Do we even need police?

[Thermodolia]

Seven hundred thousand police officers in the US, "but lets railroad them all over the actions of a negative minority element".

police shootings are definitely NOT in the minority, they happen way too often, you just don't pay attention apparently

Shootings are bound to happen when you have an armed populace

[Thermodolia]

That's based on the premise that every single person shot by a police officer was innocent. As far as shootings/killings along the likes of George Floyd, Alton Sterling, Manuel Ellis, and others, those are a minority element. The drug dealers, gangbangers, armed assailants, psychos, and etcetera are not "unjust murders".

i mean they're not exactly suppose to kill guilty people either, that's what we have prison for, or at least that's what it should be used for focus on rehabilitation.

Except that kinda happens when you have criminals who shoot back. What are the cops supposed to do? Stand there a watch?

but you'd be surprised on how little cops actually get the 'bad guys' hell the nashville police didn't even bother looking into the nashville bomber despite being TOLD he was making a bomb.

It’s almost like Nashville metro is a large area and the police don’t have enough funding or manpower to hunt down every claim.

[Thermodolia]

well yes but actually no.

To elaborate, have police be community based and reform the system so that they aren't so biased/forceful when it comes to arrests. Id personally make the justice system a mix between rehabilitative and punitive, where rehabilitation is used for the first 2 offences, but if they commit a crime again, then they go to prison.

i can agree with that, i say cops should have to be elected by the community and should have to live in the community they serve, also funnel money into things like mental health resources

Elected is a bad idea. Extremely bad.

[Imperium Latine]

police shootings are definitely NOT in the minority, they happen way too often, you just don't pay attention apparently

Shootings are bound to happen when you have an armed populace

Not necessarily, Switzerland has a lot of guns and no mass shootings (that I remember, might be wrong) , France has very restrictive gun laws and had the Bataclan and others. Norway had Breivik, its not that linear, and the US isn't the only country in the world.

This goes for gun stats and also this talk about no police and policeman being this and that on this thread.

[Dogmeat]

Naw. Just build an autoturret in your yard.

Nothing can go wrong.

[CoraSpia]

police shootings are definitely NOT in the minority, they happen way too often, you just don't pay attention apparently

Shootings are bound to happen when you have an armed populace

Armed populus, unarmed cops.

[Atheris]

Naw. Just build an autoturret in your yard.

Nothing can go wrong.

Buildin' a sentry!

[San Lumen]

well yes but actually no.

To elaborate, have police be community based and reform the system so that they aren't so biased/forceful when it comes to arrests. Id personally make the justice system a mix between rehabilitative and punitive, where rehabilitation is used for the first 2 offences, but if they commit a crime again, then they go to prison.

i can agree with that, i say cops should have to be elected by the community and should have to live in the community they serve, also funnel money into things like mental health resources

Living in the community is good idea. Electing officers is not. It’s a terrible idea.

[Northern Dosletofe]

What do you think about police abolition entirely (in all nations) ? I support immediate reforms to reduce police power and provide more funding to welfare initiatives that reduce incentives and necessity for crime, with a long term plan of removing police as an institution.

While I get what you are trying to say, the abolition of police seems really wrong. It depends on the country and its infrastructure as well as corruption. Idk, that is my opinion on the matter...

[SD_Film Artists]

i can agree with that, i say cops should have to be elected by the community and should have to live in the community they serve, also funnel money into things like mental health resources

Elected is a bad idea. Extremely bad.

I agree. In the UK some police commissioners are independent as people don't like the idea of party-politics getting in the way of a policeman's job.

[Dogmeat]

i can agree with that, i say cops should have to be elected by the community and should have to live in the community they serve, also funnel money into things like mental health resources

Elected is a bad idea. Extremely bad.

Imagine militarizing the HOA.

[Paddy O Fernature]

Some People: "Professional police need to be abolished because they cannot be trusted for XYZ reasons!"

Other People: "Yes, and we should replace them with a volunteer based force that will clearly do better then then full time professionals!"

Both groups nod in agreement.

Me: Let me know how that works out for you...

Remember when the crime rate in CHAZ/CHOP rose 525% while the Totally Not Police were on patrol there?

*Looks at New York, Illinois, California, Oregon, DC*

I see a pattern forming here...

[Picairn]

It’s almost like Nashville metro is a large area and the police don’t have enough funding or manpower to hunt down every claim.

That's why we need to increase funding, but for structural reforms and wider coverage, not for buying shiny new military stuff.

[SD_Film Artists]

What do you think about police abolition entirely (in all nations) ? I support immediate reforms to reduce police power and provide more funding to welfare initiatives that reduce incentives and necessity for crime, with a long term plan of removing police as an institution.

While I get what you are trying to say, the abolition of police seems really wrong. It depends on the country and its infrastructure as well as corruption. Idk, that is my opinion on the matter...

You forget, everywhere in the world must be treated as an NWA video

[Thermodolia]

It’s almost like Nashville metro is a large area and the police don’t have enough funding or manpower to hunt down every claim.

That's why we need to increase funding, but for structural reforms and wider coverage, not for buying shiny new military stuff.

You’re not going to get any disagreement from me here. We need less Lenco Bearcats and more officers.

[Prusmia]

In the case that there is no body to protect the law and enforce it, there would be no case where there would be an obedient populace. Any nation with such a strategy unless executed in a nation full of devout saints would collapse within anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. Either devolving into chaos or simply being overthrown.

[Ifreann]

Of course we don't need the police. We managed just fine without them for quite some time. Most of human history, in fact. Certainly every society has had something going on in the way of community defence, but those things were not the police, they had wildly varying powers and duties in different times and places, and there is no reason to believe that going forward our societies will always need to have our community defence take the form of the police.

---

I said tight gun laws. To restrict access to guns such as the Ar-15 and by Semi autos. And On taking away the police I was responding to the OP. And actually there are people on the left who want to abolish the police. There is aalso people on the right

Who the fuck would need an AR-15 to defend themself?

Someone threatened by 30-50 feral hogs.

---

Ask me again after you've been mugged; when your liquor store is robbed; when you've been the victim of domestic abuse.

My liquor store has been robbed multiple times. I think we can do without the police.

---

40% of cops are domestic abusers.

Then keep the 60% who are not.

Keep the cops who work with criminals in uniform every day and have done nothing? Sounds to me like they're pretty bad at their jobs.

---

Some People: "Professional police need to be abolished because they cannot be trusted for XYZ reasons!"

Other People: "Yes, and we should replace them with a volunteer based force that will clearly do better then then full time professionals!"

Both groups nod in agreement.

Me: Let me know how that works out for you...

It would probably work out fine. Most of what the fuzz do on a day to day basis isn't high intensity police work in which they must constantly call on their years of training and experience. Which probably explains why they get less training than hairdressers. And where lots of training is required, we can have people to do that and just that. It makes for good TV to have the main cast of detectives in Law And Order: Sub-Title Invention Squad also participate in the exciting door-kicking, perp-arresting scenes, but you can have detectives whose job is just detecting, not detecting and interrogating and lab work and also beating people up or shooting them.

---

Here's the thing.

Doctors kill an untold number of people each year because of careless mistakes, incompetence, and in rare cases outright maliciousness.

Sometimes even in rare cases it's possible that racism and sexism could even be a factor in deciding how well a doctor does their job in their life.

Most of the time they simply pay off the victim's families and in rare cases they get judged and removed from power.

So in the light that Doctors sometimes kill people because of incompetence should we abolish doctors and go back to faith healing?

No because we realized that while there are problems with the health industry there really isn't anything that much better to replace it with.

Advocating for new approaches to dealing with anti-social behaviour and handling community defence is not really equivalent to "go back to faith healing".

---

Instead, some policy makers propose replacing police with solutions we know to be effective, such as rehabilitation of criminals as opposed to punitive punishment, decriminalising non-violent crimes, and spend more on mental health care, housing and education.

How are you going to capture criminals in the first place to rehabilitate them without law enforcement?

If you think about it, "law enforcement" isn't really a good description for the police. If you go to your local police department and tell them that a local factory isn't following environmental regulations, they'll tell you to fuck off, why are you coming to us with this, we're the police, we don't make corporations abide by(enforce) environmental regulations(the law).

Given that this is a thread about the police, it would be unfortunate to conflate the police with all law enforcement, when it only takes the most basic familiarity with modern society to know that there are many laws which the police do not enforce.

So how would a society capture dangerous criminals without a police force? With some other organisation dedicated exclusively to capturing dangerous criminals, with members trained specifically for that task, authorised to employ only such powers as are necessary to safely achieve that task, fully accountable to and recallable by the community they serve. Very different from a centralised state agency with broad powers to maintain "order", which is to say, maintain the ordinary functioning of late-stage capitalism, with minimal accountability to the people they police.

---

Naw. Just build an autoturret in your yard.

Nothing can go wrong.

I did that, now I just have a steadily growing pile of super mutant corpses.

---

Slowly abolish the police and most laws, replace it with a fully transparent volunteer force.

So replace the police force with a police force. Because that makes sense.

When the latter is different from the former, yes, it does.

Also people aren’t going to volunteer for police services. Volunteer fire departments have trouble keeping volunteers because Ya don’t make money and need another job to survive which incidentally cuts into volunteer fire fighting.

"Volunteer" doesn't have to mean "unpaid". I would think that you'd know this, having yourself volunteered to serve in the armed forces. The army did pay you, didn't they?

[Ethel mermania]

Of course we don't need the police. We managed just fine without them for quite some time. Most of human history, in fact. Certainly every society has had something going on in the way of community defence, but those things were not the police, they had wildly varying powers and duties in different times and places, and there is no reason to believe that going forward our societies will always need to have our community defence take the form of the police.

---

Who the fuck would need an AR-15 to defend themself?

Someone threatened by 30-50 feral hogs.

---

Ask me again after you've been mugged; when your liquor store is robbed; when you've been the victim of domestic abuse.

My liquor store has been robbed multiple times. I think we can do without the police.

---

Then keep the 60% who are not.

Keep the cops who work with criminals in uniform every day and have done nothing? Sounds to me like they're pretty bad at their jobs.

---

Some People: "Professional police need to be abolished because they cannot be trusted for XYZ reasons!"

Other People: "Yes, and we should replace them with a volunteer based force that will clearly do better then then full time professionals!"

Both groups nod in agreement.

Me: Let me know how that works out for you...

It would probably work out fine. Most of what the fuzz do on a day to day basis isn't high intensity police work in which they must constantly call on their years of training and experience. Which probably explains why they get less training than hairdressers. And where lots of training is required, we can have people to do that and just that. It makes for good TV to have the main cast of detectives in Law And Order: Sub-Title Invention Squad also participate in the exciting door-kicking, perp-arresting scenes, but you can have detectives whose job is just detecting, not detecting and interrogating and lab work and also beating people up or shooting them.

---

Here's the thing.

Doctors kill an untold number of people each year because of careless mistakes, incompetence, and in rare cases outright maliciousness.

Sometimes even in rare cases it's possible that racism and sexism could even be a factor in deciding how well a doctor does their job in their life.

Most of the time they simply pay off the victim's families and in rare cases they get judged and removed from power.

So in the light that Doctors sometimes kill people because of incompetence should we abolish doctors and go back to faith healing?

No because we realized that while there are problems with the health industry there really isn't anything that much better to replace it with.

