A short essay from @butchanarchy

What especially strikes me about the police not only avoiding confronting the shooter, but actively keeping other people from intervening to try to stop him, is that a major part of the police's role is to keep us all from feeling empowered to take direct action against harm.

Their job is to maintain the sovereignty of the State and that doesn't show up as only a directly violent force, but an indirectly violent one as well. For the State to keep its power it needs to keep a monopoly on agency. It needs us to be dependent on it as the sole doer.

See something violent happening in front of your eyes? The State wants you to call the police rather than intervene, so that everyone sees intervention on harm as something that only the police can preform (even though that's not what police actually do). This state of things makes people feel helpless in the face of harm or violence, it makes sure that most people have little to no practice (sometimes for their entire lifetimes) of having to encounter and deal with stressful or violent conflict.

In practice, though, many people will try to intervene on immediate physical violence, especially when the targets of it are people they care about. So is cop's job then? They need to maintain the State monopoly on agency, so they step in to stop people from intervening.

Ultimately it is more in the police's interest that you feel helpless to intervene on harm-- that you fully accept that doing so is "the police's job"-- than actually intervening on harm itself is. Because stopping harm has never been their job, controlling us is.

-Your Friendly Butch Anarchist