When we say “crime is a social construction” we don’t mean that the harm done when someone is killed, robbed, or assaulted, including sexually assaulted, is subjective or all in your head.

We mean U.S. cops execute an unknown but thousand-plus people per year, and it’s never murder; it’s a “good kill” or, with enormous public pressure, a fire-able mistake. We mean the cops, along with the courts and jails, seize wealth and possessions from hundreds of thousands of people per year, and it’s never robbery; it’s asset forfeitures, it’s citations, it’s fees. We mean cops and jailers assault — including sexually assault — millions of people every year, habitually, as well as the worst of them preying on children, sex workers, and others in vulnerable positions coerced into sex acts they cannot consent to. It’s never rape; it’s a cavity search, it’s a “date” to get out of a ticket, it’s a coerced backseat sex act to avoid a report of a probation violation.

The harm is still real in all of these cases, but the social construction of crime means that those sorts of harms don’t count when we total up crime statistics, or maybe that sort of perpetrator and those sorts of victims don’t count.

Capitalism relies on a massive amount of propaganda to convince you that cops are fundamentally good guys just in need of some reform to finally be able to get rid of all the bad guys rather than what they are: a publicly-funded gang of liars, thieves, sexual predators, and killers who protect private property for richer people of the exact same sort.