How much do we need the police?

Crosswalks in the middle (not at intersections) like the UK. (This is an engineering solution.)

Make the posted speed limit actually tend to line up for green to green when going straight, and send turns down the road from the sides just before straight (to make going a tiny bit slower hit the green).

Now we absolutely need police. We might have been able to do w/o them for short periods before these riots and demonstrations occurred, but now the police are guaranteed a permanent and prominent position in American politics (until it no longer exists).

Or perhaps we should settle the matter now, distribute working firearms and ammo to every non-felon over the age of 16 (or possibly 12). Either things will heat up and cool rapidly or everyone will suddenly acquire good manners. In the long run the USA can begin a renaissance of political equality and good will for all.

Modern civilization has its roots in the Enligtenment, duh. And it's been generally a good thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-ho...

> New data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg, showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47 per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the early 19th century.

> Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year.

You can thank your local police department, among other institutions, for that dramatic decline in crime rates.

The demand in Seattle to defund the police isn't calling to totally remove funding. It's calling for a 50% reduction in the budget.

Just a heads up that "defund the police" isn't actually that different from "we need to rethink the roles where we have police"

Not just that, but also after a year of separatist terrorism(/freedom fighting, depending on perspective, of course). The riot(/uprising) was in October 1969, so I question how peaceable Pinker's Canada was at the time:

> In the first six months of 1969, there were 93 bank robberies in Montreal compared to 48 bank robberies in the first six months of 1968.[5] In January and February 1969, the FLQ staged 10 terrorist bombings in Montreal, and between August 1968 and February 1969, there were 75 bombings linked to the FLQ.[5] In February 1969, the FLQ set off bombs at the Montreal Stock Market (injuring 28 people) and at the offices of the Queen's Printer in Montreal.[5] March 1969 saw the outbreak of violent demonstrations as French-Canadians demanded that McGill University, a traditional bastion of Montreal's English-speaking elite, be transformed into a French-language university, leading to counter-demonstrations by English-Canadians to keep McGill an English language university.[4] The leader of the 'Operation McGill Français' protests was ironically a part-time Marxist political science lecturer from Ontario named Stanley Gray who could barely speak French, but who declared that McGill must become a French-language university to end "Anglo-elitism", rallying support from the Quebec separatist movement.[11] Over two weeks of clashes and protests, McGill was reduced to chaos as Quebec separatists stormed into the meetings of the McGill's Senate and administration chanting such slogans as "Révolution! Vive le Québec socialise! Vive le Québec libre!".[11] The climax of the 'Operation McGill Français' protests occurred on the evening of 28 March 1969 when a 9,000-strong group of Quebec separatists led by Gray tried to storm McGill, and clashed with the police who had been asked by McGill to keep Gray's group off the campus.[11] In September 1969, rioting broke out in the St. Leonard district between Italian-Canadians and French-Canadians with differing opinions of the language issue.[4] Italian immigrant parents had kept their children from school to protest the fact that the language of school instruction was now French instead of English, and on 10 September 1969, a group of 1,500 French-Canadian nationalists attempted to march through St. Leonard's Little Italy district to protest the school boycott.[12] Upon arrival, the marchers were attacked by the Italians, leading to a night of violence on the streets.[13]