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[Reelya]

There was a police strike in a city in Brazil for higher pay earlier this year and the murder rate spiked up 5 times higher than average for the few days of the strike. Which is way suspicious, especially when noted that the  government sent soldiers in to take up patrol duties. Wanna guess that the police or allied right-wing gangs did the murders to justify more funding? It makes sense that property crime would spike during a police strike, but none of the stories I checked out mentioned any looting going on.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51623670

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/brazilian-senator-shot-amid-tumult-striking-police-force-69082136

In the city of Sobral, where the 56-year-old former governor was injured, men wearing balaclavas on-board police vehicles forced businesses to shut their doors for the day, online news portal G1 reported.

This is clearly the cops behind all this stuff.

[nenjin]

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.

This is pie-in-the-sky thinking. The other reason you don't steal, other than a sense of justice or fairness, is because there is a law of consequences for your actions. Either someone will beat your ass, or some organization will apply whatever rule of law exists to your actions. The whole hippy dippy "we can self govern" is just a honeymoon period before the same power politics that have governed human society since the beginning of time reassert themselves. Someone has to be in charge, and that someone can always abuse their power. Distributing that power among many as opposed to few is how you reduce the occurrence of those abuses. That's an organization, whether it's a town council, a militia, a governing body or a government. The moment there is conflict, someone has to be able to adjudicate that conflict according to the rule of law, because neither party can be trusted to be altruistic when it actually comes down to it, especially when they're aggrieved. In the absence of the rule of law or a body which has responsibility for ensuring "justice", self-interest reigns. And all you're waiting for then is someone strong enough, with enough support or threats of violence, to make themselves king.

[Reelya]

Point being: most people will go through their entire lives doing nothing that would draw the attention of the cops: with or without the police. But that's not all the people, it's just most of the people. The police aren't there because of most people, so saying how most people are, therefore we don't need police at all, is just wrong. It's like saying we don't need sheep dogs because there are 100 sheep and only one wolf. We have police because those most people who wouldn't hurt a fly are easy pickings for those few people who would screw everyone else over given a chance. There's a reason 23% of people in prison check out as diagnosable psychopaths, and that's not because society is unfairly biased against psychopaths.

Also note how people are constantly pressuring the police for results / convictions of people they don't like, and these demands come constantly from both the left and right of politics:think about the justified stuff about how they're not catching and convicting enough rapists: guilty until proven innocent in those cases. Being pressured to ramp up the conviction rate, no matter the crime, is going to lead to many more miscarriages of justice. The police do hate crimes, so get rid of the police. Then, when someone else does a hate crime, we're incensed that those people are getting away with it, and not stopped and arrested.

So we want a perfectly non-harmful police who also proactively come down like a ton of bricks on whichever bad guys we say should be locked up and throw away the key. It's not easy, this is an extremely hard needle to thread. Benefit of the doubt and you let someone go with a warning, next thing you find out that you're the cop who let Jeffrey Dahmer go or something. Obviously some nations have massive room for improvement, but it's never going be balanced well enough to probably please anyone, since most people actually think law enforcement is being both too lenient and too strict at the same time, but for different things.

[JoshuaFH]

You know, I usually try to not watch the gory, traumatic parts of the news, I'm already too depressed even thinking about the world at large, but I was watching Trevor Noah's videos on youtube, and that was where I learned of the shooting of Philando Castile. Seeing the video, I'm just so deeply fucking sickened and shaken, I feel nauseous. It's like the cop was on a drug that turns you into an insane killer psychopath. But he wasn't on a drug, of course, so there's no doubt in my mind that he approached that car with the intention of firing unprovoked on the driver, no matter what... And then he was found not guilty of manslaughter charges...

Just goddamnit.

[nenjin]

Point being: most people will go through their entire lives doing nothing that would draw the attention of the cops: with or without the police. But that's not all the people, it's just most of the people. The police aren't there because of most people, so saying how most people are, therefore we don't need police at all, is just wrong.

I'd argue this is the least subtle and most apparent reason for cops and governing bodies to exist.

The more subtle reason does actually apply to everyday folks: they have disputes and they're self-interested. Forget serial killers and psychopaths, what about two neighbors arguing about a property line? Garden variety rudeness and anger that explodes into something else, like road rage. Those are the times we want a neutral party in the middle, when in the heat of the moment and long before it goes to the court system.

