by Amy Vallejos, Staff Writer
Recently on social media I have seen a lot of confusion on what the term “ACAB” means. The slang definition for ACAB is “All cops are bastards.” I have seen people twist it around and share misinformation saying it means “All cops are bad” which just isn't the case.
So let's clear things up:
The word bastard is short for bastardized which means corrupt; this means that ACAB is referring to the corrupt system that the cops work for not the individual cops as people. When I say ACAB, I have had a lot of people take it personally as if I'm attacking their individual family members who work for law enforcement; however the only reason it is “All cops are bastards” is because the cops chose to work for such a corrupted system that it makes themselves corrupt. Even if your family member who is a cop has done amazing things in their life to help people. it doesn’t take away from the harm the system they work for has caused.
When I say ACAB I don't mean that I want to get rid of the cops all together; I just want the system to be repaired. I am aware that a law enforcement system is needed, I simply think that the one that we have is corrupted and needs to be changed, not completely discarded.
Another commonly misunderstood term is “defund the police”; defunding the police does not equal abolishing law enforcement as a whole: rather that we should use a portion of the billions of dollars that are used to fund police departments in the US to fund more helpful causes such as putting it into underfunded schools, mental health organizations, drug rehabilitation programs, and resources for the homeless.
It is averaged that the US consecutively puts 100 billion dollars annually into our police departments of which most of the funding goes towards military like equipment for police with no military training as well as being spent on over policing black and brown neighborhoods.
Statistically black and brown neighborhoods have had more crime than predominantly white neighborhoods however the only reason for that is the fact that racism is so driven throughout this system that police officers are policing predominantly black and brown neighborhoods excessively looking for colored people to arrest. If the amount of policing was fairly split between white communities and colored communities I guarantee the number of crimes would be a lot more equal.
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