Jeffrey Dahmer (captured in 1991) comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure that there have been other prolific serial killers since then.
Call the police.
But how about hearing an argument in the apartment above yours and someone throwing things against the wall? How about seeing a homeless guy peeing against your wall? Or a drunken argument outside a bar? Or someone selling cigarettes on the street? An old lady off her meds wandering in the street in her nighgown? Want to fix those with a paramilitary force barreling up with drawn guns?
There’s a place for force. It’s a much smaller place than we presently imagine.
There are no police. What do you do?
I agree. That’s why I said I have no issues with reform or defunding (in whatever form that might take) and using the freed up money for other community resources, my issue is with a total abolishment of the police and prison system. I don’t see that as a viable system to keep people safe.
The logic in the piece. . .
The current approach hasn’t ended rape, therefore we shouldn’t imprison rapists. My knee-jerk reaction isn’t enthusiastic agreement.
People with health care, housing, education, and good jobs still commit crimes. I’m sure providing all of the above would reduce crime. And there are plenty of things we could do to change our approach to dealing with criminals. But, yeah no.
Unless I missed a post, I’m not seeing anyone jumping in with the authors. Anyone, even if they’re less than sanguine about the idea, think they can at least make a better argument?
It still amazed me that in 2020 people will spend more time typing about how they cannot access a nytimes article than it would have taken them to Google how to access it.
Presumably you know it’s accessible at another place because you googled it and found the link. But rather than simply post that link, you instead typed a post telling us we should search for that same link. I did search for the article because I wanted to read it. But all of the links I found were either connected to the paywalled NYT site or were commentaries, like this page, about the article rather than the article itself. So now that you’ve established you’re better at googling than I am, would you give us the link? Pretty please with sprinkles on top?
Right now there are several broad categories of predatory people who, in the aggregate, do not face any form of social impediment to keep them from doing what they continue to do. I should not need to go into excruciating detail. Let’s just say that they have a lot of social power (wealth and other forms of it) and that, on the one hand, a great deal of their rapacious conduct is designated as legitimate instead of illegal, and, on the other hand, when they do commit illegal acts, they’re nearly impervious to the mechanisms that would normally catch and punish lawbreakers. With me so far?
OK, well, no, this isn’t a WhatAboutism. That’s not my point. My point is that we’re surviving despite the fact that no one is stopping them and they keep on doing what they’re doing.
So we’d survive if there were ordinary common petty criminals and belligerent creeps and we were no longer doing anything to stop them. If that’s the cost of ceasing to police, then that’s the cost. It doesn’t mean we could not afford to pay it.
There’s reason to believe that a massive amount of the type of crime that police intervene against could be dealt with by other means. So we’re talking here about the bit that would persist. The folks that Velocity in the OP describes as
Well? So they’d do bad things. We already have classes of folks who keep on doing bad things and nothing happens to stop them from it.
Don’t forget the tradeoff. No more coercive law enforcement, no more social order via force. If the events of the past six weeks should have brought to the forefront of our awareness, that tradeoff gets rid of a vast amount of malfeasance.
We could always form vigilant committees like they did in many areas of the western United States and its territories in the latter half of the 19th century. That’s probably a bad idea on par with the idea of a having a militia instead of a standing army. There are always going to be those who will not follow the rules without the threat or use of violence and we need to have someone around to deal with those people.
For the record, I’m not in the camp that advocates for anarchy. People keep desperately trying to conflate anarchy with the movement going on at large, and by and large the movement has zero desire for anarchy.
That said, the overwhelming majority are arguing for a dramatic reduction in the use of police, not the total abolition of police. You can point to a few Democrats who are anti-abortion - that does not make anti-abortionism a Democratic party platform piece. You can point to a few republicans who want a race war. That does not make it a republican party platform piece. There are a few chanting “abolish the police.” That does not make it a central theme to the BLM/defund the police movement.
Now I’ll address your hypothetical. The total absence of a coercive control mechanism necessarily leads to the rise of coercive control structures. Either the jerks take over by force and everyone lets them, or the non-jerks create a police force to keep the jerks in line. Since people aren’t suicidal lemings, they’ll form police forces to keep the jerks from mass raping, pillaging, and burning as the uber jerks among us would be wont to do (archaic phrasing I know).
