> 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. Obtaining arms should be, for every single adult, as quick, easy, convenient, and cheap as obtaining a blog. Many, many of us have been saying that for hundreds of years.
blogs haven't really existed for hundreds of years my dude.
People have been printing blogs for hundreds of years. See "Common Sense".
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…
>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.
That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of disagreement is really narrow on this issue.
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 pe…
> Trump supporters and racists would be watching neighborhoods with lethal weapons. You just described the situation today, both inside, and outside, of the police. Many (naturally, well-armed) police are both Trump supporters, and racists. Many Trump supporters, and racists, are extremely well-armed in the USA.
>Many Trump supporters, and racists, are extremely well-armed in the USA.
Yet they are not bestowed with the power of self-policing, and are still subject to a higher authority which regulates what is and isn't acceptable defense of self or property. Who would regulate their behavior? Instead of a small subset
of racists having power, you would have ALL racists having power. I think they would love to have the ability to police their own communities without having to go through the trouble of becoming a police officer. There would be George Zimmerman to type situations happening every other day since they know police are not coming. Last year 9 black and 19 white unarmed people were shot by police out of a population of 328 million people. Any number may be unacceptable, but that number would certainly be orders of magnitude higher if untrained citizens who do not have the protocols that police must follow are given the power to self-police.
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…
Rural areas are far from not having crime, it is just much of it ends up not getting reported because by time the cops come, it is over, the people at fault are gone, and the cops got nothing to do other than harass the non-criminal people that are dumb enough to still be around. Rural police are 90% a money-making racket and the people know it. Threatening to call the police on someone in a rural area is considered a worse threat by most than directly threatening someone with a beating or deadly weapons.
If your tractor gets stolen, the only reason to call the police is for insurance purposes. Otherwise the only way you are likely to ever see that tractor again is to ask around and look for it yourself. Plus you gotta be pretty dumb to steal a farmer's tractor. Not only is it noisy as fuck, extremely obvious, and will take forever to actually get anywhere, but the person stealing it is at the mercy of the farmer that has all the time in the world to come out and either force you out by gunpoint or blast you from a half mile away.
> You are also greatly exaggerating the risk to citizens in the USA "Noor was convicted of third degree murder and second degree manslaughter for killing Ms Damond Ruszczyk just minutes after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her Minneapolis home in July 2017." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-08/mohamed-noor-sentence... > The risk is not to the caller Just yesterday there was…
A key difference is almost surely the prevalence of guns. As you suggest at the end, cops in Australia don't approach every situation assuming there might be a gun in play.
I don't think you're presenting your anecdote in good faith. Either that or you're just completely unaware of the context. "Montreal was once known as the bank robbery capital of North America." https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/history-through-... NYPD went on strike in 2014, if anyone wants to research that themselves... RIP Eric Garner
> NYPD went on strike in 2014, if anyone wants to research that themselves Vox did an analysis of the NYPD "slowdown"[1] as it was also a useful natural experiment. They didn't enforce the low-level "broken windows" crimes, but only did the minimum required by their contract. Needless to say, the city fared far better than right now. That said, neither of these is a good example of what life would be life without gov…
I don't have any claims to make, the unfair angle of the parent comment motivated me to invite people to simply read into it themselves, so thanks for the vox link. Surely there is a middle ground between no police and military-grade policing.
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…
How is this example relevant to the article ? The article discusses reducing the scope of policing, not end of policing. Not sure why this comment is upvoted.
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…
>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. That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of…
I would rather have a group of people trained on how to apprehend criminals with the minimum force necessary and with rules and regulations to follow than have untrained, armed citizens going to retrieve their goods. Would the farmer have the freedom to search any property they please? A criminal would not let the farmer search his property, and if the farmer insisted with force he could be threatening an innocent person. Criminals would almost always be better armed and trained than their victims, and if a "mercenary" service existed which could be hired by victims, that mercenary service is essentially just privatized police.
Yes, there are often police who do not follow the regulations on how to interact with suspects, but I believe it is better to have guidelines which are sometimes broken than none at all.