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enki42 posted:Being someone who argues for reform, it seems like a path that's more realistic and achievable in my mind. There's political will to add oversight to police, especially now. We can introduce complementary functions to police, like unarmed folks for routine violations like traffic issues, etc., or send specialists like social workers, while maintaining a "stop gap" of traditional police for more serious things (and gradually whittle it away). I think the argument behind abolition is that the current role of the police is too deeply ingrained in our society to meaningfully reform without first challenging people's basic concepts of the role of police and even the existence of the police. There are so many factors that'll stymie reform that it's not clear that abolition is actually any harder. Sure, the cops will fight abolition just as hard, but once abolition is done, it's loving done. On the other hand, incremental reform is highly susceptible to quietly backsliding, because the bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing the reforms would largely be pulled from the same corrupt system that's generating the current problems. jabby posted:Broken windows is a nice theory that the people in charge grabbed hold of to justify the draconian policies they wanted to implement anyway. Broken windows policing is explicitly draconian. The fundamental basis of the theory, dating back to its original publication, is that people commit crimes because they perceive that local authorities are weak and don't care, and the visible aftermath of those crimes fuels the perception that authorities are weak and don't care. By cleaning up the aftermath of petty crimes and bringing down the hammer on petty criminals in a visible and intrusive ways, the authorities demonstrate their power and send the message that they're watching closely, and thus deter crime with their shows of strength. Of course, it's an explicitly authoritarian theory, with obvious ties to general police militarization. It not only discounts how inequality and oppression and neglect of a neighborhood drive crime rates, but also calls for police to be weaponized against those already-victimized communities. Moreover, there's an aspect of the broken-windows theory that's been essentially left out of the public discourse today. The fact is that the broken windows theory was not just about preventing crime, but rather about keeping away "undesirables" whose existence created a perception of crime. The original broken windows article wasn't about decreasing actual crime rates, it was about making communities feel like crime rates were lower by making the streets openly hostile to rowdy teens, homeless people, alcoholics, and other distasteful groups held in low social regard. Or, to put it another way, it was explicitly about showcasing state power by openly repressing socially-disliked groups, because the presence of those groups makes the state seem weak. Of course, while the original papers didn't really mention race, it's no shock at all that such a premise was swiftly turned toward the oppression of minorities.
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Jun 4, 2020 19:47
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enki42 posted:I think where I might be struggling is that, in my mind, even if the "formal" institutional power structures are eradicated, it seems like informal power structures will still exist, and I can't see any particular reason to assume that those will be more egalitarian than the formal ones. Well then good news, reading the rest of my comment beyond the point you quoted addressed just this very thing with examples.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:06
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Main Paineframe posted:I think the argument behind abolition is that the current role of the police is too deeply ingrained in our society to meaningfully reform without first challenging people's basic concepts of the role of police and even the existence of the police. Well said. I got into a number of arguements with Kelling in his class about the theory since I had personally felt the adverse affects of the underlying racism paradigms that the theory assumes. It's a pretty big dog whistle to talk about undesireables and communities in order to visualize "needing" this type of draconian policing without visualizing a black or minority neighborhood. It's a baked in racial premise that those communites are the ones in DIRE need of policing while you convienently get to ignore that drug usage and the rates of committing these low level offenses are largely similar if all things were equal (socioeconomics, education, etc). It's a gross conflation about crimes of opportunity and how these offenses should NOT be dealt with in a criminal way, and ignoring that it's social issue that needs to be dealt with. It's tough because the implementation of looks effective, even if you utilize data. If you look at it's sole purpose which is reduction in crime, this theory implemented WILL reduce crime, but only because you cast such a wide net that you are keeping peace through authoritarian like standards and regimes. It's honestly the dying breath of the "tough on crime" era line of thinking but because it was bought wholesale by the NYPD it really gave the theory the ability to outlive it's half-life in the thought arena. Yuzenn fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 20:12
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Once again, literally no one who is for 'police and prison abolition' is advocating for replacing the racist US police state with completely unformalized town by town mob justice. If thats what you think is being discussed then you should probably take a little bit of time to read about the topic outside of an SA thread before wading into the discussion. It would certainly be nice if everyone had the patience to hand hold your dumb asses but given the fact that the country has erupted in mass police violence I think its fair that some of us aren't in the mood. Complaining that people get mad when you totally mischarecterize what they are proposing out of ignorance (at best) and repeatedly propose stupid gotcha 'what if' scenarios or handwaving empirical evidence that policing as currently constructed in the US does exactly what you are saying you're worried reform/abolition would do (exacerbate crime and racist violence) because the US is 'just too racist' is bullshit, sorry. If you can't read the word Police Abolition without interpreting it as 'remove all state and civic functions currently within the domain of police forces and replace them with nothinf' then you're either a baby brain or even worse you are being disingenuous in order to support the status quo because you are ideologically commited to the notion that a thin blue line protects us from the dangerously murserous impulses lurkinging in the heart of man. Which, you can definitely believe that but if you do please don't pretend you're interested in this conversation.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:14