You can’t project current crime statistics, where it’s very likely that men with guns are going to come and stop things that get too out of hand, with an imagined future where there is no such response. People rape with the knowledge that there’s a fair chance (not nearly so good as it should be, but lets not get into that) they’ll get caught and imprisoned. It stands to reason you’d have a lot more of that, or any other heinous offense, if they knew there was no consequence at all. So, all manner of criminal, violent and repulsive behavior would arise. And again, we’re not suicidal lemings, we decent folk will arm up, form a possy and hunt down - oops, that’s a coercive control mechanism.
We can keep the men with guns for the big stuff like armed robberies, rapes, burglaries, etc. If you don’t, then you get unregulated militias doing it in place of a regulated police force - or Mad Max. We just shouldn’t be sending them when a kid next door is crying too loud and Karen gets upset about it.
In 18th and early 19th century America, the annual murder rate was from nearly 20 to over 30 per 100,000 (see this article and in particular this chart). By contrast, the murder rate* these days is around 5 per 100,000. Those (to us appalling) 18th and 19th century murder rates took place in an America where permanent professional law enforcement services–“the police”–were essentially non-existent. People survived (well, except for the ones who didn’t), but that doesn’t mean we should want to go back to those days.
*Technically the rate of "murder and non-negligent manslaughter.
I realize you will say that you want to make all sorts of social and political and economic changes, not just “abolish the police/abolish prisons” and that we therefore won’t go back to 19th century American (or medieval European) rates of violence. I’m just saying, the “civilization wouldn’t actually totally collapse” argument is a pretty damned weak argument. Our civilization and its direct predecessors demonstrably can SURVIVE all sorts of calamitous things, from the Black Death to a world war in which nuclear weapons were used.
You don’t need to google for a link, just install NoScript in your browser and you can read the New York Times all day long if you want. It works in Firefox and Chrome, not sure about others but it’s been around for years and works great.
That “we survive” with what you describe as undesirable but legal behavior is really neither here nor there wrt locking up rapists and serial killers. Survive is a pretty low bar.
A nonzero rate of criminal behavior doesn’t tell us that the current system is worse than nothing.
I think the trade-off argument holds more (but insufficient IMO) water. The current prison system causes problems. So do free-range serial killers. For many people, they perceive more risk from imprisonment than they perceive from free criminals
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A moderator told me not to
It’s bullshit. What about decent people that may commit a crime of passion? Shit what about something as silly as speeding? A LOT of people would start driving like maniacs.
“The Man From The Train” details a series of family murders around the turn of the 20th century, many of which were apparently committed by the same man. The primitive local law enforcement of the day was incapable of adequately investigating and connecting the killings.
Crime was rampant in major cities like New York and London until professional police forces started coming into being. The people who were prey for those criminals were overwhelmingly poor and powerless. Most who would be victimized by crime in a world without adequate policing would still be low income. The wealthy would be able to hire their own security.
This is like saying that since poverty still exists, government safety net programs are worthless.
Trouble is, there are a whole lot of pesky individuals who could care less about cooperation, and are perfectly willing to sacrifice others to their concept of “self”.
You want to buy land in Montana or Idaho and set up a wonderful society built on cooperation, without police or courts? Have at it. All too often though, those “cooperative” enterprises founder when some begin taking advantage of the rest, and there’s no one to stop them.
There will always be the need for prisons. There will always be Charles Manson type sociopaths who if free will kill. The only alternative would be a return to a very liberal use of the death penalty.
How many of your examples are going to be solved by education?
Has anyone taken a thorough look at a police department’s call-outs and interventions and tried to determine how many of them could be solved by a social worker or a health care team instead? You have your biases and I have mine, but I expect the percentage is going to be a lot lower than you think. And I expect that in most cases, you want the police officer on the scene as the first responder to assess the situation. A drunken argument outside a bar could be a bit of loud rowdiness, or it could be a full-on brawl.
Furthermore, since we’re raising examples, how about a shoplifter who’s caught by store security? Or a man who’s been upskirting women at a music festival? What about a drug dealer creating a dangerous mix because he doesn’t have the right ingredients for a proper mix? Let’s add drinking and driving, internet scams, intimidation of the elderly, vandalism, or dumping garbage on private property to avoid paying fees at the public dump? Do you think education will make a difference to any of those crimes? Do you think people who are caught offending those crimes will reconsider committing those crimes again because a social worker has given them a pamphlet and there’s no further deterrence?