Advocating for new approaches to dealing with anti-social behaviour and handling community defence is not really equivalent to "go back to faith healing".

---

How are you going to capture criminals in the first place to rehabilitate them without law enforcement?

If you think about it, "law enforcement" isn't really a good description for the police. If you go to your local police department and tell them that a local factory isn't following environmental regulations, they'll tell you to fuck off, why are you coming to us with this, we're the police, we don't make corporations abide by(enforce) environmental regulations(the law).

Given that this is a thread about the police, it would be unfortunate to conflate the police with all law enforcement, when it only takes the most basic familiarity with modern society to know that there are many laws which the police do not enforce.

So how would a society capture dangerous criminals without a police force? With some other organisation dedicated exclusively to capturing dangerous criminals, with members trained specifically for that task, authorised to employ only such powers as are necessary to safely achieve that task, fully accountable to and recallable by the community they serve. Very different from a centralised state agency with broad powers to maintain "order", which is to say, maintain the ordinary functioning of late-stage capitalism, with minimal accountability to the people they police.

---

Naw. Just build an autoturret in your yard.

Nothing can go wrong.

I did that, now I just have a steadily growing pile of super mutant corpses.

---

So replace the police force with a police force. Because that makes sense.

When the latter is different from the former, yes, it does.

Also people aren’t going to volunteer for police services. Volunteer fire departments have trouble keeping volunteers because Ya don’t make money and need another job to survive which incidentally cuts into volunteer fire fighting.

"Volunteer" doesn't have to mean "unpaid". I would think that you'd know this, having yourself volunteered to serve in the armed forces. The army did pay you, didn't they?

You mean like when you volunteer to join a PD you get paid for being a cop

[Major-Tom]

Yes, we do. I've had my life saved by a cop, a community advocate couldn't have done the same for me I reckon.

That said, I'm a standard looking white guy. Many working-class people, black people, other people of color etc, they feel the full brunt of systemic classism and racism within Departments, and ordinary people regardless of color or creed can fall victim to an unjust police officer or an unjust Department. We need to work for police reform, abolish qualified immunity, and ultimately make sure that police officers need a college degree and a helluva lot more training.

In addition, the behemoths known as police unions need to be structurally reformed and weeded out of their frat-like mindset of unyielding allegiance to one another, especially when an individual commits some serious wrongdoings.

Our PDs in the US are often institutionally crooked, but the knee-jerk response would be to abolish them, but that simply isn't the logical or thought-provoking response. We can ultimately do a lot more with a lot less empty rhetoric. For those who say, too, "we can replace the police with (X)," you're ostensibly replacing them with, well, the police. Hence why PD and Court reforms make a lot more sense.

[Ifreann]

Yes, we do. I've had my life saved by a cop, a community advocate couldn't have done the same for me I reckon.

That said, I'm a standard looking white guy. Many working-class people, black people, other people of color etc, they feel the full brunt of systemic classism and racism within Departments, and ordinary people regardless of color or creed can fall victim to an unjust police officer or an unjust Department. We need to work for police reform, abolish qualified immunity, and ultimately make sure that police officers need a college degree and a helluva lot more training.

In addition, the behemoths known as police unions need to be structurally reformed and weeded out of their frat-like mindset of unyielding allegiance to one another, even when an individual commits some serious wrongdoings.

Our PDs in the US are often institutionally crooked, but the knee-jerk response would be to abolish them, but that simply isn't the logical or thought-provoking response. We can ultimately do a lot more with a lot less empty rhetoric.

I'm sure some people had their lives saved by their feudal lord's men-at-arms. Some people had their lives saved by Spartan hoplites. Some people had their lives saved by slave patrols. While saving lives is obviously a very good thing to do, I'm a big fan of lives and the saving of them, that alone does not justify the existence of an organisation or system.

[Ethel mermania]

Yes, we do. I've had my life saved by a cop, a community advocate couldn't have done the same for me I reckon.

