The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Like, I really do think these ideas work for a town small enough that it essentially is one community, albeit with some problems if like, anyone outside the town gets embroiled in the system.
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6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World
- Thread starter kame-sennin
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Like, I really do think these ideas work for a town small enough that it essentially is one community, albeit with some problems if like, anyone outside the town gets embroiled in the system.
But that's kind of the point. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in an anarchist society we'd all live smaller, slightly more directly-connected lives. Anarchist systems don't work in a "modern" society because the society they do work in would be radically different.
To a degree, I think there's some benefit to that. I don't care too much for coffee chains, and I'm not sure it's so necessary that we get oranges in winter. On the other hand, I like air travel and (I think it'd be fair to say) the NHS (which benefits from an economy of scale).
So your thesis is the only thing stopping people from ripping each other's heads off is the threat of punishment from the state? It's a scary world in which you live.
kame-sennin
Member
So back to the political era of policing?
All of the ideas are bad with the exception of #6. A certain version of them could work in conjunction with the police.
captmorgan
Banned
Even sports need refs to stop people from ripping each other heads off.
kame-sennin
Member
What percentage of crime is drug related?
What percentage of crime is poverty related?
What percentage of crime is mental health related?
When you reduce or remove these factors, how much crime do you have left?
The state not only has failed to solve any of these problems, it has made them all worse. One has to ask if our society is really safer than it would be without state intervention.
What percentage of crime is poverty related?
What percentage of crime is mental health related?
When you reduce or remove these factors, how much crime do you have left?
The state not only has failed to solve any of these problems, it has made them all worse. One has to ask if our society is really safer than it would be without state intervention.
You have the crime that comes from people being selfish assholes with an unlimited appetite of desire.
That is a lot of crime. And just about 100% of sexual assault.
None of that requires a prison.
Is it not at all possible to have a police service that operates alongside liberal (de-legalised) drug policies, socialist economic policies that alleviate and reduce poverty, and effective mental health services?
I think you're right in that the volume of state-backed police operations could be greatly reduced. However, if a police force is "simply" defined as a respected authority that upholds a system of justice within a community then I don't think you're ever going to have any society without that authority - a lot of the original article implicitly assumes that any police force is state-backed.
-Pyromaniac-
Member
We should just have an annual thing like The Purge. 364 days of peace, 1 day of war.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. Do you believe in any kind of morality?
captmorgan
Banned
Sure but morality is like will power. You can eat clean %90 of the time but every once in awhile you want a cheat meal. You can be a saint 99% of the time but every once in awhile you want to hit someone with a hammer.
Now in this reality without cops/laws do I believe everyone will go on a killing rampage every minute of everyday no. Do I believe when someone is having a really bad day that they will decide to run over a group of bikers, yes.
Also without cops/laws what is stopping some communities from using and dumping lead, arsenic, asbestos, mercury? Or even bothering to treat their waste before sending it down stream to the next community?
I think most of these are framed terribly, 6 is just a good idea all around but all of the other 5 have valuable elements to be used as part of a total strategy. I think it's absolutely true that we should be constantly considering what needs to be illegal but that the way the article frames these ideas is insane.
Stopped reading at this part.
Who said anything about getting rid of investigators? Lots of countries have investigators that aren't "cops" because they aren't armed and can't make arrests. They just investigate.
You both seem to think that criminals are basically demons. Some are, but not all. Obviously you do a background check, and if the teenager is a gang member or has a history of extreme violence you call the real cops.
And you are pretending the average person is much worse than they are. Are you a cop, by any chance?
This is a much better criticism. I don't have a good answer to it. But I think that in any working system, these people would be government employees or at least organized by the government, not by undemocratic committees or corporations. And, I think that you'd be surprised at the number of people that care about where they live, even in the worst places, and would gladly put themselves in danger to protect it.
captmorgan
Banned
I guess philosophers are going to debate the truth of human nature until the end of time.
As mentioned upthread, there is the implicit suggestion in this list that our current system of government and economy must be dismantled in order for this new cop-free reality. If the State continues to exist, there must be some mechanism for the State to exert its will. What can that be, in absence of a police force? The military maybe, but that's not what I'd call an improved situation. It's a weird hypothetical situation that requires consideration of a lot of stuff beyond the police force.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
So...should we just be trying to connect the police with their communities more? Because I'm all for that
But I do think there's a tricky balance to be struck. Because then you risk the other problem, of police being biased in favor of their communities (similar to how their biased in favor of each other now). Neither do you want situations where someone from "outside the community" is victimized from within it and receives improper attention.
unholyrevenger72
Banned
These can work IF and only IF they are used in conjunction with traditional police force...
captmorgan
Banned
It wouldnt even have to be an outsider, we have may examples of communities protecting their star foot ball player after rape charges. Now imagine that magnified. In communities people will protect who they like and punish people that dont conform to community standards.
What your gay? get the rope boys.
Okay, let's say that our hypothetical community has a gang problem as well. Let's say that this gang is very influential and powerful, and can force the larger community to do or not do certain things.
What incentive is there for this unarmed man in normal clothes to confront this gang, and why would any member of the gang listen to him?
This is not just an imaginary scenario, as there are obvious cases of such power dynamics going on within smaller, more communal milieus both in the present and in the past. If this asymmetricality of power is to be taken as inevitable – which I admit is arguable – then I would prefer that a somewhat standardised entity of power exist instead of the alternative.
I feel like this article doesn't understand how much little work cops do.