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And yes i'm conflating your posts with CelestialScribe's because I believe you are two sides of the same stupid/evil coin. If you can't take on new information because someone is mad or frustrated with you: grow up. Edit: also, I'll stop posting in this thread, sorry. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 20:16
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Crumbskull posted:And yes i'm conflating your posts with CelestialScribe's because I believe you are two sides of the same stupid/evil coin. If you can't take on new information because someone is mad or frustrated with you: grow up. I can take on new information, and I've learned a lot and done a lot of reading thanks to this thread. If you bothered to read anything instead of getting to 500% aggro immediately, we've basically been arguing for the same steps (unless your standpoint is "completely abolish the police today with no plan" in which case lol). Advocating for serious structural reforms including disarming like 80% of police isn't an insane fringe right wing viewpoint like you seem to think it is. I'm not asking to be educated, I'm asking for you to actually read what I'm writing and not misrepresenting it because it's anything short of 100% abolition right now.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:30
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enki42 posted:I think where I might be struggling is that, in my mind, even if the "formal" institutional power structures are eradicated, it seems like informal power structures will still exist, and I can't see any particular reason to assume that those will be more egalitarian than the formal ones. It's true that there will always be power structures. The issue in this case is that in diverse areas, the power structures at the local and regional levels often sit at above the community level, so that whites can maintain power over minority communities. Since residential segregation hasn't really waned, areas tend to be separated clearly into white communities and non-white communities, with economic and political power structures built encompassing them both to ensure that the white communities are able to extend their power and influence to control and dominate non-white communities. For example, if you look at city-wide stats, Minneapolis is majority-white. But when you drill down into individual communities, you'll find a much different picture: an urban core of overwhelmingly non-white communities, surrounded by white communities. Lumping all of that into a single local authority allows the powerful white communities to control black communities, taking in tax money from the whole city and using it to craft a white supremacist government that only serves their communities. https://mobile.twitter.com/whstancil/status/928352020951715840 Even when that's not the case, national power structures and norms mean that white supremacists tend to end up in control of the power structures in black communities anyway: for example, the Ferguson PD routinely discriminated against non-whites despite the fact that whites made up less than a third of the population. Ferguson was 67% black in 2010, a number that has likely only increased. With numbers like that and the map above, I hope you'll understand why abolition and a reversion to community control is rising in popularity: there's a solid argument to be made that police departments are essentially an occupying force imposed on black communities by neighboring white communities in order to unofficially maintain white supremacy.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:33
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enki42 posted:I can take on new information, and I've learned a lot and done a lot of reading thanks to this thread. If you bothered to read anything instead of getting to 500% aggro immediately, we've basically been arguing for the same steps (unless your standpoint is "completely abolish the police today with no plan" in which case lol). Crumbskull posted:If you can't read the word Police Abolition without interpreting it as 'remove all state and civic functions currently within the domain of police forces and replace them with nothinf' then you're either a baby brain or even worse you are being disingenuous You can't make this poo poo up.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:34
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Cpt_Obvious posted:You can't make this poo poo up. I'm not saying it's their viewpoint, I'm saying that if that isn't their viewpoint, I'm not sure where we're in disagreement in terms of initial steps? - Defund the police significantly - Find alternate solutions to take the place of police for many interactions - Add community oversight These aren't points that I reluctantly agreed to, this is the very first thing I advocated for in this thread. I think everyone is yelling at each other for no particular reason other than perceiving people to be on the opposite side of a culture war, honestly.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:39
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https://twitter.com/erikhinton/status/1267435394758512646?s=19
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Jun 4, 2020 21:36
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This is all great discussion and I totally understand what everyone is saying. But I’m still struggling with this lack of answers to the scenario I posted - is it just that abolitionists sincerely believe such a scenario should never occur?
