© Reuters / Patrick Fallon
US police have failed to protect rape victims, but singling them out allows the corrupt system, which enables that failure, to continue its abuses by other means - and leaves vulnerable women without any protection at all.
Making the argument for feminists to climb on board the police-abolition bandwagon, the Guardian's Moira Donegan
reasons cops are not only incompetent when it comes to handling rape cases - they're part of the problem. She holds up the high rate of domestic abuse in police households and cites several notorious examples of cops raping women in their custody, declaring the protector has become the predator and insisting the only solution is to end the institution once and for all.
The question of
who will arrest and prosecute rapists if the police are abolished is pushed aside - even though it's asked in the title of her article - and the reader is left with the impression that police are actually responsible for more violence against women than, well, rapists. Listening to her argument, however, could put women in real danger.
'Cops are terrible at solving rape, therefore we should get rid of them' is the kind of cringeworthy hot take that's suddenly everywhere as cries to "
defund the police" begin to drown out the "
Black lives matter" chants that initially defined the George Floyd protests. But like the "
defund the police" movement itself,
scapegoating cops for the justice system's abysmal treatment of sexual assault victims is a dangerous oversimplification.
Comment: Despite APD claims, numerous reports and Tweets suggest otherwise: