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How much do we need the police?
321–330 of 505 posts
Re: How much do we need the police?
#322Earlier 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…
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.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#323Montreal 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…
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.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Extremely well said point. I think a lot of people in our profession have come from more privileged backgrounds. This causes them to not really encounter the kinds of people that you are talking about at least not in a way that they know the people are psychopathic. I realize now that I was probably quite damaged by having a childhood like I did. I suspect that I have a warped view of the world in many ways but one t…
The privilege surrounding discussions of defunding police in western social media and forums is incredibly overwhelming. We won the lottery in being born in (relatively) extremely stable societies, and have no idea what it is like to live in a society with a far weaker police force like Mexico or Somalia. We are insulated from the harsher realities of the brutality of human nature. Mexico has huge swaths of territory in which police are powerless and cartels rule. There is not a single place on Earth that I am aware of where a lack of police force is not filled by an often times more violent group. What is to stop that power vacuum from being filled?
Re: How much do we need the police?
#325I 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…
On HN there should be an expectation that people actually read the articles before commenting.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#326Montreal 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…
That is so weird. I can remember several police strikes here in Belgium, and none of that sort of thing happened.
The latest police strike announcement was for April (12th to 19th) this year, and was over the lack of PPE for field work. The strike was cancelled as PPE was made available before the strike date.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#327Earlier 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…
I live in a city with a vandalism problem. People throw benches into the river, break glass panes, and perform other similar feats just for the fun of it. Oh, and the ubiquitous designer drugs ads on every damn wall.
Well, it _was_ a problem until the government put cameras on every street corner and the police started tracking down and punishing every one of the vandals.
How would gun ownership help with this? I look out of a window at 2 AM and see a couple of guys destroying a bus stop. Should I grab my gun and start shooting at them?
Re: How much do we need the police?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
blogs haven't really existed for hundreds of years my dude.
Re: How much do we need the police?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
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…
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Re: How much do we need the police?
#330Montreal 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…
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