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Jun 4, 2020 21:44
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CelestialScribe posted:This is all great discussion and I totally understand what everyone is saying. But I’m still struggling with this lack of answers to the scenario I posted - is it just that abolitionists sincerely believe such a scenario should never occur? https://medium.com/@micahherskind/resource-guide-prisons-policing-and-punishment-effb5e0f6620 Mat Cauthon has posted a number of times with Kaba's work, you will see many of those works within this link. *read the drat articles, holy poo poo Yuzenn fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 21:50
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Yuzenn posted:https://medium.com/@micahherskind/resource-guide-prisons-policing-and-punishment-effb5e0f6620 This isn’t a helpful response and just appears to be hand waving a potential problem. If you think the scenario I outlined isn’t realistic, just say so. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 4, 2020 21:51
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CelestialScribe posted:This isn’t a helpful response and just appears to be hand waving a potential problem. If you think the scenario I outlined isn’t realistic, just say so. I'm trying not trying to engage with this incredibly unproductive thought exercise for scenarios and anecdotes that don't even exist anywhere. If you have anything to refute from the professionals who have spent their life work answering the exact things you are trying to question then post specifics and cite literally anything. Otherwise i'm not going to engage with any "WHAT IF ALL THE WHITE PEOPLE TRY TO SHOOT THE BLACK PEOPLE". It's exhausting hyperbole.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:54
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CelestialScribe posted:This isn’t a helpful response and just appears to be hand waving a potential problem. If you think the scenario I outlined isn’t realistic, just say so. The police do not protect minorities from racists, they ARE the racists. I genuinely don't know how many times that has to be explained to you.
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Jun 4, 2020 22:01
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Yuzenn posted:I'm trying not trying to engage with this incredibly unproductive thought exercise for scenarios and anecdotes that don't even exist anywhere. This wasn’t the scenario I outlined in this thread.
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Jun 4, 2020 22:03
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The police do not protect minorities from racists, they ARE the racists. I genuinely don't know how many times that has to be explained to you. And I don't know how many times this needs to be explain to you, but there are multiple scenarios that you can imagine outside of a racist, white-nationalist power fantasy in which neighbours become interlocked in armed disputes and seek power to solve them when the threat of police escalation is no longer there. (This doesn't mean keep the police as they are now, it means that community policing has flaws that need to be addressed in some way). It is really, really not hard to imagine that in the absence of that state structure, bad actors attempt to obtain power in order to strong-arm others to do their will. Someone mentioned informal power structures before, and it's true - those exist, and they will exist, and right now, most of the solution to that problem seems to be one of a few things: - Look at this society, it didn't happen, therefore it won't happen - If it does happen, it's better than the current situation - People are better than you think and will be able to solve problems on their own None of these are satisfactory answers. If no abolitionist can seriously come up with a thought scenario in which community policing solves a problem like I just described (without dismissing it as "it will never happen"), then there are huge, huge numbers of people who will just never support the idea.
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Jun 4, 2020 22:12
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You've convinced me man, please outline your proposal for community health, safety and violence mitigation that does not allow any conceivable harms to result?
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Jun 4, 2020 23:10
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It is shocking how rapidly a single poster can drag an entire thread to a stop. My larger concern would be if there were any major changes to a court system. I assume cash bail would be abolished, but would our adversarial system (prosecution vs defendant) be replaced with something else? How would we elect judges, and what role would they play versus juries?
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Jun 4, 2020 23:14
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Crumbskull posted:You've convinced me man, please outline your proposal for community health, safety and violence mitigation that does not allow any conceivable harms to result? Why is it so difficult for you to conceive that community policing might result in the wrong communities policing wrongly, and to think of one or two ideas that the state could enact in order to stop that from happening?
