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How much do we need the police?

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#421

Post by 082349872349872 »

cheesecracker wrote: post #418
082349872349872 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In countries where people are nicer to each other, there is less police brutality. It would take much more time, but I think more Fred Rogers and less GI Joe (or whatever their current equivalents may be) is likelier to provide a more lasting fix than any of these short-term policy proposals. WWJD?

So how do you make people be nicer to each other?

Education (in the french sense of the word)? My only specific recommendation I already gave above, and even that is a hypothesis. If I had an answer, I'd be proposing it, but as it is, I've taken the easier path out, by living in the place where I'd found the nicest people, after having traveled a bit.

(I don't think one can make people be nicer to each other. At best, they can experience for themselves that things go more smoothly once nature is not red in tooth and claw, and decide to be nicer. That said, legislating morality does work better than one might think: it allows people who might already go along with the legislation to claim to their in-group that they still don't really like the out-group, but are only going along with the law.)

Re: How much do we need the police?

#422

Post by throwaway894345 »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #332
metrokoi wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural communities where there is basically no crime is no comparison to cities with an abundance of crime targets. Also they still have police, it just takes the police a while to get there. A entity with authority to carry out laws; a person who determines what is and isn't a crime, what acts are self defense and which are assault or murder, and tracks down criminals. If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is…

>If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police. That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of…

You don’t “hire” the police, and that’s critical. If you did, they would be accountable to you and not the rest of society. Police are agents of the government which is accountable (to some degree) to the people. This is a tremendous distinction.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#423

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cheesecracker wrote: post #419
Netcob wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe the fact that the riots have been caused by the police in the first place should be considered too.

The triggering cause was the act of one policeman and his three colleagues who stood by (which might indicate the constriction was perhaps a kind of standard procedure that went wrong - or not. Personally I am waiting for an official verdict). That's not "the police". If you say that's "the police", you can also say "that's black people" if a black person murders somebody. In any case, there is no excuse for riots.

Hmm, I've seen current USA riot footage where the police seemingly got spooked (by an umbrella), and proceeded to gas a couple of hundred peaceful protestors.

Some riots and current outbreaks have certainly been caused by police.

In other incidents riot police have been filmed purposefully and willfully attacking already subdued members of the public; looking around first to check for observers of course! One of the cases the policeman put a weapon in the have of a subdued arrestee as a precursor to beating them.

These sorts of actions inflame the public and cause ongoing rioting.

It's been interesting witnessing quite measured, in relative terms, vigilante justice against some rioters too.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#424

Post by taborj »

selimthegrim wrote: post #399
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...

I'm sorry, this is like pulling a single line out of a book and using it to bolster a specific argument. In other words, there's loads of context that's missing. Your video has less than 10 seconds of context. What happened just before the video starts? What happened 15 minutes before?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#425

Post by bluedays »

coliveira wrote: post #78
bluedays wrote: post #21

> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…

Contrary to popular belief, pacific demonstrations have very little power. That's why riots are an essencial tool for demonstrations like the ones we're seeing these days. People like to give examples such as the civil rights' movement as the effectiveness of pacific demonstration, but that was just a good tactical decision made by Dr. King and other organizers, since they knew that police was ready to kill them at a…

Dude, you can't even spell. I'm not going to take what you're saying as intelligent when you can't even spell essential.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#426

Post by epistasis »

wccrawford wrote: post #374
epistasis wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but imagine a situation where this is a huge step up in fairness and justice from what you currently experience everyday! Many people currently live under tyranny and terror worse than an HOA police force.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fa... This is the kind of behavior that I expect to see widely across America if we rely on random citizens to patrol instead of police. He was told by 911 to stay in his car, but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".

Agreed that it won't help there. But communities are different; the ones that are proposing community policing are ones where they know that they will get better treatment from their own community members than they will from outsiders.

The same solutions will not be applied universally across the US because the challenges are very different for different communities. Many Black communities that are asking for community policing will benefit; doing community policing in white spaces is not guaranteed to make them any safer for Black people, but I don't know if that's being called for. And honesty I'm not sure it makes them less safe, either, when you look at what happened to Treyvom Martin and Ahmed Aubrey's cases (and all the others that do not get media attention).

Re: How much do we need the police?

#427

Post by taborj »

virgilp wrote: post #415
CapricornNoble wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>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:…

There's also the fact that school proliferation itself is a relatively recent (~80-100 years) phenomenon; and after that there was a world war, and after said war maybe not everybody could afford to/ had a priority to buy guns ("greatest proliferation in the Western world" does not necessarily equal "proliferation at the same levels as today"). Last by not least, maybe the other factors you mentioned would still resu…

But time and again we've seen violent crimes rise after enacting gun control, most recently in New Zealand[0] (this particular report focuses on gun crimes, which are on the rise after gun control has been enacted, but it's by no means a problem isolated to gun crime).

It all indicates the problem isn't the gun, it's the person. And taking their gun away doesn't take away their problems. I find it odd that the current climate of acceptance and a desire to help others can so staunchly ignore mental health issues.

[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/416881/rates-of-gun-crim...

Re: How much do we need the police?

#428

Post by throwaway894345 »

Memosyne wrote: post #393
rayiner wrote: post #216

Earlier 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…

> Look at places like Somalia or Afghanistan to see what happens when law and order breaks down in a systematic way. Also see Brazil with Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho which are violent organizations that have/had lofty goals similar to the growing movement (i.e. anti-police brutality, vengeance)[1]. Those groups now partake in degenerate drug and sex fueled parties and slaughter their enemies usin…

> No need to worry though; their code of conduct proclaims that they fight for liberty, justice and peace and that rape is bad -- they're obviously the good guys.

Look Mom, I did an Antifa!

Re: How much do we need the police?

#429

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

electricviolet wrote: post #298
gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow socialist stuff too much but I thought there'd be some interesting work from Jacobin to see how they perceive it. Turns out there is: > However, in most cities and states, police unions are treated as members in good standing of local labor councils and federations. They often work closely with other municipal unions, from firefighters to teachers, to protect labor rights and municipal budgets. Given t…

This is really interesting -- thanks for the link.

FWIW I approach it from a libertarian perspective (namely in this case it's my view that large groups have a tendency to go sour and become abusive). So naturally I'm at best ambivalent about unionization, but I find it fascinating and enlightening to see socialists grapple with the things they advocate.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#430

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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