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6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World

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Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody's Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World

Tons of hyperlinks in the source article. And an interview with the author here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgbbCW9s6uo&spfreload=10

After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth.

But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:

1. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams


Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns – so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found success through peace rather than war.

2. The decriminalization of almost every crime


What is considered criminal is something too often debated only in critical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Violent offenses count for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrests every year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to put a person in chains and a cage. Decriminalization doesn't work on its own: The cannabis trade that used to employ poor Blacks, Latinos, indigenous and poor whites in its distribution is now starting to be monopolized by already-rich landowners. That means that wide-scale decriminalization will need to come with economic programs and community projects. To quote investigative journalist Christian Parenti's remarks on criminal justice reform in his book Lockdown America, what we really need most of all is "less."


3. Restorative Justice


Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these models represent an alternative to courts and jails. From hippie communes to the IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S. cities like Philadelphia's experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the process. It has also been used uninterrupted by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities like San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia for centuries, and it remains perhaps the most widespread and far-reaching of the alternatives to the adversarial court system.

4. Direct democracy at the community level


Reducing crime is not about social control. It's not about cops, and it's not a bait-and-switch with another callous institution. It's giving people a sense of purpose. Communities that have tools to engage with each other about problems and disputes don't have to consider what to do after anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place. A more healthy political culture where people feel more involved is a powerful building block to a less violent world.

5. Community patrols 


This one is a wildcard. Community patrols can have dangerous racial overtones, from pogroms to the KKK to George Zimmerman. But they can also be an option that replaces police with affected community members when police are very obviously the criminals. In Mexico, where one of the world's most corrupt police forces only has credibility as a criminal syndicate, there have been armed groups of Policia Comunitaria and Autodefensas organized by local residents for self-defense from narcotraffickers, femicide and police. Obviously these could become police themselves and then be subject to the same abuses, but as a temporary solution they have been making a real impact. Power corrupts, but perhaps in Mexico, withering power won't have enough time to corrupt.

6. Here's a crazy one: mental health care


In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed up the last trauma clinics in some of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. In New York, Rikers Island jails as many people with mental illnesses "as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined," which is reportedly 40% of the people jailed at Rikers. We have created a tremendous amount of mental illness, and in the real debt and austerity dystopia we're living in, we have refused to treat each other for our physical and mental wounds. Mental health has often been a trapdoor for other forms of institutionalized social control as bad as any prison, but shifting toward preventative, supportive and independent living care can help keep those most impacted from ending up in handcuffs or dead on the street.
 

potam

Banned
This reminds me of some bullshit anarchy pamphlet a hippie handed me in school. It basically boiled down to, "Get rid of governments and police, and you'll instantly have global harmony!"
 

Hex

Banned
This is the most asinine thing that I have read all day.
This cop thing sucks, it does not make the fact that humans prey on each other magically go away and the fact that humans find it in their nature to do stupid things.
 
Wait, I think I've seen this before.

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It's interesting that #2 - Decriminalizing almost everything, and #3 - communal justice, exist in the same article and are next to each other, because the applied result of these two things together almost always results in a communal criminalization of almost everything, and "justice" being applied by vigilantes.

#6 is obviously a good idea, but #6 is thrown in there as the olive branch... the only normal idea that most people agree with, and the only idea that can be implemented with the existing justice system that we have.
 

Tugatrix

Member
There is some validity in some of the ideas, but crime will never go away and we will always need cops. About the number 2 all of them? really? It my have worked on Drugs in Portugal why would it work on a different context or crime?
 

Kallor

Member
7. Live in a perfect world full of sunshine and flowers, bunnies and rainbows.

This list could have worked if there were only ten people in the world.

Number 6 would do worlds of good though.
 

JeTmAn81

Member
All the people who want a cop-free world can go live somewhere together and the rest of us will stick with law enforcement.
 
This is the single dumbest thing I may have ever read. Like I lost IQ points reading it. We are all dumber for having read it.
 

Zaptruder

Banned
I wouldn't go so far as to insist on a 'cop free world'...

But the optimal state of a criminal justice system is simply reducing the rate at which crime occurs, and not maximal response to crimes that are occurring.

To that end, it's optimal to impose just enough penalty so as to provide rational people with sufficient disincentives to commit crimes, that they aren't incentivized to commit crimes.