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Jun 4, 2020 23:14
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Cpt_Obvious posted:It is shocking how rapidly a single poster can drag an entire thread to a stop. How could there not be changes to a court system? The entire infrastructure of how evidence is collected and brought to a judge would need to be completely done away with under this scenario. I don't even know how a criminal court would work in a world run on community policing. Not to mention, in a world without law enforcement, who would actually see that a sentence is carried out? CelestialScribe fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 23:18
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Is it fair to say that a better way to think about "abolish the police" is "find things where the police are unnecessary or not the best solution", which right now could very easily be: - getting police out of schools - having police not be first responders for mental emergencies - having police not be first responders for DV issues - treat drugs as a health issue rather than a criminal one - many many more things before anyone gets around to guillotining homicide detectives It's "conditionally abolish the police where it makes sense right now, and continue doing that until there's no police." I don't know if I agree with the "no police" part, but for like 99% of what the police do and for anything that an abolition movement could accomplish in the foreseeable future, the above is probably what you're looking at, and I think you said in the USPol thread that all of those sort of things are things you're down for CelestialScribe. enki42 fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 23:19
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Does anyone outside the US advocate for abolishing police? I've never seen anyone irl here do so. Which gives me the impression it's more drastic than strictly required. Similarly with disarming police. Contrary to the perception some might have, most European police do carry firearms and while hardly perfect they do kill vastly fewer people. Big difference iirc is the length of education, strict selection and generally more centralized control. What country has the best behaved police and what do they do? That's more interesting to me than very theoretical police free societies or small isolated communities existing in literal warzones.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:20
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It's definitely a thing with progressive groups in Canada, particularly ones with an anarchist bent. The local anarchist group in my city regularly protests any sort of police interaction, including coordinating with them during protests or security for big events and things like that.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:23
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From what I've seen it's an idea that is gaining more popularity and prominence in international activists circles but there's a lot of variation depending on the specific country and/or cause you're referring to. France and the UK seem to be embracing it more quickly because of similarities in racist, anti immigrant, or islamophobic policing and violence. Same for South Africa. I've heard people from various South American countries advocate for it due to the realities of police oppression there, especially again indigenous groups or LGBTQ people. If you look for it it's out there but it definitely gets more prominence in the United States because our problem is much more egregious. That being said, white supremacy and carceral state politics are global, so the project of abolition is not somehow diminished or less relevant because country X doesn't have the same level of police violence or mass imprisonment as country Y. Also police violence or draconian imprisonment in one place is enabled by the carceral policies of other places - Israel takes their lessons from oppressing Palestinians and uses them to train US police and military forces, who take that training, refine it through the lens of US law enforcement priorities and share it with partner states like South Korea or Brazil or Norway. So on and so forth. Many European nations are involved in intelligence sharing and certain law enforcement operations with the US. The linkages are deep and complex. Abolition is framed as the way to create a world free from violence and dehumanization as the mechanisms through which we endure safety, order, and accountability, so it is inherently global in scope. We cannot of course impose an American model of abolition on any other country, but chances are people in any given nation are asking many of the same questions and trying to envision what abolition looks like in their country. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 00:36
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Regardless of what social structures we would have at the other end of abolition, it's clearly the case that cops aren't necessary: humans have been living in cities for what, 6000 years? Longer? And cops are what, 2-300 years old? And cities before then weren't exactly mad max hellworlds. Even accepting the argument that that only worked in the past because cities were smaller, that still is an argument that abolition would work in every small town. Yet they still have cops. I'm generally on board with the following as a plausibly achievable set of goals that moves in an abolitionist direction. This seems to be similar to what the Minneapolis city council is contemplating. 1) Replace the institutions of the police wholesale with entirely new membership, with vastly more oversight. The current police culture is too toxic to reform 2) Take a hard look at the types of duties cops perform, and ask whether that duty has to be performed by an agent of state violence. For about a third of these duties (things like traffic stops) all but the chuddiest of chuds would agree that you don't need a cop to perform them. For another third (things like domestic violence visits, helping rape victims, etc) the current public unrest could probably convince many of the holdouts. That leaves the subset of duties where you probably aren't going to convince the average centrist that a state-sanctioned professional violence dispenser isn't useful (things like arrests; plus the actual legit situations like mass shootings) 3) At this point you basically have a compromise position between reformists and abolitionists and just gotta keep the pressure up. As cops are used less and less and people stop seeing them on a regular basis and their power over local governments is broken, you can start whittling away further and further at their powers until you're basically left with two roles for state-sanctioned violence: bodyguards to other public servants (such as a counselor responding to a domestic violence call and thinking they might need some muscle because the guy is really out of control), and emergency responders to things like mass shootings. That's my take at least. Feel free to radicalize me further.
