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[Putnam]

Eliminate the idea of "criminal", maybe, as a category to place people in? It's so broad as to be meaningless, with the kind of shit that's a "crime".

[Egan_BW]

I think that the idea of crime can and should exist, even if there's no need to classify people as "criminals" in a way that others them. Actions which actively harm people should be addressed in some way.

I suppose what my point is, is that the need to apprehend people against their will for the good of everyone will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future. It would be nice if there were no need, but I don't see it happening.

[ChairmanPoo]

If you read the bible in times of yore public offenders were brought before the whole town and summarily stoned by the whole town. Maybe a similar system could be adapted, with offenders being collectively punished on a neighbourhood basis? It doesnt need to be stoning, we live in more civilized times, baseball bats might be a more efficient tool for the purpose

[Reelya]

The BLM thing has stoked protests in Australia recently, they're having a big debate about Aboriginal deaths in custody, and an Aboriginal university academic pointed out that Aboriginal people were significantly *less* likely to die in prison than other races, on an individual basis.

They're already super-aware of this issue in prisons, since a black death in custody is national news here, and other deaths are not newsworthy. they've had half a dozen royal commissions into the matter and they've done the prison reforms. The problem isn't caused by prison guards, it's the poverty and crime rate in those communities in the first place. But it's just much easier for politicians to promise to look into what's happening in the prisons than ask why there are so many black people in prison to start with rather than address the real issue which is the poverty in general that causes lots of black people to come in contact with police.

For the American experience you may find that things like "banning chokeholds" or other specific police actions fail to really bring meaningful change as well, since they address a symptom and not the underlying cause.

[Frumple]

They've had half a dozen commissions already, they've done the prison reform. The problem is the underlying poverty, not what happens after people go to prison.

I mean, no, if folks are dying in custody there's probably problems with what happens after people go to prison, too. If your clinks are still killing people the prison reform prolly ain't actually done. Poverty might be a larger problem, but that don't somehow invalidate whatever ones the prisons have.

[Reelya]

I'm not saying it's not a problem, what I'm saying is that they always promise prison reform, and they have got it to the point black people are significantly less likely to die on an individual basis, in prison, than other people, so promising more of the same isn't going to help black people. At best, further prison reform will spend a large amount of money and see minimal actual gains for black people.

It's like saying that we got you a fancy coffin so you don't need to worry about dying, when what you needed was medicine. Prison reform here isn't medicine, it's palliative care, and it's also an easy promise that lets politicians weasel out of addressing the real problem. You just waggle a finger at some prison guards then that absolves society of any blame.

[Iduno]

For the American experience you may find that things like "banning chokeholds" or other specific police actions fail to really bring meaningful change as well, since they address a symptom and not the underlying cause.

And also because they're already illegal. As is "murdering civilians." Actually, all of the "reforms" that are being suggested already exist, and are worthless.

[Max™]

1: Not convinced that "eliminate crime entirely" is a feasible goal outside of fundamentally changing what humans are. Which we probably won't be able to accomplish for the next, what? 10-15 years? ;P

Greatly reduce crime, and the kind of crime which would call for an arrest, sure. That mean greatly reducing the need to make arrests, not eliminating the need entirely.

Most people are not monsters, most people are not inherently evil, they gotta learn that shit. I lived with a monster from before I can remember, I couldn't stop him from hurting my mom, so I made sure he saw me seeing him, and when I learned what police were in theory I tried asking a neighbor to call them to help one night when he got especially violent (we had no phone) and said neighbor responded to the 4 year old from next door asking them to call the cops in a reasonable enough fashion by calling the cops, who came and removed Jackie from the house... until that morning when he came back home.

Next time they came and asked them to keep it down basically, I tried to plead with them to help because I couldn't stop him, tried to explain this, and was told that I should go back inside, it was late.

Just because something is wrong doesn't make it a crime apparently, but I knew that if I killed him, even though it was the right thing to do, it would probably be considered a crime so I started working to figure out how I would have to do it to avoid getting attacked by the people who should have helped in the first place, and thankfully before I was big enough and capable enough to do this he offed himself while my mom was living where he couldn't find her.

I know evil, I know what monsters actually are, I can barely stand to watch Alien because it is such a goddamn visceral glimpse into my childhood: being trapped somewhere with a monster you can't stop as it threatens and attacks those you care about.

I honestly and genuinely hope nobody ever has to stare into the eyes of something like him, and it is a rare thing indeed to come across pure psychopaths in the wild.

Sociopathy is what happens when you tamp down anything inside you that says "stop this" and begin trying to emulate monsters, but it is generally a learned process that can be unlearned. A sociopath might end up being reformed and learn how to function normally again, a psychopath just learns how to hide better so they can keep playing with their food. People need to be protected by people who know how to identify psychopaths and either train them via game-reward strategies to behave (negative incentives will not stop a psychopath, let them play a game of slots on a computer and tweak the slots so each win causes the next one to take twice as much time or more before it happens, most people quit playing rapidly, a psychopath doesn't think about the negative results and keeps chasing the positive ones, give them points to hide themselves, bonus points for not doing things like hurting people physically or mentally, it is a promising method apparently), or remove them from society if they can't be manipulated like that.

Without laws that criminalize things only if they're done by the poor or darker skinned portions of a community, without opportunities being deliberately limited for them, without mental and physical healthcare being made prohibitively expensive, without housing and food insecurity, the vast majority of crimes would literally disappear overnight.

These aren't people doing things because "man, I bet it'd be fun to break into that building and steal a TV so we can get a gun and some drugs to go shoot some people while stoned" or something like that. You try to steal a tv so you can fence it and you try to use some of that money to get high because it makes it a little easier to ignore the nagging soreness in your jaw, the clicking twinge in your knee, and the vague feeling everybody is watching you because they know what you were thinking about doing.

