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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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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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One thing I do worry about for the idea of reducing the cops to bodyguards for other government employees is that, even if policy is to only bring a cop if it's necessary, they'll end up coming every time a racist idiot exaggerates about the threat of a black man to 911 Not really sure that's solvable by policy though. And still better than the status quo of cops patrolling black neighborhoods looking for black men to exaggerate the threat of
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Jun 8, 2020 02:36
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Yeah I think most of the abolish crowd is okay with having government employee bodyguards for social workers
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Jun 8, 2020 20:09
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silence_kit posted:a.k.a. police if they aren't patrolling the streets, aren't the person doing the active response, and don't have the power to decide to arrest, it's so unrecognizable that calling them police by another name is disingenuous
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Jun 8, 2020 21:20
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Mat Cauthon posted:No, they aren't. Apologies. I was repeating what appeared to be the most common voices using the word abolition in this thread. Thanks for explaining further that that isn't the same as the broader abolition movement tbh I have a lot of reading to do once I'm not using all my energy protesting
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Jun 9, 2020 02:48
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CelestialScribe posted:"actually we think the amount of policing we have is good we'd just like to be treated like human loving beings". they want something other than police then, or at least other than beat cops, because the job of a beat cop is to find people to treat inhumanely public safety doesn't have to come in the form of policing, which as an institution is less than 200 years old
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Sep 14, 2020 02:47
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CelestialScribe posted:Okay, sure - but how does that explain the results of that poll? alternatives to policing as the primary agency by which the state attempts to increase public safety have basically gotten no attention, or at best have gotten them only very recently and cursorily. I bet you'd get pretty different results if instead the poll was "some have proposed <X> as an alternative to policing. If your local government was willing to implement that, would you want police presence to increase, decrease or stay the same in your neighborhood?", filling in various different proposals for X. If that poll did come out with more or less the same results then well I guess I have egg on my face, but by and large I've found that anybody I've talked to who isn't waving a thin blue line flag is more or less sympathetic to the idea that the way policing is structured is fundamentally not the best way to approach public safety, but sometimes when they hear "defund" or "abolish" they fill in the blanks with "with no replacement" Setting aside that I personally think abolition with no replacement would be a net positive over the status quo, having the poll clarify the difference between abolition with and without replacement is bound to make a huge difference on the results
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Sep 14, 2020 02:54
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this is setting aside the fact that public safety is really a secondary concern at best of the institution of policing compared to maintaining the interests of the powerful at the expense of the weak by force; a century or more of pro-cop propaganda has sold that lie already
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Sep 14, 2020 02:57
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CelestialScribe posted:Just to clarify, if this thread is not for debate and discussion, then what is it for? Is it a place to share stories of people getting attacked by police? fwiw, the purpose of this thread is to discuss what to replace police with, or how to go about defunding, not to discuss whether those are justified. I don't know if there's a dedicated thread for that question the impetus of this thread was people in uspol asking "what are people actually suggesting when they say defund/abolish?" iirc
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Sep 14, 2020 03:23
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CelestialScribe posted:Even in a society where private property is eliminated, there are plenty of cases where law enforcement are required that have nothing to do with private property. Such as? There's a logical leap between "there are currently undesirable behaviors that law enforcement responds to other than property crimes" and "law enforcement and a criminal justice system is required to deal with them". It's just not an obvious leap because the leap has been made for you time and again, countless times over your life. But it's an assumption nonetheless. Police don't prevent crime. At best, they respond to it. So if your goal is to reduce behaviors such as assault, rape, or murder, you're not doing that with prisons and cops. The criminal justice system exists to punish people, not to increase safety.
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Sep 21, 2020 06:02
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Like, for your example of a stalker, I know someone who has a stalker. He assaulted one of her coworkers, went to prison briefly, and is now back out on the street, trying to find her. She has to hide her name on our websites and she still gets occasional hints that he's on her trail. From her description, he sounds very clearly mentally ill in some way. The police are fundamentally not helping her right now, because that's not how police function. We, her friends, colleagues, and family, are the ones protecting her from this man right now. e: I was writing this before your reply
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Sep 21, 2020 06:08
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CelestialScribe posted:I mean, as an example, let's take something like assault. Guy #1 punches guy #2. I think we'd all agree we want guy #1 to have to make amends in some way. By what mechanism does that happen, if not through law enforcement? (Not saying cops, I'm saying, law enforcement. Surely there needs to be an independent force that gathers evidence, etc.) How does anyone benefit from the court case and punishment in this scenario. Like literally "nothing happens" and the two people are left to deal with the fallout the hard way seems better to me than the state stepping in and arresting the guy in this scenario
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Sep 21, 2020 06:12
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CelestialScribe posted:Yeah, and that sounds horrible. But wouldn't you agree that your situation isn't ideal?. Like, in an ideal world, wouldn't there be an independent force that deals with this guy? But it's a paradigm that can't help but fail. Either you lock people like that up forever, and then for every person who legitimately poses a lifelong threat (and probably needs therapy more than jail) you lock up a thousand people forever who committed crimes of passion, or you judge based on the acts that already happened, and let people like him free. Hell, we already have an insanely overzealous prison complex and he's still free. I shudder to think of ow big they'd swell to reach a point where he is locked up for life. So like, yeah, in this specific case, this is a case where "lock him up forever" is better than doing nothing (though some sort of mental health service is very likely better than either), but a criminal justice system that routinely makes decisions like that would have to be a nightmarish dystopia. CelestialScribe posted:I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a society where people can get away with assaulting people for no reason. Having that guy fined, sent to community service, etc, is far better than letting him walk free. It sends a terrible message that the strong can prey on the weak. So the benefit is that it sends a message to future would-be assaulters? If that was how it worked, you'd expect to see lower rates of crime in places with more police or harsher penalties. But you just don't see that. It's a fundamentally broken paradigm of public behavior modification.
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Sep 21, 2020 06:26
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Did that punitive justice unbreak your friend's arm, or make them safer from future armbreakers? Like that's a really lovely thing that happened to them but I don't see where in the story the police helped and performed a function that would be lost in a post-police world
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Sep 21, 2020 07:07
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