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Jun 5, 2020 00:56
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Community policing in America will be like HOA taking care of law enforcement. No thank you. A comprehensive reform and reduction in police related duties as discussed above seems to be the only way forward. Disarmament of officers, reallocation of non essential police duties (traffic, wellness etc.) to existing or additonally created organizations would likely do much to alleviate current problems. The police have too much of an overarching mandate so they can make a simple traffic stop and murder you for being the wrong skin color. Their mandate must be extensively narrowed to combatting violent crime/post crime investigation. Most importantly to me is an overhaul of the education requirements for officers though. Increase the education requirements for entry into the academy to a bachelor in one of the social sciences and increase the pay to attract a higher caliber of officer.
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Jun 5, 2020 01:26
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As a serious question, what would criminal investigation look in a future where we could fire all cops and build a new criminal justice system? For the purpose of this discussion, lets say the goal of criminal investigations is to accurately solve major crimes such as Murder, Rape, and other violent crimes. In 2018, we nationally, the US had a 63% clearance rate on murders, 45% on violent crimes, and 34% on rape. (1) Would splitting the CSI/Detectives into a separate department, with separate unions be enough to prevent the current levels of corruption and racism from reemerging? Looking at LAPD, people are eligible to be hired as detectives after having spent atleast 3 years a regular officer, which comes after 18 months in the academy.(2) Would breaking up these career paths even further improve the culture of detectives and help remove the biases learned in the police academy and as a beat cop? The quickest path from hiring to promotion to a detective is approximately 4 years; What kind of way can we use that 4 year timespan to train detectives who are more able to effectively solve crimes accurately, without falling into patterns of blaming minorities and other disadvantaged people? I'd also like opinions on whether the local structure of investigation also hinders our ability properly solve crimes. Would we be better off with centrally run detective bureaus, either at a state level or even a federal level (though I guess federally run would probably be unfeasible and kinda overlap with the FBI). (1): https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/ (2): https://www.joinlapd.com/career-ladders
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Jun 5, 2020 01:27
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Criminal investigator sounds like another specialist public servant that doesn't need to be armed or be state muscle If you mean what do we do in the meantime after firing everybody and suddenly realizing that there are literally no qualified forensics experts who aren't actively involved in the current system...I actually have no idea about that
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Jun 5, 2020 01:34
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flashman posted:Community policing in America will be like HOA taking care of law enforcement. No thank you. Did you read any of the posted resources? Even one? flashman posted:Most importantly to me is an overhaul of the education requirements for officers though. Increase the education requirements for entry into the academy to a bachelor in one of the social sciences and increase the pay to attract a higher caliber of officer. This has already been tried, and failed, many many times. https://twitter.com/GoldyLandau/status/1266603925483986944 Median income in NYC: Household: $57,782 Individual: $50,825 Even second or third tier cities like Memphis have bumped up not just cop pay, in part by getting donations from millionaires and corporations, but also incentives like tuition reimbursement, take home vehicles, private school tuition, and housing subsidies. Part of the problem is that most people don't want to be cops. For those that do, the biggest deterrent is fear that they will get caught on camera doing something wrong. The issue is not pay. More on that here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/02/13/is-the-answer-to-crime-more-cops Some studies have shown that cops with a degree will use "force" less often. posted:The study found no difference with respect to officer education when it came to arrests or searches of suspects. But it found that in encounters with crime suspects, officers with some college education or a four-year degree resorted to using force 56 percent of the time, while officers with no college education used force 68 percent of the time. "Force" included verbally threatening suspects, grabbing or punching them, using mace or pepper spray, hitting suspects with a baton, handcuffing, throwing to the ground, or pointing or firing a gun at them. From here: https://psmag.com/education/cops-and-college-do-police-need-book-smarts-21852 Others have found that college degrees make cops more likely to overpolice: posted:One of the task force’s many recommendations called for efforts to encourage higher education for police officers. Underpinning this recommendation was an optimistic assumption that having a college education makes police officers more sensitive and responsive to the distinctive needs of the communities they serve. But is this true? From here: https://theconversation.com/college-educated-cops-enforce-the-law-more-aggressively-106333 So education maybe isn't the answer either. Hard to say conclusively without more data and research, but it's hard to get departments to go along with that because if the results aren't positive it kind of undermines the whole educational incentive part of further reform and professionalization of police. The Glumslinger posted:As a serious