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Quote by Kristian Williams

“It is a bad habit of mind, a form of power-worship, to assume that things must be as they are, that they will continue to be as they have been. It soothes the conscience of the privileged, dulls the will of the oppressed. The first step toward change is the understanding that things can be different. This is my principal recommendation, then: we must recognize the possibility of a world without police.”

Quote by Kristian Williams

Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

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Kristian Williams

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“By “crime” I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq). The point here is that the standards I want to appeal to in invoking the idea of crime are not the state’s standards, but the community’s — and, specifically, the community’s standards as they relate to justice, rights, personal safety, and perhaps especially the question of violence. (...) Because the state uses this protective function to justify its own violence, the replacement of the police institution is not only a goal of social change, but also a means of achieving it. The challenge is to create another system that can protect us from crime, and can do so better, more justly, with a respect for human rights, and with a minimum of bullying. What is needed, in short, is a shift in the responsibility for public safety—away from the state and toward the community.”

PolicePolice BrutalityAnarchismStatePolice StateState ViolencePolice Violente
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“One of the most damaging, longest-lasting consequences of the War on Terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence. The argument that violence in any form debases us and marks the instant failure of all involved is much more difficult to make when the state regularly engages in or approves of wholesale violence against civilians and combatants alike. Instead, the case for nonviolence becomes, in the ugliest way, pragmatic: the state wants violence, because in that playing field it maintains every advantage, from bigger guns to total immunity to the privilege of perpetual victimhood.”

ViolenceNonviolenceWar On TerrorImpactsState Violence
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“It seems paradoxical that an organization responsible for enforcing the law would frequently rely on illegal practices. The police resolve this tension between nominally lawful ends and illegal means by substituting their own occupational and organizational norms for the legal duties assigned to them. Westley suggests: This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police, are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion. From the officers’ perspective, the center of authority is shifted and the relationship between the state and its agents is reversed. The police become a law unto themselves.”

ViolencePolicePolice BrutalityPolice StateState ViolenceMilitarization
Book:Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
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“What makes them haughty and strong is that they've studied to be authorities so that the law will be obeyed. The law has always been hard. They say that only by being that way can they force you to obey the law; there are people who won't be good otherwise. We're only interested in being bad, they say. I don't know, I've never done anything bad to anyone, not to José or to my children . . . They defend private property--that principle--is sacred--because it is possible for our hands to be stained with blood; but to appropriate what isn't ours, that's out of the question.”

Police ViolenceState ViolenceInherent ViolenceProperty Over People
Book:One Day of Life
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“Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved”

PrejudiceMental HealthMental IllnessDisabilityStigmaMental Health StigmaDisability QuotesBlamingSevere Mental Illness
Book:On The Stigma Of Mental Illness: Practical Strategies for Research and Social Change
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“At first, she bucked like a wild stag beneath me, and she tried to scream, but the pillow did a good job of muffling her voice.  Before long, the bucking stopped, and my wife’s corpse, blue without oxygen, appeared below me like a hideous phantom.”

PoliticsFantasyHorrorScience FictionParanormalSci FiImaginativeLiterary FictionSlasher
Book:The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction
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“The orderly brandished a hunting knife from a sheath at his waist and sliced open the prisoner’s throat with it.  Warm blood cascaded out of the prisoner’s throat, some of it spraying the captain’s uniform.  The orderly waited for the prisoner to bleed to death before cutting the head clean off.  Within a few minutes, the muscle that the prisoner built on his body was carved out and thrown on the grill.  After the meat cooled, the orderly put the human steaks in front of the captain for dinner.  As the captain ate each buttery piece, he couldn’t help but compliment the orderly for a job well-done.”

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Book:The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction
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