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[Cthulhu]

Well yeah, if you take police abolition in a completely absurd direction that nobody is suggesting then it sounds completely unworkable.

[Reelya]

Well yeah, if you take police abolition in a completely absurd direction that nobody is suggesting then it sounds completely unworkable.

Uh, Frumple is actually suggesting that. I'm only responding to his idea.

Anyway if you got rid of city police then you'd only end up with worse police: there would be a vacuum for "protection services" and someone would fill that void. You'd get private companies coming in. So you'd end up with the same heavily armed troopers on the streets except now, they have even less rules to follow and they're not subject to democratic control even nominally. And you can't get rid of them or sanction them, because to do that ... you'd need police.

[Frumple]

I don't think removing the police will significantly reduce 'reason to steal'.
Insignificant compared to poverty.

Thing is they're a significant contributor to poverty in parts of the states. Fines, fees, injuries and incarceration, felon records (often enough horseshit ones), so on and so forth. Cops often enough take already shit places and just make them that much worse.

So, like, I'unno, y'know? I'm saying I could see it go either way, or just not have much impact. At the absolute least stateside, I don't think removing cops from an area is necessarily going to cause an increase in crime (unless it's the ex-cops causing it, I guess, and even that could be offset by a lack of sanctioned harm previously coming from the cops). Plenty of places in this country where they just don't do much or any good for the people actually living there.

So you're arguing that making every legal won't cause more things that are currently illegal to occur? Basically you'd be legalizing murder, rape, slavery, etc. There have to be at least a few people who, if police literally didn't exist would think "well dang, I'm going to kidnap me some sex slaves". Hell, breeding sex slaves would be legal. And you're asking "what could go wrong if the police didn't exist". Like, fucking everything could go wrong.

I'm arguing the cops existence or lack thereof just doesn't have much of an effect on a lot of shit, or at least not a positive one. All that shit happens now, and only occasionally does police presence actually bloody help with it. I don't think you're much or at all more likely to see the crap you're talking about with or without them.

And if you could replace them with actually helpful shit that doesn't regularly brutalize, murder, and steal from people, hell, you'll probably be in better shape :V

[Reelya]

You haven't explained how you arrest a murderer or rapist in your scenario. Those things would be effectively legal in your scenario if nobody was around to arrest people. You can argue arrest and conviction rates. But if a gang could just rape women in a public park, and people say "that's illegal, but what can you do? We don't have police!" then how would you deal with that scenario?

[SalmonGod]

I mean, you say that, but would they? Most to all of the reasons a burglar does or doesn't hit a house has exactly sod all to do with police presence. They're well aware the cops are probably going to do bugger all about them, preventative or otherwise. Getting rid of cops wouldn't change the calculus much at all.

Frankly, I could see a reverse correlation involved; fewer cops ruining lives and pushing people to/keeping them on the edge could easily mean fewer people having reason to steal crap from folks homes. Bringing cops to heel and/or getting rid of their adverse influences for your area is part of making your neighborhood be unruined, ha.

So you're arguing that making every legal won't cause more things that are currently illegal to occur? Basically you'd be legalizing murder, rape, slavery, etc. There have to be at least a few people who, if police literally didn't exist would think "well dang, I'm going to kidnap me some sex slaves". Hell, breeding sex slaves would be legal. And you're asking "what could go wrong if the police didn't exist". Like, fucking everything could go wrong.

This is absurd levels of alarmism.

There's so much I could say.  But I'll just leave it at this.  Police as we know them today are not the only possible form that law enforcement can take.  Nobody is advocating for suddenly plunging the world into a future where there is no mechanism for executing enforcement of the law.

I even clarified specifically in my previous posts that I don't advocate for 100% elimination of any sort of police force.

Really I think that there probably should be something like the police in modern society's current form, but it should be like 5% of its current size and funding.  The other 95% should be re-directed to various types of social workers and programs.  Basically, the exact opposite of this image.  Crime would plummet.

And the funny thing is that *even if we were* communities exist where that would *still* be an improvement, because of racist policing.  Communities where the people already do their own forms of unofficial organizing to establish and enforce standards of behavior and mutual aid, and the official state law and its enforcement are just an extra predatory occupying force that does far more harm than good.

[Reelya]

I know you didn't say to eliminate police 100%, but Frumple did: I said you can't eliminate police 100%, and Frumple was the one that disagreed with that analysis.

100% elimination of police is the only scenario I'm talking about, in response to Frumple and only in response to Frumple.

BTW back to Frumple's original point, before modern civilian police forces ... it's not like they didn't have law enforcement and everything was just magically ok. They used soldiers / militia. The rise of civilian police forces occurred during the period of rapid urbanization for a reason. So if it's harking back to how they used to do things then you'd put the state militias in instead of city police.