[WealthyRadish]

IIRC the Rojava autonomous region in Syria (an anarchist/socialist/feminist state created by Kurdish militants) essentially only uses "police" (the military) for counterterrorism while ordinary enforcement is left to neighborhood-level bodies that make minimal use of the court system and prison sentencing. But this is something carved out by socialist militants in the midst of a brutal civil war, with the political benefit of a violent popular reaction against ISIS occupation that made left-wing ideology more acceptable to ordinary people. Looking at America today on the other hand, I can see why people would immediately leap to imagining policing being done a local level by non-police as an invitation for lynch mobs or a system even more strongly dominated by local property owners, given that here the change wouldn't be accompanied by other changes in government or society.

[Cthulhu]

Daily reminder that serial killers are a statistical artifact based on assumptions about who is motivated to kill people and what motivations for killing people are rational.  The difference between John Wayne Gacy and a given mob hitman is entirely manufactured, the hitman's probably killed more people anyway.

[Reelya]

Even if the hitman killed 100 times as many people as the serial killer, it's actually still more rational to fear the serial killer for regular folk: the hitman's victims will most likely mostly be in organized crime, and it's actually pretty sensible to rationalize that you're not just "unlikely" to be targeted by a paid mob assassin, it's just not going to happen with any measurable probability.

Well, you could be walking down the street and hit by stray bullets from some gangland violence, but that's no more scary than being hit by a hit and run driver or something. Whereas serial killers may in fact target you, and the way they kill you may be worse: the hitman wants to get in and out quickly, the serial killer wants to open you up an play with your organs first.

[Egan_BW]

Hmm. Are hitmen just police working for a hierarchy parallel to government?

[Reelya]

Hmm. Are hitmen just police working for a hierarchy parallel to government?

They're the parallel government's Human Resources department, handling both promotions and retirement.

[Cthulhu]

Yes, they are.  I've been saying that.  Gangs are states for people the de jure state cannot or will not cater to.  The mafia started as local enforcement during a period of state failure in Italy, yakuza started as a sort of trade guild for gamblers and peddlers, etc.  Which is why I've been saying that if we had a functioning state that could actually provide basic human rights and services to its entire population, most of the violence we think we need an unaccountable paramilitary for would go away.

This includes serial killers, because serial killers are an artificial category created by the FBI and maintained by a media industry that makes money talking about them.  There is no mysterious chunk of the population born without souls.

[Egan_BW]

I think there's a difference between the conditions under which organized crime appears disappearing, and the conditions under which it dissolves. Or at least, interia is a thing. They're not going to stop being gangsters just as soon as the government starts offering a better deal, if only because humans are prone to the sunk cost fallacy.

EDIT: I'd agree with "go away eventually", though. Months? Generations? I'm not qualified to say how long it would take, but it would happen.

[scriver]

Yes, they are.  I've been saying that.  Gangs are states for people the de jure state cannot or will not cater to. 

No. Gangs prey on people in their neighbourhoods. Gang members are only in it for themselves.

[Cthulhu]

At least a generation, violence recycles itself generationally.  To go back to serial killers, John Wayne Gacy was definitely emotionally abused by his dad and probably physically abused as well, called him a pussy, pantywaist, not a real man.  He learned the lesson well, and grew up to replicate that behavior on the people he had power over.  He was manipulative, abusive, and predatory long before he started killing people.  Point being he wasn't born without a soul, he was victimized by violence and then coached on how to be violent. 

You will see a similar process in virtually every violent criminal's upbringing (not necessarily in childhood of course, though often).  Lonnie Athens directly interviewed hundreds of violent criminals in prisons and got some variation on this story from basically everyone he interviewed.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, I've learned the history of all the serial killers of note through LPOTL and the vast majority have both horrid childhood abuse and then that abuse finding a way to combine with their adolescent sexual awakening, which creates the desire. This is why so many serial killers are also rapists.  What tends to happen is a gradual series of incidents where the future serial killer gives themselves "permission" to take the next step towards their desire, and eventually they kill someone and then tend to go berserk and begin the serial killer pattern in full.

Most other repeated violent criminals most likely either didn't combine their abuse with their own sexuality or did not ever fully give themselves permission to kill. The serial killer pattern is so rare because the societal conditions enabling it are also historically rare, and thus people in the same situation elsewhere in history found different ways to satisfy their urges. We've even seen this change with the rise of the modern surveillance state, where even randomly killing strangers leaves a trail of evidence that can be followed, and thus some who would probably become serial killers instead become mass shooters, giving up on not getting caught for being able to have one big incident.