question, what would criminal investigation look in a future where we could fire all cops and build a new criminal justice system? For the purpose of this discussion, lets say the goal of criminal investigations is to accurately solve major crimes such as Murder, Rape, and other violent crimes. In 2018, we nationally, the US had a 63% clearance rate on murders, 45% on violent crimes, and 34% on rape. (1) This is a good question. Given that cops are already pretty poo poo at solving violent crimes, there's a lot of room for improvement outside of the policing model as it currently exists. My gut feeling is that the skills necessary to successfully investigate crime can be successfully divorced from the threat of force or punishment as motivation to comply with law enforcement. Further, assuming a post-police world where everyone has the resources they need and we depend on social/community connections to resolve things there would be 1) fewer violent crimes and 2) stronger connections = more witnesses, more incentive for them to cooperate with investigations and more mechanisms through which to prevent biases and corruption from hindering accountability and justice. That's all conjecture though, so if you ask me to extrapolate from there I can't and I won't. The Glumslinger posted:Would splitting the CSI/Detectives into a separate department, with separate unions be enough to prevent the current levels of corruption and racism from reemerging? Looking at LAPD, people are eligible to be hired as detectives after having spent atleast 3 years a regular officer, which comes after 18 months in the academy.(2) Would breaking up these career paths even further improve the culture of detectives and help remove the biases learned in the police academy and as a beat cop? The quickest path from hiring to promotion to a detective is approximately 4 years; What kind of way can we use that 4 year timespan to train detectives who are more able to effectively solve crimes accurately, without falling into patterns of blaming minorities and other disadvantaged people? I think you have to split those things apart. There will be some overlap as people decide to transfer from one career path to another but taking a street patrollman and turning them into a detective doesn't seem to discourage them from bringing the same assumptions and bias into their conduct, only a veneer of detachment from street level crime and professionialization. You can absolutely train someone to investigate crimes in 4 years outside the police model (investigators for civil cases or other noncriminal concerns do exist) and also we have to acknowledge that a lot of what is accepted as rational for detectives - collecting evidence for crimes - relies on evidentiary models that are increasingly seen as either completely made up (blood spatter analysis) or unreliable (fingerprint analysis) or outright counterproductive to ensuring the correct people are held accountable for crimes (eyewitness testimony, suspect line-ups, suspect interrogations, etc). The Glumslinger posted:I'd also like opinions on whether the local structure of investigation also hinders our ability properly solve crimes. Would we be better off with centrally run detective bureaus, either at a state level or even a federal level (though I guess federally run would probably be unfeasible and kinda overlap with the FBI). Something like local community-based structures for arbitrating everyday minor, nonviolent conflicts, with state run investigative bureaus to handle violent and/or technically complex crimes (financial stuff, identity theft, etc). Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 01:57
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CelestialScribe posted:Why is it so difficult for you to conceive that community policing might result in the wrong communities policing wrongly, and to think of one or two ideas that the state could enact in order to stop that from happening? Its not, I've already acknowledged that it definitely will. I've also already suggested mechanisms that would mitigate this risk, as have several other posters. I don't even know why I am continuing to engage with you since you keep asking the same question over and over in bad faith except that I must be as stupid as you are! Community policing DOES NOT MEAN that every community designs its own system of justice from scratch, it does not mean an end to any and all kinds of federalism or networking of local agencies and organizations who would be replacing the police in their roles. Advocates of community policing are not suggesting, for example, abolishing the concept of rights. But you know that, you're just also an rear end in a top hat! To the person asking about detectives, I'd suggest looking at other ingestigative models such as e.g. forensic accountants, OSHA/L&I, environmental dlcomplaing investigators etc. who all manage to find answers to their questions without routinely torturing and otherwise forcefully coercing a bunch of people. You also have to understand these proposals within the broader context of further societal changes, if your argument is: community policing won't work if literally everything else stays the same then NO poo poo, the reason policing as it is currently constructed has the problems it does is not because the police just got unlucky and hired only the bad guys for two hundred years, its because the police are there to exert social control through violence and maintain capitalist white supremacy. If you replace the police with a community driven system of violent oppresion and maintenance of capitalist white supremacy (what CS seems hell bent on imagining, presumably because they don't care to imagine a world that isn't specifically designed to maintain white racial oligarchy but draw your own conclusions) then duh, yeah, you'd inevitably end up with a lot of the same problems. Luckily, a lot less people are actually comitted to that system than people realize, and even more people can be disuaded when it becomes clear how much they and their community (even white ones!) stand to benefit.
