> You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people.

That's really not what policing is about even in the most charitable view. It's certainly what policing has been propagandized to be.

Besides playing candy crush in a cruiser, the vast majority of policing everyday is responding to complaints that happen after a crime happens (or someone getting nervous).

The role of police, in the most charitable framing, is to catch people suspected of committing crimes.

Evil is also something I'd quibble over. For example, the cops that are doing things like hiding in closets to catch people jumping a turnstile certainly aren't "stopping evil people". People are complex, there are few that are truly "evil".

Now, my less charitable read on cops is they have overbloated budgets, too little oversight and consequences, and they certainly don't prioritize impactful crimes to low class people. Cops, for example, very rarely try and catch/stop bike theft. Cops primarily exist to punish people that pester the rich and well connected. See, for example, BAM and reckless ben.

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> They have not suffered because of police simpliciter

They also suffered from a lack of point to point teleportation. Or, I mean, they would if that existed.

The point being that it's not terribly useful to talk about things that only exist in theory.

Police, rather by definition are regulated by the people with money because they can afford it. The people in "poor neighborhoods" can't afford to pay for police.

> Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.

Says the person trying to change the topic of discussion to hypothetical ideal instead of the world we actually live in.

As for ACAB and its polling, well, that's like saying "socialism polls badly", it probably does, but also nobody answering the polls actually agrees on how to define it.

There is an absolutely massive amount of (american) propaganda devoted entirely to portraying police in the best possible light and influencing people towards that end. We have endless movies and tv shows and books and cable news shows and radio talk shows and on and on.

> I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor?

No, literally nobody thinks that and it's a pretty sad attempt at rhetoric to suggest it.

> but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.

I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to draw a distinction here, if you actually look at americans, you can pretty easily divide them into two groups, one of which that wants "transparency and demilitarization" and one of which wants a police force with more military style weapons and equipment, and if you are on the side of demilitarization, then guess what, you're on the same side as everyone yelling acab.

You aren't some kind of special person who can some how see the perfect compromise between all positions that everyone else has missed.

"Police should be monitored by a complete separate agency with no chain of command in common with the police force, answerable to voters in a more direct way, as well as trained to de-escalate situations and held accountable for their crimes" doesn't fit on a placard and it's hard to chant. ACAB is a lot shorter.

Also, as a final takeaway, the phrase is "a few bad apples SPOILS THE ENTIRE BARREL" not "a few bad apples are perfectly fine and nobody minds them".

I'm sure most police aren't actually committing crimes and abuse of power. But they also refuse to hold the ones that do accountable and are therefor 100% complicit with all the abuses.