Even in the case of cops, most of them need to be indoctrinated into the mindset of "every call could be your last, nobody but your partner has your back out there" before they start bragging to other cops about fucked up shit they've done or viewing it like a game of trying to get people to fuck up so they can arrest them. Then after you get someone in that mindset you task them with responding to a huge range of situations with a limited set of skills, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail... if all you have is pepper spray and a pistol...

[Reelya]

Sociopathy is what happens when you tamp down anything inside you that says "stop this"

Actually it seems more like they don't have that thing inside them to start with.

EDITED to include relevant neuroscience research:
https://www.livescience.com/39904-why-psychopaths-lack-empathy.html

Psychopaths are usually described as lacking empathy, and a new study reveals the neurological basis for this dearth of feeling.

When people with psychopathy imagine others experiencing pain, brain regions associated with empathy and concern for others fail to activate or connect with brain areas involved in emotional processing and decision-making, researchers report.
...
In addition to a lack of remorse, psychopathy is characterized by shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. The rate of psychopathy is about 23 percent in prisons, compared with about 1 percent in the general population, research shows.

The problem here is that you're trying to put yourself in their shoes to understand why they act like that, but that's failing to understand how alien someone else's brain can be. They're not just us with a different skin and experiences. That "little voice" that stops people doing bad things, it's an evolved trait, a specific brain function. It's not really correct that everyone is, by some universal objective truth, born nice and has to learn how to be bad. We've been engineered with special "be nice" circuitry.

Sociopaths and similar are basically the Uncanny Valley of psychology. They look like anyone else but they're going to act in ways you can't fathom.

EDIT2: if you have a true psychopath or sociopath often they don't comprehend other people feeling guilt, so they laugh at it, it becomes a funny situation to them. So if you have someone who does bad shit, doesn't seem to feel remorse about it, and seems to find it amusing to make others feel those emotions, then you've probably got a sociopath with bad wiring right there. Another thing they do is to "express remorse" when it's convenient to them or they got in trouble. But they don't actually feel remorse, what they're doing is being a mimic: they do the song and dance about remorse to manipulate the situation, but they don't feel actual remorse, and they probably don't believe other people do either. They're play-acting at remorse and they project that everyone else is play acting at remorse.

[Max™]

Sociopath =/= Psychopath

I totally agree that they are an alien thing though, and the scary part is when they learn how to fake being totally normal like everyone else.

Jackie would put his mask on and get people laughing and happy and on his side, and I never understood how he did it. He got annoyed that I never seemed to fall for it, made a game out of seeing if he could get me to believe his mask, it was fun to him to try and trick me into not hating him with my every breath.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, Max, I agree with the general notion of what you're saying.  I just don't believe that the drop in crime will be overnight, and I don't think it will ever be 100% complete.  Regardless of psychopaths, even, the brain is a complex, fragile, non-standardized piece of hardware.  It's subject to wear and tear, bugs, malfunction, and no two ever come out of production exactly the same.  Some with defects that hinder or subvert constructive socialization.  Some with extreme incompatibilities.  I'm a positive humanist, but I'm also an absurdist.  Reality is chaos, humans are great but still a mess of chemicals, and bad shit happens.  One day society might be so well structured that procedural and cultural pressures make it virtually impossible for anyone to do much harm to others, no matter how inherently broken or malicious they are.  But that's not going to be anytime soon.  Not within the scope of a discussion exclusively about police reform, anyway.  If we could make a Star Trek utopia happen overnight, that would be a different matter.  But my post was more meant to be about how to approach radical police reform without radical change to any of the rest of society's structure.

I'm anti-authoritarian and ACAB to my core.  Have been for over 20 years.  But even I think society in its current form needs some sort of law enforcement structure.  It may be possible to create a society that doesn't, but that would be completely unlike life as most can imagine it today in just about every possible way.  I just think law enforcement needs to be like less than 5% its current size, completely purged of its current membership, restructured, and deprived of almost all weaponry.

[wierd]

The issue is tragedy of the commons writ large.

No single drop of rain believes itself responsible for the flood, et al.  Say, in a world without law enforcement, I go to the countryside, and pick some wildflowers.  Where's the harm in that, right?  The trouble is, it is not just me. It is me, the charming old lady down the road, the regional florist, and hundreds of other people.  Cumulatively, we pick *ALL* of the flowers, and next year, several local plant populations are in precipitiously sharp decline, because they were annuals, and no seeds were produced.

Law enforcement enforces the obvious laws, of "No, you do not get to rape and rob each other", but it also enforces the less obvious ones, like "No, you do not get to pick the wild flowers, no matter how many there are, or how pretty they are."

Without such law enforcement, tragedy of the commons is inevitable, and that is not a good world.

[Egan_BW]

You're not likely to be arrested for picking flowers, though. Direct force isn't needed for things like that. Unless the person really feels like running and getting their guns over a flower-picking fine, at which point I'd say you have bigger problems than flower picking.

[kaijyuu]

Yeah y'all are vastly overthinking things. Abolishing the police system in the US and replacing it with something bare bones would result in little change at all, aside from less thuggery over property disputes. And less people getting shot for running a red light or whatever.


Please please get rid of any thoughts along the lines of "we're savages under a thin veil of civilization." It's the opposite in reality. We don't need organizations to civilize us.

[Putnam]

You're not likely to be arrested for picking flowers, though. Direct force isn't needed for things like that. Unless the person really feels like running and getting their guns over a flower-picking fine, at which point I'd say you have bigger problems than flower picking.

The literal problem that's causing all this is that people are in fact being murdered for offenses like picking flowers or being black in their own homes