[Cthulhu]

If you look at distribution and amount of fines, police departments actively prey on black communities to supplement city budgets, so when you see those dril candle graphs of horribly fucked up budgets, remember where the difference is coming from.

[Dunamisdeos]

So what do you guys think could replace the police force there?

You referenced other, alternate systems in place around the world. Let's go over some of those. This is genuinely interesting.

[SalmonGod]

BTW back to Frumple's original point, before modern civilian police forces ... it's not like they didn't have law enforcement and everything was just magically ok. \

Pretty sure I was the one who brought that point up, actually.

And I'm not much of a history buff, but I'm pretty sure I've read multiple times that through most of history humanity's approach to law enforcement has been about reporting crimes and seeking reparations after the fact, which is not the modern policing approach to law enforcement.  The historical exceptions mostly involved the most unflatteringly authoritarian rulers, or actual military occupations installing military police to bully conquered people.

[Cthulhu]

For a lot of human history justice has been performed by individuals, the victim or the victim's family, usually by extreme violence including murder.  That was mostly pre-state, however.  That's a big part of why public punishment was so common in the middle ages, nascent states demonstrating not only what happens if the law is broken, but just as importantly who was going to do it (i.e. the state, not you).  In modern day you see public punishment often in failed or emerging states, for the same reason.

A lot of that first part still applies even in the US, in certain areas.  Disparities in violent crime aren't a product of race (not directly at least, but racism is a big part of it), or even poverty, but state failure.  If you can't rely on the state to fulfill basic needs like securing food and safety, you have to do it yourself.  Gangs are states for people the de jure state has failed.  Police brutality and mass incarceration directly leads to violent crime by disrupting communities and creating highly insecure environments.  People act as if violent crime is some universal constant, that some percentage of the population is born insane and we need an unaccountable paramilitary to deal with them.  That's bullshit.  I'd go as far as to say no violent criminals are insane, and that criminally insane behavior is perfectly logical behavior in the context of that person's upbringing in a dangerous, insecure environment. 

Otherwise we'd have to say that basically everyone on earth before 1600-1700 or so was insane.

Since violence is an issue of socialization, it doesn't go away as soon as you get rid of the police.  Police brutality / mass incarceration / violent crime are an interlocking problem.

In semi-related news, your daily reminder that ICE is almost definitely engaged in large-scale human trafficking, for labor slavery and probably much worse things

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, I still don't believe the assertion that life before the renaissance or the industrial revolution was just wanton violent insanity everywhere.  I understand how it's easy to characterize the past that way when history teaches us all these accounts of horrible things.  But it's a matter of perspective.

Recent history has not been some anomaly of peace.  We're still close enough to the last 100 years to put them in perspective and know what the impacts of violence actually were on people's daily lives.  But generations 200-300 years from now will likely be taught the sensational accounts of war, or of the issues of police and gun violence in the USA, or of unrests in the middle east, or the genocides in various countries, etc, and they will get the impression that those things characterized daily life for everyone of this era.  But those are just the things that get taught in basic history lessons, because they're the things that leave a mark.  Precisely because they're not the norm.  They're events with short lifespans, or the effects of longer term systemic issues only have serious effects for certain people.  As we're living this daily life, we know better.  It's the same thing for us looking back on people 200+ years before us.

And what I've heard most commonly from anthropologists is that exile and shunning were the most widespread forms of punishment through most of history, not direct violence.  And those are still the most effective forms of punishment today.  I think modern prisons can be interpreted somewhat as being a consequence of exile being impossible to do in today's modern circumstances, because society is global and intertwined, and shunning is much more difficult to meaningfully execute.

[TamerVirus]

exile and shunning were the most widespread forms of punishment through most of history, not direct violence.  And those are still the most effective forms of punishment today.

Ah, so the Amish had it right all along. Police forces need to be defunded to the point where they only have horse and buggy and longbows. Amish police officers are armed with longbows...right?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'd add that my understanding is that for hunter-gatherer societies, a large amount of punishment for truly heinous crimes was through exile, either temporary or permanent. Obviously of little use to us today, but it shows that people were not as quick to killing each other as you might believe, even in in a lifestyle that might require frequent bouts of violence against nature or other human groups.

[martinuzz]

I'd add that my understanding is that for hunter-gatherer societies, a large amount of punishment for truly heinous crimes was through exile, either temporary or permanent. Obviously of little use to us today, but it shows that people were not as quick to killing each other as you might believe, even in in a lifestyle that might require frequent bouts of violence against nature or other human groups.

People aren't very good at killing when they look someone in the eyes.  The nazis went from shooting jews into a ditch to gassing them in enclosed unwatched spaces, while having the bodies shoved into the incinerator by other jews because of that. 

For most people, exile was a death sentence too, from hunger and hardship, but those who exiled them didn't have to watch them die.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Maybe, but I'd rather be sentenced to death by exile than any other form.