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How much do we need the police?

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#171

Post by colejohnson66 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #22
tehwebguy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think police stop rapes from happening? Rapes happen in peoples' homes where there are no police. Then, if the victim chooses to report it, they are often blown off by the police entirely unless the circumstances make it impossible to ignore.

Police try to find and arrest rapists, who would probably go on to rape other people if they weren't in prison.

You would think. But I know someone who was raped. The guy even bragged about it. But the DA declined to prosecute.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#172

Post by hadlock »

tathougies wrote: post #81
jbay808 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This framing of the police seems very strange to my Canadian sensibilities. I'm curious about whether Americans largely agree with this description.

Canadians do not have violent warlords on their streets. You don't understand what it's like to live in our (mainly South Western) cities, and live with threats of drive-by shootings, vandalism, and getting caught in gunfire. My dad worked driving around downtown LA and surrounds for 20 some odd years and there was more than a few times he was caught in gang-based gunfire. This was in the 80s and 90s mostly, and thin…

After we shrunk the size of our military in the 1990s, closed a bunch of bases etc there was a surplus of military hardware that was no longer being purchased by the military. Mysteriously at the same time we passed a bill allowing police to do things like buy tanks etc under the guise of anti-riot equipment, despite not needing it before for well over a century. All sorts of equipment deemed only necessary for fighting wars on foreign soil, suddenly became part of the equipment catalog for rural police forces in places like Vermont and New Hampshire.

The concept that the local police force and national military should own/use the same equipment is fairly recent, only happening in the last 25 years, and in great numbers only post-9/11.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#173

Post by electricviolet »

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #54
jorblumesea wrote: post #29

One of my current frustrations with American politics is how radical everything has become. The debate is now, either we don't have any police and defund them, or, we allow them to continue being completely unaccountable. Neither of those situations sound ideal. It feels like Europe and other places have a much more reasonable and nuanced view. Police get funded, and well funded, but the job requirements are strict,…

Yea I'm kind of besides myself about how "abolishing police" is treated as a serious proposal, when the most deaths and violence occur in profoundly vulnerable communities where disbanding police would almost certainly result in innocent people having no protection against criminals. It's pretty clear that police unions allow for a lot of this institutional rot and inability to address abuse. I fear that the left doe…

Most of the left leaders I follow and trust are specifically opposed to police unions due to the fact that they protect violent officers.

Let's not lump other public sector unions in with police unions; the teacher's union has nothing to do with police brutality.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#174

Post by awb »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #164
BurningFrog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like are you suggesting the natural state of people is just to loot and behave completely selfishly? Don't know about that, but there is ABSOLUTELY enough selfish/predatory/angry people in any population that will commit violent acts for profit and pleasure if the risks of being brought to justice disappears. I would not have guessed it would erupt as fast as it did in Montreal, but empirically, it did. I expect da…

Day 2 may have been a lot better as store owners started to take matters into their own hands. We only saw the first day, which many people were unprepared for. A lot less people would be willing to loot if they had a friend who died after getting shot by a store owner with a shotgun. Not that this is really any better, I'm just trying to say that we can't really reach any conclusions from one day of this experiment

Pretty sure gangs would take over. Power abhors a vacuum.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#175

Post by _8j50 »

"Police" (Edit:"modern police") is a 19th century invention, well after cities were a thing. If we get past semantics, a service that provides order and security to a community is needed. I imagine it more like social workers that also do criminal investigations for prosecutors instead of a military force for a city. Perhaps an unrelated armed "police" can help when deadly force is needed (gangs, armed criminals,etc...).

Disarm and civilize the police but keep their SWAT units as a separate department that only backs up police when requested.

This would throwing a lot less people in jail and having police that live in the community. But hey, this is just wishful imagination, politicians and police union would commit sedition if anything like this happened.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#176

Post by markc »

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…

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/Murray-Hill_riot

That's not to dispute the idea that cities will generally retain order if police are absent. I imagine it varies wildly from one time and place to another.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#177

Post by [deleted] »

flyingfences wrote: post #146
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…

All that sort of damage has also happened in plenty of situations when the police were not on strike, though... I don't think that one unusual event (an anecdote) is any indication of any larger pattern. More to the point, though, the article doesn't suggest a complete abolition of all police; it suggests returning them to a more limited, core role.

[deleted]

Re: How much do we need the police?

#178

Post by ben509 »

_8j50 wrote: post #175

"Police" (Edit:"modern police") is a 19th century invention, well after cities were a thing. If we get past semantics, a service that provides order and security to a community is needed. I imagine it more like social workers that also do criminal investigations for prosecutors instead of a military force for a city. Perhaps an unrelated armed "police" can help when deadly force is needed (gangs, armed criminals,etc.…

The Vigiles were a police force[1] in ancient Rome, so they're not a recent innovation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigiles#Police_force

Re: How much do we need the police?

#179

Post by AmericanChopper »

usrusr wrote: post #139
AmericanChopper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you make that their only job you'll be in a situation of hammers seeing nails wherever they look. That depends entirely on how much power you give them, and how much accountability you impose upon their use of it. The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Trying to give them duties that conflict with those objectives is simply always going to…

No amount of power removal and accountability will change the "nails" perception if the only job they have is hammering. > The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Only if your idea of a perfect society is one where everybody is incarcerated. I'd rather have one where as few people as possible need to be incarcerated to keep order.

> No amount of power removal and accountability will change the "nails" perception if the only job they have is hammering.

Providing the police with conflicting responsibilities isn’t going to solve that problem. At best it’s a waste of resources, and at worse it makes everything worse. You can’t expect the police to earnestly participate in improving a community when at any moment their responsibilities may obligate them to decide that it’s the community members who are the problem, and that they need to go to jail.

The very nature of the justice system is adversarial, and the police are it’s enforcers. Attempting to burden them with responsibilities that directly conflict with their role in the system isn’t going to fix anything.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#180

Post by BurningFrog »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #168
BurningFrog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like are you suggesting the natural state of people is just to loot and behave completely selfishly? Don't know about that, but there is ABSOLUTELY enough selfish/predatory/angry people in any population that will commit violent acts for profit and pleasure if the risks of being brought to justice disappears. I would not have guessed it would erupt as fast as it did in Montreal, but empirically, it did. I expect da…

> Well, some people never find their needs met... enormous numbers of people in the US are living literally a paycheck or a medical emergency away from bankruptcy and homelessness

I was implying that some people always want more, regardless of how much they already have.

But sure, I agree that those desperate people can also be dangerous.

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