I think childhood education works, messages from role models work, and programs that increase social cohesion work. Selfishness, laziness and pettiness are all part of the human condition, but most people can be steered away from crimes based on those motivations. However, some people are simply uncaring about the society they live in, and commit crimes because the crimes are easy and the criminals don’t care about the harm they’re doing. Those people aren’t psychopathic or sociopathic. They know what they’re doing is wrong, but they choose to commit the crimes anyway, and just hope they won’t be caught. Deterrence sometimes prevents those sorts or crime. Education without deterrence having any effect is a dream doomed to failure.
The counterpoint to your argument is to question whether you believe the predatory people you speak of are unaware of the elements of wrongness in their actions. They may have constructed justifications for those elements of wrongness, or reduced them to inconsequentialities, but do you think they’re oblivious to them? And whether your answer is yes, or no, do you genuinely think that educating these predators will change them? I suspect there have been several attempts by people with different viewpoints to try to “educate” the predators, yet somehow those attempts have failed to be persuasive.
That’s not the point that is trying to be made.
Y’all keep saying “what about murderers?” “What about rapists?” As if the current system is doing a great job and we’re proposing taking that away and replacing it with nothing. The current system IS NOT PROTECTING you from rapists and murderers. The police are reacting to things that have already happened, and they’re not very good at it. The police are a little better than 50/50 on murders and less than 1/3 on rapes. There are times when an armed response is needed. But those times are vanishingly small. And having a squad of people trained to be that armed response dealing with mundane events is unnecessary and dangerous.
This is a big part of the problem, imho. The police and law and order are so intertwined in some peoples mind that a call to disband the police is also a call to disband law and order. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The laws will still exist and enforcement will as well. We seek to make the implementation of law and order better by making it more equitable. by making it less dangerous. by being proactive instead of reactive.
but, this isnt a thread debating the disband the police movement in general, it’s about incorrigibles in particular.
And this is another part of the problem. Violence is never needed. Force may be sometimes needed. Equitable and appropriate use of force, not unfettered use of force. Not unaccountable use of force. Not the current system of use of force.
mc
What’s the plan if the police are abolished? Declare them outlaw and allow any redneck with a rifle to gun them down without penalty? Raise the hue and cry and round up a posse comitatus to pursue and subdue the criminal? Yell “Haro! Haro! Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort.” and wait for your feudal overlord to show up?
That’s the thing- we have historical evidence of how things worked without police, both in the genesis of English Common Law, and in our own frontier era. And they were generally violent, vigilante type law enforcement.
That said, I agree that maybe there should be a multiple tiered sort of police force- a sort of unarmed, conflict resolution type cop whose job is to be engaged in the communities, help people by finding them appropriate aid and services, etc… and who have the power to arrest, etc… but who aren’t armed- not even nightsticks. Maybe pepper spray is as far as I’d allow. Anyway, they’d be trained more in conflict resolution, and getting people the correct aid as needed, and would have basically self-defense training and/or minimal training to subdue people.
Then the second tier would be the big boys- their ENTIRE job would be to be the government’s monopoly on force, as personified by the police force. Basically they’d act more like a SWAT team; the “normal” cops would have to summon them, and they’d show up, be armed, and ready to crack heads, subdue unruly suspects who resist all the attempts of the normal, unarmed, peaceful cops to get them to comply without violence.
Basically the idea is to bifurcate it; in my scheme, 99% of police interactions would be with the normal, unarmed cops, and 1% would be with the head-crackers. Every deployment of a head-cracker squad would be highly documented and reviewed- from the initial deployment call, through the actual application of force, through the aftermath.
That way, we’d have a large force of police who’d be able to do almost everything they already do the vast majority of the time, and we’d have a small force of cops whose sole job would be to be the armed muscle of that particular government. So if there was a shooter, they’d get called. If there was a crazy person attacking people, they’d get called. But if there was a homeless guy wandering the lobby of an office building being belligerent, the regular cops would get called, and the head-crackers would only get called if they couldn’t handle this guy.
For those of you who want to do some outside reading here is an excellent Vox article that talks with several experts on the issue.
The “abolish the police” movement, explained by 7 scholars and activists
And here is the report from MPD150, an initiative started in 2016 (the 150th anniv of the Minneapolis PD) who are working closely with the city of Minneapolis.
Force is violence or at the very least a threat of violence. Force may be equitable, appropriate, and fettered by law and custom but it is still violence. Check your state penal code and I bet they mention force and deadly force. The state of Arkansas outlines when you can use deadly force in defense of a person and I think it’s understood by all that this means you’re permitted by law to use violence.