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How much do we need the police?

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#301

Post by metrokoi »

geofft wrote: post #236
BurningFrog wrote: post #38

Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police. Steven Pinker describes how that went: > "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the…

But that's a terrible experiment! For one, you're in a situation where the only people with serious weapons are criminals and police (because non-criminals could generally trust the police to handle violence for them). You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches, you haven't done any of the things that would happen in a society actually set up to be sustainably police-free. You took a society…

Arming the populace? Having a bunch of untrained people police their own neighborhoods sounds like a recipe for disaster. Trump supporters and racists would be watching neighborhoods with lethal weapons.

I'm not saying that Trump supporters should not be able to, but the anti-police crowd seem to not think far enough ahead to realize that taking power away from police and giving it to the people means giving it to people that they see as political and ideological enemies as well.

Edit: would someone like to dispute this instead of just downvoting? I'm trying to discuss in good faith; this seems to be a real problem with the idea of arming the populace: inevitably there will be citizens who have different ideas on self-policing their community. Would we only allow people with socially acceptable ideologies to have arms?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#302

Post by baddox »

wolf550e wrote: post #276
ncallaway wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

If their budget is reduced, the police will choose where to cut services in such a way as to inflict maximum fear in the population, to cause their budget to be restored. They will, for example, say they cannot investigate the rape of a white woman, supposedly because lack of funds. But they will have plenty of funds to harass poor and non-white people for maybe smoking pot, but mostly for being poor and/or non-white…

If your comment is accurate, then it serves as a strong argument for why the police should be defunded even more than 50%.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#303

Post by holler »

ncallaway wrote: post #293
ghthor wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using "completely peaceful" protestors is a disingenuous statement.

Some protestors have been completely peaceful. Some entire protests have been completely peaceful. And some of those completely peaceful protests have still met tear gas, and/or pepper spray. For example, see the protest in DC that was peaceful and broken up before curfew. Is your assertion that nationwide, over 9 days, there hasn't been any peaceful protests?

If we’re focused on Seattle still, and basing this off the news from the past few days, it certainly was hard to notice any peaceful protesting occurring. Of course many people were peaceful, but amidst scenes of people busting through every retailer’s window downtown, looting stores until they were bare, while dozens of cars burned in the street...

Re: How much do we need the police?

#304

Post by holler »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #272
cheschire wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and many small message boards on the internet don’t require folks to hold a moderator role. It doesn’t scale.

There's a reason "roof Koreans" are a meme. They were successful in keeping their businesses safe while the rest of the city was looted.

so Pro 2A?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#305

Post by metrokoi »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #262
throwaway894345 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t we look at societies without police and contrast them to societies with police and tease out which have better outcomes?

In some rural communities the police can be hours away, if there's even an officer on shift right now. Virtually everyone in those communities has guns and it works out pretty well.

Rural communities where there is basically no crime is no comparison to cities with an abundance of crime targets. Also they still have police, it just takes the police a while to get there. A entity with authority to carry out laws; a person who determines what is and isn't a crime, what acts are self defense and which are assault or murder, and tracks down criminals. If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#307

Post by testbot123 »

tathougies wrote: post #274
testbot123 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a demand for accountants, lawyers, and law enforcement that focuses on egregious offenders and systemic injustice, eliminating the root causes of crime. Not tear gas and tanks. You were speaking about crime in the 70s and 80s. That probably has a lot to do with the War on Drugs [0] (have we won yet?), brought to you by the same administration who gave us Iran-Contra [1], which largely introduced the US (LA speci…

> It's a demand for accountants, lawyers, and law enforcement that focuses on egregious offenders and systemic injustice, eliminating the root causes of crime. Not tear gas and tanks. Right, that's another word for police. > That probably has a lot to do with the War on Drugs [0] (have we won yet?) No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.

> Right, that's another word for police.

I guess we agree then: more police so we can stop targeting minorities in street-level busts and instead target the big offenders: white collar crime that destroys minority communities and keeps them in perpetual bondage. If you want to haul the rich and powerful out of their homes with tear gas and tanks, who am I to disagree?

> No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.

Now we're getting somewhere. By itself, no, it didn't. Institutionalized racism in the forms of employment, education, and housing discrimination carried from the 1960s caused largely-minority communities to remain segregated and poor while at the same time, white flight took money from the inner cities and moved it to the suburbs, leaving behind an underfunded and broken education system [0]. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act are relatively recent developments: 1964 and 1968, respectively -- just a little over 10 years before your father got to LA. By the 80s, increased class stratification and tough-on-crime initiatives from the federal government meant minorities and the poor faced even more disproportionately aggressive policing and incarceration. With little hope of achieving the same success as their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs, many individuals turned to crime as a mode of survival. Then came Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and gangs.

Of course, if you're talking about true gangs in the US during this time, we can also discuss the American mafia, white supremacists like the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK, or even the gangs depicted in the film, "Gangs of New York" in the "Five Points" area of NY (but this is an example of some of the first gangs in the US, around the late 1700s -- thought some historical context would be interesting). These gangs, however, have faced less scrutiny because of their close connections with law enforcement and government.

[0] For a heartbreaking account of the devastating long term effects of this, I highly recommend Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools"

Re: How much do we need the police?

#308

Post by smsm42 »

geofft wrote: post #236
BurningFrog wrote: post #38

Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police. Steven Pinker describes how that went: > "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the…

But that's a terrible experiment! For one, you're in a situation where the only people with serious weapons are criminals and police (because non-criminals could generally trust the police to handle violence for them). You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches, you haven't done any of the things that would happen in a society actually set up to be sustainably police-free. You took a society…

> you're in a situation where the only people with serious weapons are criminals and police

Isn't this what the administration of virtually every major city have been working for decades to create? So this is an experiment that matches current conditions. Somehow I don't see most folks arguing that we don't really need police also being for unrestricted firearms ownership and repeal of the myriad of barriers that exist between the law abiding citizen and gun ownership right now. So maybe start with that if you want less police?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#310

Post by HarryHirsch »

asdff wrote: post #218
ikeyany wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other ways of turning policing away from "tacticool" policing and towards community policing: offering cops more $$$; requiring a degree or two; placing residency requirements (x cops in a precinct must live within y miles of the community they are to serve) to help weed out the bully types. That can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

To do all that you need to start with offering cops more cash, as in LA at least there is a huge recruiting problem and a staffing shortage. No one wants to be a cop, its a notoriously shit job where they haze you worse than boot camp and that's why many cops come from cop families who don't know any better than to tow the family line. Cops in LA are also very highly paid especially in benefits and overtime. Part of…

a notoriously shit job where they haze you worse than boot camp

That would indicate a leadership problem. Regular people just won't stay around when everyone from the top down is bent, even if the salary is outrageous.

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