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How much do we need the police?

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#311

Post by torb-xyz »

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…

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 anarchist principles) they are replacing the police with alternative institutions.

You can read more about it here: http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...

Re: How much do we need the police?

#312

Post by sacred_numbers »

fzeroracer wrote: post #291
zarkov99 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police in the small US college town I live in is pretty much part of the community. I personally know many of the officers - and they are fine people. Even so, they are still a target for antifa agit-prop tactics. The playbook is always the same, catch the one cop that said or did, or appeared to say or do, the wrong thing, once, and you can tarnish the entire department, the entire profession, forever. And it works.…

> whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature Police officers in the US face 12.9 fatalities per 100,000 workers. In comparison, construction workers see 14.3, agricultural workers see 17.7, farmers and ranchers around 24 and truck drivers 26.9. As for the rest of your argument, if the 'fine' police officers don't do anything to stand up to the bad police officers or ad…

Also, the average homicide of working age males (87% of police are male) is about 10 per 100,000. This is slightly higher than the rate for police (about 8-9 per 100,000). The remaining 4.9 per 100k police fatalities are mostly car accidents, which is also pretty small considering how many miles they drive every day).

I can understand how it might feel scary, though. Just because they don't have much worse outcomes than the average American of their demographic doesn't mean that they don't have more terrifying experiences than average. That's not an excuse, though. Abusive parents are often reacting to past trauma that was inflicted on them, but we still shouldn't allow them to abuse their children. Protecting the public in a constitutional way needs to be the top priority. Officer safety and wellbeing come close behind, but they should still always be in second place.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#313

Post by torb-xyz »

warkdarrior wrote: post #251
geofft wrote: post #236

Earlier 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 Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?

No, it's a different institution based on different ways of organising power. For another example of this see Civil Defense Forces in Rojava[0] which are organized democratically.

http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...

Re: How much do we need the police?

#314

Post by [deleted] »

seibelj wrote: post #114
missosoup wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes most police in AU carry a firearm. No they don't have a 'decent rep' for brutality, whatever that means. Comparing AU police to US police is insane. Every encounter with police like a traffic stop in the US is a nonzero chance of getting killed. That's not at all comparable to Australia where there are no tasers and the use of lethal force is in the single digits per year nationally. The view you're presenting is…

You are also greatly exaggerating the risk to citizens in the USA when calling the police. The risk is not to the caller, the risk is to the alleged criminal that may get manhandled (or shot) way out of proportion to the offense. But you don’t make a mental “death chance calculation” when you call the cops.

[deleted]

Re: How much do we need the police?

#315

Post by metrokoi »

geofft wrote: post #273
warkdarrior wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?

To some extent, But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc. And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force. I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence d…

> But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc.

So the civilian watch would effectively only have lethal force to stop a threat then? All of those things have a purpose. Armored vehicles for example are most often used to approach armed suspects who have holed themselves up in a defensive position without risking seat or police lives. Stingrays are used to track gang, cartel, weapons dealing, and terrorist activities.

You could argue that only federal entities should have that power, but then the FBI/DEA/ATF would inevitably fill the power vacuum and take over a lot of roles that would otherwise be done by police. The alternative of course if that we simply don't use Stingrays, armored vehicles, riot shields and rubber bullets, but then a lot of crime would go unpunished either from lack of information gathering or simply from fear of death (for example, a civilian with just a gun would have a much higher chance of death trying to free a child from an armed abductor that a swat team with armored vehicles, bulletproof shields, etc.)

Re: How much do we need the police?

#316

Post by zkomp »

wahern wrote: post #162
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…

Researchers studying sociopathy often put the number somewhere between 2-8%, with variance seemingly driven by cultural and other environmental factors. Whether or not you believe that sociopathy is a distinctive thing , it's hard to dispute that a not insignificant subset of human populations are primarily restrained by deterrence alone --specifically the threat of punishment. That doesn't mean such people are evil…

Generally agree but not that they are deterred by punishment alone, no. They will do whatever they get away with. Which would imply - “the right thing” must also be objectively better to the individual, not only backed by moral+force, for it to work generally.

(Not to mention the sociopaths are already present in politics and police. Drawn to power)

Re: How much do we need the police?

#317

Post by metrokoi »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #278
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…

Would this happen IF we had free guns for the populace who want them who pass background/mental evals (make owning a gun a right for all). Then we democratize gun ownership. Next we create UBI so nobody has to steal to put food on the table, and guarantee jobs for anyone who wants one, and healthcare for all. you end the poverty and almost-poverty and you stop a lot of the reasons behind WHY people loot when there's…

What happens when a burglar is shot by a home owner and there is a dispute on whether or not it was justified? Almost every single act of self defense would be heavily disputed. You would have "vigilantes" dispensing what they see as justice by trying to apprehend the home owner, who would then again be forced to defend themselves. You would need a higher entity of authority to arbitrate these disputes, possibly with lethal force, which would essentially be just another form of police.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#318

Post by erichocean »

geofft wrote: post #273
warkdarrior wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?

To some extent, But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc. And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force. I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence d…

> And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force.

Imagine an armed and dangerous HOA, functioning as its own "community policy force."

What fresh hell is this?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#319

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #283
chipperyman573 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Vigilantism is better than a police apparatus? I don’t understand these takes.

[deleted]

Re: How much do we need the police?

#320

Post by sneak »

smsm42 wrote: post #308
geofft wrote: post #236

Earlier 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'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 exi…

> 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.

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