In the Netherlands the police's motto is "waakzaam en dienstbaar" meaning something like "vigilant and at your service". I like it, it means they are servants you can ask things and they are there to help. They are trained to always de-escalate. Tbh they sometimes get a lot of foul language addressed to them by certain individuals, yet they usually remain calm. I have a lot of respect for them.
How much do we need the police?
381–390 of 505 posts
Re: How much do we need the police?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
or they'll spend less of their budget on highly expensive military equipment and more on less expensive deescalation skills and community engagement...HA
Don't they basically get given that stuff second-hand by the military?
Re: How much do we need the police?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pe…
First of all, I want to say that I don't support roving gangs of mercenaries. But just as a thought experiment... which do you think is likely to kill more innocent people: roving gangs of mercenaries in a stateless community where most are armed or the US government? edit: changed vigilantes to mercenaries for consistency
Well, we are now talking about the entire US government instead of just US police. Certainly a state has a greater pool of resources to draw upon for war if it chooses to do so, but comparing a state with groups of mercenaries or vigilantes is impossible because of the myriad of different forms they could take. One would be comparing a single large casualty number vs. many much smaller numbers. The Iraq war is estimated to have had 150,000 to over 600,000 civilian casualties in the first three to four years of conflict, although I believe that is total, not just casualties attributed to the US. The US had a population of just under 300,000,000 at the time. Revolutionary Catalonia is the best large example of a large-scale anarchical society I can find, and in 1936 is estimated to have had 8,350 killings for a population of under 3,000,000 [0]. Of course those two examples are more on the extreme side, and there are infinite nuances, such as the fact that not all civilians in the civil war were innocent, the same with Revolutionary Catalonia. They both were extremely different times as well.
I'd say it's a toss-up if I absolutely had to guess.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Almost all of the protests in Seattle have been peaceful, until the cops started spaying made and throwing flash grenades into the crowd. Yes there has been some looting, generally away from the protestors, because the police are busy.
So far, everyone who has said that cops reacted this way for absolutely no reason has been misinformed or lying when I go investigate. It’s actually quite surprising how frequently these blatantly wrong claims keep coming up.
Often there is an assumption that because they didn’t see what started it, it must have been nothing. You might think they didn’t have a good enough reason, but I have yet to see police in any city deploy OC for no reason at all.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that’s just the short term. Look at places like Somalia or Afghanistan to see what happens when law and order breaks down in a systematic way. The issue isn’t even just “crime” in the sense of robbery, etc. When there is no police, organized crime can take over. When we lived in Bangladesh in the 1980s, a minibus full of criminals showed up at the gate of our house. (This being Dhaka in the 1980s, we had a brick…
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"
Honestly defunding the force doesn't solve much if the underlying issues are not dealt with. I saw a Vice Special about police training nowadays. The so-called consultant kept referencing the community as combatants and his approach for most confrontations was overpower the 'opponent' at any cost.
Nothing is going to change if the police training and punishment for violating basic freedoms is not addressed.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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 It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone". People ar…
>>>It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone".
We've had by far the greatest firearms proliferation in the Western world for centuries. In the 1920's you could buy fully automatic Thompson sub-machineguns from a mail-in catalog. ( http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/web/coltguns.htm ) Yet school shootings are a relatively recent (~30 years) phenomenon. Over that same 30-year period we've also had an increase in single-parent households as well as an increase in SSRI drug prescriptions. There doesn't seem to be anywhere near the willingness to attack those social issues or investigate their impacts on murderous outbursts.
Firearms proliferation seems to work well for Kennesaw, Georgia. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/06/us/kennesaw-georgia-gun-o...
But the data for everywhere else is a mixed bag: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-...
Re: How much do we need the police?
#387In the Netherlands the police's motto is "waakzaam en dienstbaar" meaning something like "vigilant and at your service". I like it, it means they are servants you can ask things and they are there to help. They are trained to always de-escalate. Tbh they sometimes get a lot of foul language addressed to them by certain individuals, yet they usually remain calm. I have a lot of respect for them.
I think this is what the "serve" in popular US police mottos like "protect and serve" that some departments use was intended to convey. I suppose the message got lost (in more than a few cases in the US) somewhere between painting it on the car and training and managing officers inside the car.
It definitely feels like the police in the US are generally less trained than those in most western European countries (or at least the one I live in), and while this doesn't necessarily make them more violent, it does seem to increase the variance in attitude and behavior I've experienced among cops in the US. There are those I wouldn't trust to use physical force even when necessary, and clearly others I would not trust to use force as a secondary or last-resort option. It's rather concerning when you don't know what you will get.
This is definitely not equally true of every department. I've lived in some smaller towns where the police are noticeably more compassionate, as well as some cities like SF where the presiding strategy seems to be avoiding the overuse the police partly because of their inherent unpredictability, an overly punitive justice system, etc.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#388Please keep in mind that the current protests are only happening because of police . There is a point when they're not the agents of order and safety, but the agents of violence and disorder. And yes, we ought to question the value of any police force that kills citizens so regularly -- so normally -- that it's shocking if someone can even ask whether a cop should be charged with murder after murdering someone on cam…
It is not just because of police, it is because the government or mayor that oversee that police allowed it to become that way and did not immediately take action.
1. Police don't just start one day misbehaving without any warning. It takes years to get there, years where they see there is no consequence for being more and more out of line and years of having immunity for their actions.
2. That event was not handled properly, the cop should have been arrested on the spot or in a couple of hours, not days later. These lack of immediate action was seen as an attempt to cover up or minimize the gravity of the situation and that is a very good reason for public protests.
Both #1 and #2 are not the fault of the police, but for people governing over the police force. Quoting from a well known psychologist, the regular policemen has an IQ around 90, the police oversight body should compensate for that.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone I've talked with that believed in abolishing police understood that it would need to be replaced by some kind of other institution. Suddenly removing the police like that is therefore not a valid way to consider the abolishment of police in general. I'm a bit surprised by someone who's familiar with an anarchist theory to be this naive about this stuff. Today in Rojava (society in Syria based in part on anarch…
It is worth noting so, that of all western style democracies only the US has the kind of problems with police violence. Not saying other countries don't have police violence, but not even close to the degree the US has. So instead of looking at alternative societies in Syria, how about looking at European countries and the way they are policing? Or Canada?
No, the US is too special for that.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a natural experiment in what happens without police when the city is in the midst of an extreme wave of crime and violent protest, and one of the protests turns into a riot while the police were on strike. The idea that this incident demonstrates that any city will go up in flames immediately if the police take the day off is a misreading this specific moment in history. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murr…
But here we are in the middle of ongoing riots discussing the role of the police. Maybe the comparison is not so inappropriate after all.
Then maybe the fact that the riots have been caused by the police in the first place should be considered too.