And for those that aren't wholly (or even very) rational, the optimal course of action is to take alternative vectors to help reduce the other factors that contribute to criminality, including but not limited to reduction in prison population and decriminalizing lesser crimes so as to provide better pro-social community influences for people most at risk of criminality.

The optimal degree of penalty needn't be a stiff penalty either; it simply needs to be high enough and *certain* enough so as to prevent action in that direction.
 
I think a lot of things can be decriminalized (#2). I'm in favor of drug use being decriminalized. America's prisons are filled with non-violent offenders

Ah, but #2 doesn't say "sensible decriminalization." It says "decriminalize almost everything."

Not the same thing :p
 

Jonm1010

Banned
It's like there is a semblance of good ideas in each of those bullet points.....but then they go off the deep end with it.

Like, there is a good argument to be made about decriminalizimg certain offenses, namely drug offenses and there is value in investigating some of the non-violent community interventionist ideas. That sort of community involved patrolling has shown promise from what I read.

But they take some good ideas and warp them into a argument for basically pure anarchy and best-case-scenario assumptions about human nature.
 

Lautaro

Member
Here's a crazy idea: why not fix the cops instead?

This maybe sound like fantasy but there are some countries where the police is a respected and appreciated tool of society.
 
It reads like a thesis that didn't have enough to argue, so the thesis changed halfway through. I don't think providing proper mental health care is an alternative to having police. And some of that is just insanely anecdotal. I'm glad that some tribe in the wilderness uses communal justice, but that probably doesn't extrapolate well to a first world nation of 330 million people.

Ah, but #2 doesn't say "sensible decriminalization." It says "decriminalize almost everything."

Not the same thing :p

It's weird how it was "decriminalize almost everything" and focused on pot use.
 

Fracas

#fuckonami
I understand the very real problem in the United States' police system but I feel you can't just get rid of it. Fix it, don't throw it away.
 
All would nonetheless require an institution to supervise and govern the measures suggested. They would also probably be more effective if used in cooperation with a, small though it may be, police presence.
 
Martial law. Checkpoints. Capital punishment. Army terror squads to keep the proles in their holes.

Who's with me? Nobody? Good.

I stand by the notion that requiring college degrees for police officers who don't have a previous military rank of, i don't know, E-3 or higher is a good start.
 
I'm glad that some tribe in the wilderness uses communal justice, but that probably doesn't extrapolate well to a first world nation of 330 million people.

That have guns. And Meth. And huge knives. And cars to run you over with. And chainsaws. And the millions of other things people can fuck each other up with.

How on earth did someones mind actually come up with this and think its a logical conclusion?
 
I fully support #2...I really like my neighbors car....and there is so many people in this world that need to be hit with a sledge hammer. Example if you just spent 15 min in line at a fast food restaurant and you wait till its your turn to start studying the menu and trying to decide....WHAM! sledgehammer.
 

Derwind

Member
#6 is legit.

#7. Do away with institutionally racist policies in every level of the justice system.

I think a lot of things can be decriminalized (#2). I'm in favor of drug use being decriminalized. America's prisons are filled with non-violent offenders

Yeah, ending the war on drugs makes sense but decriminalizing every offense really doesn't make much sense.
 

jackdoe

Member
#4 and #6 are the only ideas that aren't bat shit insane but they have absolutely nothing to do with removing cops from society. #5 is probably the most insane idea of the bunch.
 

Crayons

Banned
Wouldn't matter anywhere seeing as how decriminalising drugs isn't even sensible.

How isn't it sensible? The war on drugs is a huge failure. How about instead of locking up people for doing drugs, we funnel that money into rehabilitation instead?
 
Martial law. Checkpoints. Capital punishment. Army terror squads to keep the proles in their holes.

Who's with me? Nobody? Good.

I stand by the notion that requiring college degrees for police officers who don't have a previous military rank of, i don't know, E-3 or higher is a good start.

The problem with that is the cost of college in the US. Nobody would take a cop's salary if it meant shelling out 40k+ for a degree first.
 

Ray Wonder

Founder of the Wounded Tagless Children
I think a lot of things can be decriminalized (#2). I'm in favor of drug use being decriminalized. America's prisons are filled with non-violent offenders

I'm not, I have a family member that was incarcerated for doing drugs. Now they're clean. They have to stay clean for the next 6 years or they go back. I'm in favor of that.
 
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