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How much do we need the police?

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#231

Post by hoorayimhelping »

js2 wrote: post #3

I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…

The use of the word 'violence' felt odd and inciting and disingenuous and very loaded in these contexts. I think the word the author is actually describing is 'force'. Police have the legal capacity to use force, not violence. That's why we have a legal concept of deadly force, but not one for deadly violence.

Putting someone in handcuffs is not necessarily violent, but it involves using force to impose the will of the state on an individual.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#232

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ben509 wrote: post #178
_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

You wouldn't go out in ancient Rome after dark, though. Unless you could afford armed bodyguards.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#233

Post by always_left »

billme wrote: post #140
always_left wrote: post #28

Does anyone ever take justice into their own hands? Not recommending it, but my neighbor's car was stolen so I went out and found it for them that day. It was reported missing but I had a feeling it wasn't going to be actively looked for due to the severity of the crime.

How exactly did you find the car?

Honestly sheer luck. I drove around areas that generally have more crime looking for a blue crossover car. Around 1AM, when I was headed home, I spotted it on the left side of the road behind a camper, then I sat a good distance from it until the perpetrators started driving it then I called 911.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#234

Post by carapace »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #190
carapace wrote: post #181

I dunno about no police, but Sir Robert Peel has a thought (I posted this the other day, apologies if you've seen it before.) This seems to me to be pretty sane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles > The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent in the United…

Serious question: how can something be called "consent" if it can't be withdrawn by individuals? That's democracy, not consent.

What do you mean?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#235

Post by [deleted] »

markc wrote: post #176
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/Murr…

[deleted]

Re: How much do we need the police?

#236

Post by geofft »

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 that assumed the existence of the police for its stability and then removed them, of course it fell apart.

Apart from violence, there's another big thing that probably went missing, too - authorization for certain people to enter private property for reasons of the general good. The reason we call the police for welfare checks, for better or worse, is that nobody else has the right to enter your house. A doctor might be better suited to responding to someone undergoing a mental health crisis, but they can't break in. Similarly, you see stories of "police rescue deer from rooftop" or whatever because nobody else is authorized to climb onto random rooftops. If a society wants to get rid of the police, it needs to designate some other group to handle this use case. It can't simply get rid of the police.

A "natural experiment" of a world without police is quite unnatural: it's a world built up around the police with a sudden police-shaped gap in the middle.

To pick an analogy that should make sense to folks here, it's like shutting down your datacenter for 16 hours, suffering serious outages, and then concluding that your company absolutely needs its datacenter. Well, yes, it does today, but that's not what the people saying you should look at public cloud are advocating.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#237

Post by yowlingcat »

rayiner wrote: post #216
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…

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…

Damn, that's nutty. My parents always warned me that the Bangladesh they grew up in and knew is, in their words "a place where you have to be at least a little crooked" to survive (although they left in the 70s as soon as they could), and I know that the 80s was the era of Ershad's reign which was a particularly rough time. By the right people, does that mean in the government or organized crime or who knows?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#238

Post by milquetoastaf »

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…

Hmm. Unable to replicate https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

Re: How much do we need the police?

#239

Post by magicalist »

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…

> Steven Pinker describes how that went

Well as Wikipedia describes how it went beforehand:

> 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]

And this was all while the police were on the job, so it seems like pretty important context (especially considering the article is not the headline and we're talking about policing scope here).

Re: How much do we need the police?

#240

Post by throwwwaway »

remember_george wrote: post #72
Uhhrrr wrote: post #41

It's true that police are asked to be solutions for social problems for which they are unsuited. However, the reason this interview is topical has to do with someone paying for cigarettes with a possibly counterfeit bill and refusing to give them back. That seems to me to be an entirely reasonable reason to call the police.

Seeing how George Floyd moved to Minneapolis to do ministry work I bet he didn’t even know the bill was counterfeited.

Once one side starts speculating on things like this, the other side starts speculating on things like what was an intoxicated man doing in the driver's seat on a car.

It's not helpful to the issue, which is that he was murdered by police, and that something needs to change to prevent something similar from happening again.

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