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Jun 5, 2020 02:21
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My job, in real life, is organizing mobile and manufactured home communities (trailer/caravan parks) into cooperatives. Under that model, the community creates mutually agreed upon rules, elects RECALLABLE directors, sets their own rent and annual budget and etc. Does this model have a ton of problems? Do bad actors act in racist ways or commit theft or otherwise do harm to the community? Yes, of course, its people. Is every single one of those communities better off than when the land they lived on was owned and controlled by some landlord or private equity group? Of loving COURSE they are, not a single person in any of my communities no matter how frustrated they get with their co-op has EVER suggested just going back to having a landlord. Is it possible to conceive of a community so racist that they drive out all of their non-white members? Sure, as a really perverse thought experiment I guess, but I've never seen a situation even approaching that AND if there was one the democratic nature of the organization provises a ton of mechanisms for even a single individual to fight back against this unfair treatment. Mechanisms that are not present in any way shape or form in a for-profit individual or shareholder owned park. Literally every single piece of historical and academic evidence points to the glaringly obvious fact that organizations that are meaningdully democratically governed by thier STAKEHOLDERS produce better outcomes than the alternative.
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Jun 5, 2020 02:29
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Have I seen racist landlords with a ton of power and no accountability be insanely racist and punative? Yeah, routinely. And if you can't understand the parallels here then your resistance to the idea of police abolition/community policing etc. likely stems from a broader issue of you being thick as poo poo.
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Jun 5, 2020 02:32
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How large are the cooperatives that you organize? Do you have any cooperatives as large as a small US town - let's say, 5,000 to 10,000 people? Community size does have a direct impact on the effectiveness of personalized oversight - in larger communities, petty graft is both more attractive and less obvious ronya fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 03:13
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fatherboxx posted:Before this thread eats itself because of one reason or another... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wko0OnpxDX0 https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/organizing/world-without-police/ Also the stuff I posted about Cheran in Mexico.
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Jun 5, 2020 03:50
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I've heard two interesting ideas for challenging police unions: 1. that the AFL-CIO should dis-affiliate itself with the International Union of Police Associations, and 2. that government unions should also break off with and condemn police unions. Basically, the unions of this country should unite in breaking off with and condemning police unions. And it makes sense, because the police aren't real allies for unions anyway.
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Jun 5, 2020 05:35
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ronya posted:How large are the cooperatives that you organize? Do you have any cooperatives as large as a small US town - let's say, 5,000 to 10,000 people? Obviously I don't, the U.S.A would never allow something. However, there is plenty of evidence that, at every firm size but SPECIFICALLY larger sizes, graft, corruption and fraud are considerably reduced in cooperstively owned and operated enterprises. I think people tend to oversell Mondragon in a big way and probably don't take into account its unique cultural context when using it as an example BUT its pretty hard to argue that their system of governance and political economy hasn't had significantly better outcomes than those of pretty much every other region in europe, particularly during times of crisis. Chiapas, Nicarauga, Syria, Reggio Emellia, etc. Plenty of examples of networked and federated small direct democracy groups managing comple regional ecenomies in many different contexts. If you'd like to provide some evidence to support your assertion I'd love to see it because it is counter to what I've been able to find in my research so far, genuinely would be helpful for my capstone if you could share this with me. (Somewhat related: is it your assertion that graft and petty theft are uncommon right now? I'm pretty sure, for example, wage theft is the single.most common crime in the usa and I'm pretty sure a.meaningfully representative 'justice' system would spend a lot more time stopping the mass exploitation of the working class, but who knows you seem to have thought about this a lot)
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Jun 5, 2020 06:30