That said, I'm a standard looking white guy. Many working-class people, black people, other people of color etc, they feel the full brunt of systemic classism and racism within Departments, and ordinary people regardless of color or creed can fall victim to an unjust police officer or an unjust Department. We need to work for police reform, abolish qualified immunity, and ultimately make sure that police officers need a college degree and a helluva lot more training.

In addition, the behemoths known as police unions need to be structurally reformed and weeded out of their frat-like mindset of unyielding allegiance to one another, even when an individual commits some serious wrongdoings.

Our PDs in the US are often institutionally crooked, but the knee-jerk response would be to abolish them, but that simply isn't the logical or thought-provoking response. We can ultimately do a lot more with a lot less empty rhetoric.

I'm sure some people had their lives saved by their feudal lord's men-at-arms. Some people had their lives saved by Spartan hoplites. Some people had their lives saved by slave patrols. While saving lives is obviously a very good thing to do, I'm a big fan of lives and the saving of them, that alone does not justify the existence of an organisation or system.

Ban EMT's

[Atheris]

I'm sure some people had their lives saved by their feudal lord's men-at-arms. Some people had their lives saved by Spartan hoplites. Some people had their lives saved by slave patrols. While saving lives is obviously a very good thing to do, I'm a big fan of lives and the saving of them, that alone does not justify the existence of an organisation or system.

Ban EMT's

Ban firefighters!

[Picairn]

Of course we don't need the police. We managed just fine without them for quite some time. Most of human history, in fact. Certainly every society has had something going on in the way of community defence, but those things were not the police, they had wildly varying powers and duties in different times and places, and there is no reason to believe that going forward our societies will always need to have our community defence take the form of the police.

We also managed just fine without modern medicine, or modern appliances. Most of human history, in fact.

Humanity is durable together, but that doesn't mean that our suffering doesn't necessitate solutions.

That being said, I would rather have police answering to a central state, which the people can control and oversee, than dozens of different militias and watchmen answering to separate towns and villages. Decentralization means less coordination, less coverage and less effectiveness in capturing criminals. Not to mention that these militias and watchmen can be weaponized and cause local wars whenever there is tension between towns and villages.

[Imperium Latine]

Yes, we do. I've had my life saved by a cop, a community advocate couldn't have done the same for me I reckon.

That said, I'm a standard looking white guy. Many working-class people, black people, other people of color etc, they feel the full brunt of systemic classism and racism within Departments, and ordinary people regardless of color or creed can fall victim to an unjust police officer or an unjust Department. We need to work for police reform, abolish qualified immunity, and ultimately make sure that police officers need a college degree and a helluva lot more training.

In addition, the behemoths known as police unions need to be structurally reformed and weeded out of their frat-like mindset of unyielding allegiance to one another, even when an individual commits some serious wrongdoings.

Our PDs in the US are often institutionally crooked, but the knee-jerk response would be to abolish them, but that simply isn't the logical or thought-provoking response. We can ultimately do a lot more with a lot less empty rhetoric.

I'm sure some people had their lives saved by their feudal lord's men-at-arms. Some people had their lives saved by Spartan hoplites. Some people had their lives saved by slave patrols. While saving lives is obviously a very good thing to do, I'm a big fan of lives and the saving of them, that alone does not justify the existence of an organisation or system.

Yes, because who needs doctors and a health system when we have medieval healers doing the same thing.

Are you seriously comparing modern society and ancient times? Police is needed, you might have criticism against it, but it's abolition is just dumb.

Policing isn't just neighborhood policing, it's also combating human trafficking and drug trafficking, cartels, mafia, gangs. How are you gonna fight that without police? The army? Because all those forces you mentioned would be the modern days military and policing requires a different way of doing things, obviously.

[Norastan]

Yeah, if you like chaos, sure, good luck with bank robberies and mass shootings, I'm sure a unarmed paramedic can deal with that.