I'm finding Roko's decision to leave the police force the most interesting thing in this whole discussion.
Because she's got what I think is a pretty fundamental conflict to navigate here. The police are necessary. Their job is scary and when they're out there on the street they're under semi-constant threat. When people are scared and threatened they're on the defensive and prone to overreaction. And when that's the police, the overreactions are almost necessarily injustices.
There's nothing that makes that okay. Trying to find a way to build trust between a police force and the population it interacts with, once that trust is damaged, is like trying to find a way to un-poison a well. People have learned there's no clean water in there, so there's no reason not to shit in it, so the water never becomes clean. And on the other side of the metaphor, the tension creates the threat, the threat gives rise to the injustices, the injustices reinforce the tension, and it seems like there's never any way off the wheel.
I spent most of my post highschool youth being the one who was immediately considered or assumed to be "dangerous" in any situation that even remotely threatened violence, disorder, or unrest. It was almost automatic - if the police got called, I got cuffed (or anyway got a pair of those plastic ziptie things). Other people didn't get cuffed until after the police figured out what was going on and arrested them, if ever. I didn't get released until the police figured out what was going on and that I *wasn't* the one they needed to arrest.
I got over resenting it a long time ago. But I have never lost sight of the fact that it's still wrong. And it sucks. And a lot of people get a hell of a lot worse than I did out of it (Black Lives Matter, damnit).
But I'm just damn baffled about what is the right thing to do about it.
Roko may be saying "I just don't want to be a part of it, I quit." And that may make her life better. But it doesn't make the situation better. I understand what Roko is upset about, and why she feels a need to do, and be, something else.
But. What else? And do you make the situation the rest of us have to deal with in any way better by walking away from it?
And is that what CreepyBot is on about here, now that it has appeared to taunt her?