What would a police free future look like?
What would a police free future look like?
The revolution will not be message tested.
Maybe it's because I live in a country where the police don't carry guns (and sex work is legal), but I found it really hard to put my finger on exactly what they are advocating for here.
They seem to be saying that police only exist to enforce middle class interests? I don't think that's entirely true.
I would like to see more change in how policing is done, but the idea that communities self-police is idealistic. Sure they do in some ways, but it can be just as selective and just as damaging as anything police do.
I think the idea is more that police are actually mandated to enforce state power through violence. Middle-class usually just match up in their interests with the interests of the state. Even in countries where police don't carry guns, they are still used to forcefully combat protests or other things which oppose or obstruct government interests, and they still enforce laws unequally among different demographics (and to be clear, even when they don't carry guns around with them normally, they will still go get guns whenever they feel they need to).
Community policing is important in that it eliminates the use of one group to police another. White middle-class cops being used to police poor minorities, for example. Does it eliminate all biases? Of course not. But studies have shown that police are far less likely to employ excessive force against members of their own neighborhoods and communities.
There's a lot of issues with this self policing thing that I don't think is considered. If there's nobody whose job is policing then you're expecting people to put their lives on the line for strangers for free. What happens to isolated people? Who do they call? Who decides on what actually happens in justice? If someone killed your relative for example, and you were allowed to take that person and torture them, then would you? Many would.
There might be problems with current systems in different places, but the whole "get rid of the police" thing doesn't make sense.
It's strange but there has never been an instance where police have made me feel safer.
I have an instance. I didn't let someone in when they were in the right hand turn lane and wanted to go straight. They were simply too close and made their choice too slow. So instead they came in behind me. Then I noticed they were following me, so I immediately started driving to the nearest police station. On my way a cop was pulling out of a McDonald's and I pulled into the suicide lane, honked irrationally, got the police attention and explained the situation. The car behind me immediately drove off speeding and while the cops didn't chase after them, they had me pull into the parking lot and get information on the situation. Overall they were nice and I legit felt safer.
That said I've had cops point guns at me for minor trespassing. I've had cops stop me and search me. I've also seen cops helping the community, pushing someone's broken down car with them and generally being helpful.
Overall I don't think the issue is with police as a concept but instead with the current implementation of our police. "What if everyone just helped each other or looked out after each other" does not work at scale. In order for police to function correctly there must be trust there between the community and the police. If anyone can't trust the police to protect then the police are broken and can't serve.
Overall I don’t think the issue is with police as a concept but instead with the current implementation of our police.
Well sure, "police" is just a label. You can call an ad-hoc community-defense group in a stateless society "police" if you want. People aren't opposed to the word itself, they're opposed to what modern-day police as an institution are (enforcers of state authority against the populace).
The whole reason that US law forbids the US military from being deployed internally without congressional approval is because it was assumed that local police would be made up of members of the community they police, and not treat the community as an adversary, whereas a national military member would probably be from somewhere else.
Without getting into the slave-catching origins of police in general, the militarization of the police (as well as the large areas which they cover beyond just their local neighborhoods) has effectively turned our police into the very thing the Posse Comitatus Act was trying to prevent; an occupier force to impose government authority and the threat of violence in peoples' everyday lives.