Sanghyeok wrote:Police are often seen as something necessary to protect lives, prevent crime, and preserve order. However, in practice this has rarely been the case in countries around the world. Instead, cases abound where police have failed to complete their duties, and instead not only bring harm to their communities through brutalising and terrorising their residents through beatings and sexual assault, continuously place business interests above the common people's, and preserving property instead of lives among others. 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.
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.
I start by quoting the original post because I want to know what your sources are on the first lines. I know from personal experience that police in my area are extremely successful. Granted sometimes they can be overused like someone from Victoria going into a Queensland clinic despite Victoria being on lockdown so they get fined and sent back without treatment. But that is the law, police don't make the law all they do is enforce it, we should change the law, not punish those who work for it.
About what you said regarding rehabilitation; the objective of most prisons is to rehabilitate prisoners, if you mean to rehabilitate them without police first detaining them then you'd have a very hard time with that because most criminals likely won't just stop what they're doing because someone says "stop so we can rehabilitate you".
Decriminalising non-violent crimes is very vague, theft isn't 'violent' until the owner refuses to comply with the criminal. Driving intoxicated isn't violent until they hit someone and they die, same for when someone drives too fast. Granted there are many crimes that are really silly and don't need to exist, but target them individually.
People with good mental health can be criminals, some of history's most notorious criminals were very mentally stable and organised, greed can make someone appear very 'unstable'.
Housing and Education is a strange focus considering even with both of those things people can be criminals, there are many college educated criminals who have a nice home and a 'happy' life, they just want something more and are willing to go further to have it.
The purpose of police was to make people feel less that they have to sleep with one eye open and a knife under their pillow, and so far they've done a good job at that. Think to yourself what is stopping you from killing that one person that you're in a room alone with and is annoying you so much that you'd like to stab them? If you're worried about self-defense then that's understandable, but what about in a nation like the U.S. where people have guns, and a lot of them, what's to stop you from just pulling yours and shooting that annoyance on the spot and running off? No one else, except their relatives, would likely try to hunt you down and even then how would they know it was you? They wouldn't have evidence to pull, maybe a camera but no fingerprints or DNA or whatever the police look for, it'd be the purge.
I felt I needed to edit this in here; I've seen many people say to abolish drug and alcohol restrictions so I will add my opinion. The biggest reason for drug laws and alcohol restrictions is because of irresponsible usage in public, the government doesn't have to care what you do at home or how you want to slowly die to a colourful figment of your imagination, they just need to care about what you can do to other people. When people overindulge themselves in alcohol or drugs to the point that they lack all focus or judgement, who's to say they don't get behind the wheel of a car and drive that 3+ tonne missile into a population centre and hurt people. That is the concern of governments, I am surprised I don't see more people mention that especially when people say they want to abolish intoxicated driving laws which would only put more people in danger. However when government restrict other things like tobacco to a certain age when it has no real intoxication effect, that is because they want to prevent children from getting deformities or tumours or something else malignant. People should think less selfishly about laws like that and realise not everyone is a responsible drinker or drug-doer.
I am sincerely sorry if I offend anyone as it is not my intention to.