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To be clear, I said that larger communities are more vulnerable to graft than smaller ones. I did not say that cooperatives are more vulnerable to graft. ... that being said, one common explanation for why large cooperatives are rare is that they get graft-ier faster than alternative ownership forms as they grow larger, so I suppose that is nitpicking. My guess is that the dynamics for municipal governance are pretty different from corporate governance - facing different incentives and restrictions. A proposal for a cooperatively owned farm federation, otherwise embedded in a liberal democratic context, is not the same kind of problem as a proposal for a farming community that will also pass its own laws and enforce its own justice. However, since you ask, for Conventional Thought™ on the efficiency and nature of cooperatives, I would suggest Dow's Governing the Firm: Workers' Control in Theory and Practice, which lays out the literature pretty well. Dow also briefly touches on Mondragon. The take today tends to emphasize corporate governance issues... that the corporate governance issues that plague shareholder (public or private) firms - like investor heterogeneity (people want different things across different time horizons), free-riding (maintaining oversight is individually costly, but the benefits are diffused, so stakeholders do less of it), free cash flow vs debt (free cash empowers insiders, debt empowers the third-party lender), etc. - affect large worker-held firms more than large shareholder-held firms. Agency problems that cooperatives plausibly handle better, like worker monitoring, conversely do not scale. Yada yada yada, lots of theory, none of it is really relevant to municipal governance or policing, I think. ronya fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 08:49
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If 'communities' are 'more vulnerable to graft' as they get bigger irrespective of how they are governed then I'm a little confused about your inital response to my post. I apologize but I can't get into my Zotero right now due to having no wifi in this boatyard but when I do I'll share some contemporary research that demonstrates pretty much exactly the opposite of Dow's theoretical analysis is true when you look at actually existing cooperative firms. I won't dispute that lack of access to capital is an issue for anti-capitalist firms because, no loving poo poo. You're right that its a lot of yada yada theory that scans if you largely already accept biz school dogma, its also just fortunately objectively wrong! Cooperative firms do not get 'graftier' as they get bigger, although I'm now assuming you got a.graduate degree in business so I suppose I'm not terribbly surprised if you hear poo poo like that commonly. And like I said, if you don't understand how complex political economic organizations which utilize direct democracy and equal representation for stakeholders with a commitment to mutual self-aid and a concern for community might possibly serve as a model for what community policing would look like, well.....
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Jun 5, 2020 09:09
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I think some writers have observed before that the idea that cooperatives allow the owner-stakeholders-workers/consumers to pursue multiple objectives tends to be taken self-evidently as a failing by the econ types, but as a benefit by the socio types, and the two ships pass in the night Do elaborate when you get wifi... maybe drop me a PM if it is too off-topic Crumbskull posted:And like I said, if you don't understand how complex political economic organizations which utilize direct democracy and equal representation for stakeholders with a commitment to mutual self-aid and a concern for community might possibly serve as a model for what community policing would look like, well..... A concrete and simple difference is diversity of goals... for the firm stakeholder, to a first degree of approximation, the stakeholders have an overriding common interest: they want to get paid. They may have divergent ancillary interests but this is the single largest one that dominates the others. This commonality of interests means that democratic control becomes mainly over means, not ends. On the other hand, community governance is heavily about ends. To drag this back on-topic, many communities may wish to actively enforce a prohibition on, let's say, graffiti for the sake of example. They may wish to use force to do so. Quality-of-life calls constitute the majority of day-to-day police calls in the developed world, not serious crimes or crowd/riot control, so this is a realistic scenario. But between reform and abolition, for that goal, abolition would not be not an option... this is obviously a zero-sum or negative-sum battle with someone whose calling in life is spontaneous art expressed in the medium of public-facing walls. For this reason democratic theory revolves heavily around majoritarian restraints and plural coexistence, rather than agency theory - there is no common interest for the agent to pursue (or fail to). The police question becomes predominantly a 'rights' debate, not an 'common interests' debate. Political theory that starts by assuming that all members of the community have or will have broadly identical political ethics sets itself too easy a task... an argument for police abolition that starts by saying "I support this because it would make goals I reject impossible to pursue" struggles at the "first, obtain broad agreement on goals" barrier. But if that is done - would abuses of policing power have the same severity or frequency if such broad agreement, such radical re-thinkings of conflict resolution/public health/property already existed, to begin with? Probably not. It's the same old saw: in a society of methodological anarchists, liberal democracy is probably pretty pleasant, and a shift to true statelessness wouldn't actually change very much.
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Jun 5, 2020 10:59
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