can't relate to each customer as if you were fully encountering another human being, you just have to treat them as units to process to try and get them served and on to the next customer as quickly as possible so you don't get overwhelmed (the fact that many service workers are also explicitly required to perform friendliness and interest as part of their job might complicate this but I don't think it cancels it out). Similarly, thinking about taxi drivers or bus drivers, I'm sure they probably relate to urban space differently in some ways than other people, because the streets are the raw materials for their job.
This is relevant to the ACAB question because, if I'm right that being a shop worker gives you a shop workers' mindset in some ways, then being a cop also gives you a cop mindset, which includes, as a minimum, seeing everyone as a potential criminal/suspect who you may be justified in using violence against at any moment. And I suspect that, whatever hypothetical cops could potentially be like, actually existing cop mindsets are likely to contain a whole lot more toxic elements. Which I guess is basically just a long-winded way of saying that I think your anecdote's important and revealing - it's not (just) that bastards become cops, it's that being a cop makes you a bastard.

I'm glad to hear that you've been discussing and learning with people offline. (Again, no irony or sarcasm intended there). I think one of the important differences between police misbehaviour and non-cops behaving in harmful ways is again the role of the police as an institution, the institution that is supposedly meant to prevent/investigate/punish misdeeds. Anybody can do bad things, but only cops can do bad things in the knowledge that the people in charge of investigating any crimes they commit will be their coworkers.

Again, I think it's important to look at the role the police play in moments of heightened social tension and confrontation, and again I'd mention that the US right now gives a very helpful example of what I'm talking about. To go back to your earlier point about whether cops "support BLM", I think that phrase is so vague as to be virtually meaningless - you get a really really clear example of that with what happened in Buffalo, where "On June 3, Buffalo, New York, police officers were filmed kneeling with protesters outside City Hall. One day later, in a now-viral video, two officers pushed a 75-year-old man to the ground during a protest outside City Hall, seriously injuring him and resulting in both being arrested."
So, just to look at the city of Portland, for example: I don't think it's fair to say that "all ordinary people in Portland are bastards", because there's a whole diverse set of ways that people are responding to the protests there, ranging from supporting and joining in to throwing explosives at them and everything in between. But are there any instances of police refusing to join in with the repression? And if not, does that mean that we can make generalisations about Portland police, even the ones who might take a knee or say that they support BLM?
Finally, I was going to say that Verso are doing free ebooks of both The End of Policing and Police: A Field Guide and that those books might also be useful if you want to read up further on the subject, but they now seem to not be free. They are still 70% off, so if you read ebooks they might be a worthwhile investment, or if you really don't want to pay for them I imagine that there may well be free PDFs available somewhere.