Whose going to watch our traffic laws to see if 12 years aren't driving. What if I want to sleep but the neighbor is playing loud music, I walk over to his/her house and they are drunk. They won't listen to me and hit me. What if a husband is beating his wife for cheating on him, says he wants to kill her, do we detain him(somehow without weapons) and put him in jail? Do the patrols have that power? If they do how are they not cops. Who watches the jail and would they also be unarmed?
Also how is manslaughter handled? If I have a habit of drunk driving(many people do) and kill someone who is going to keep me under control.
Whose going to watch our traffic laws to see if 12 years aren't driving. What if I want to sleep but the neighbor is playing loud music, I walk over to his/her house and they are drunk. They won't listen to me and hit me. What if a husband is beating his wife for cheating on him, says he wants to kill her, do we detain him(somehow without weapons) and put him in jail? Do the patrols have that power? If they do how are they not cops. Who watches the jail and would they also be unarmed?
Also how is manslaughter handled? If I have a habit of drunk driving(many people do) and kill someone who is going to keep me under control.
Community policing seems very ripe for abuse. You'll have patrols led by folks like Arpaio kicking out brown people based on arbitrary local laws, with the full support of white neighbors. Majority versus minority conflicts will still exist.
Plus the whole article only talks about non-violent offenses. We'll still need the police infrastructure for murder and rape. Article is anarchist college freshmen wank.
BearFlexington
Member
You sir have a damn good point.
YoYo Switch
Banned
Waiting for this to show up on tumblr with hundreds of thousands of reblogs all exclaiming "THIS" "INSTANG REBLOG" "OMG YES" "SIGNAL BOOOOOOST"
fastford58
Member
Damned Onion got me again...oh wait.
No, I think it's different from just connecting the police to their communities. It's more about creating a new type of law enforcement that isn't based on naked power and dominance. I mean, look at Eric Garner. He was selling untaxed cigarettes, which, sure, you have to stop, but why do you need guns and submission holds to do it? Wouldn't an intermediate level of response be useful in a situation like that?
Obviously, there are many situations where you need real police. Nobody with a brain really wants a "police-free" world. This really was a terribly stupidly written article. It references lots of good ideas and then buried them under exaggeration and sensationalism.
Don't you understand, if there weren't any cops people wouldn't commit crimes. How can you be so stupid?
kame-sennin
Member
This thread is like mice trying to explain why they need cats.
jackissocool
Member
Why exactly are direct democracy and rehabilitative justice bad ideas? Or citizens getting involved in keeping their neighborhoods safe? Did people saying this is a bad list even glance at the numbers?
You seem to forget that all humans are bloodthirsty savages held in check by the police, which is the natural state of man - western capitalism backed by state power. This is the only way society has ever and will ever be.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Direct democracy is never more than a bad day away from being mob rule. Rehabilitative justice works insomuch as the recipient is actually interested in being rehabilitated. Citizens interested in keeping their neighbors safe is great; citizens forming possess because they're convinced that their neighbors are stealing from them is not.
This list would be amazing if we all lived in small communities filled with people we trust, but it totally ignores the reality of the world: humans are, at their core, unthinkingly selfish. Can we rise above that? Yes. Do we? Generally not. The current system exists to place checks on that unthinking behavior.
That's a terrible analogy.
Reminds me of HotFuzz where the village has the lowest crime rate of all the UK but also has the highest "accident" rate lol.
jackissocool
Member
Do you have any actual evidence for your sweeping claims about human nature? Or are you just repeating the empty words you've been taught to justify the current power structures? And if it is true your solution is to put the power in the hands of a few, who are certain to be the most selfish of all?
Chie Satonaka
Member
This is more of a fantasy than the list.
Poodlestrike
Banned
I dunno, direct observation? History?
The few are the most likely to be selfish, but the easiest to control. By setting up a system of checks and balances, you can ensure that no one person (or group of persons) gains enough power to dominate the others. It's less satisfying, but safer.
The purposefully mentioned former violent criminals taking part in such programs. This is one thing they should've linked or provided a citation. Aside from that, the idea of breaking off the responsibilities of the police to another group is ok but ultimately pointless. They are just police with a different name.
When it comes to violent crimes in progress someone needs to be trained to deal with it. That's why even in countries where the police aren't armed by default they have the option to arm themselves if the situation warrants it. There isn't anything inherently wrong using the UK model of the police force but they still would be police.
Actually there is a problem with how many laws exist we currently live in a society where everyone is a lawbreaker without even knowing about it. It would be nice to detangle the cluttered mess in our law books. The biggest barrier to this type of change though is that local governments use laws to help fund themselves. People usually aren't outraged enough over the various ticketing systems to see this trend being reversed.
This would be cool. The only problem I see is that it requires more diligence and participation from citizens. Considering how inept we collectively are at local politics this is a very difficult problem.
This has the same problem as #3 but I feel it would be less effective with urban areas.
This requires too much diligence and cooperation from the people. There are only a handful of people within every neighborhood who would have the motivation to keep this going. It really isn't much of a community project if the responsibilities are upheld by a specific minority in the social group.
This whole idea needs a rethink when it comes to scaling this among urban communities.
Yeah a lot of people have been advocating this before the article. There isn't much to be worried about with this one aside from the knuckleheads on this forum and in real life who don't give a damn about mental issues.
How about the history of civilization? There will always be a section of the population that doesn't give a shit about other people and will commit crimes against them. State police are a natural result of communities growing and needing a centralized structure that can take care of these assholes.
Poodlestrike
Banned
See, this I can agree with. Good steps.
superdeluxe
Member
6 is good, the rest is crap.
Someone got paid to write this didn't they?
Someone got paid to write this didn't they?
In their world there is no money. Only merit and exchange. For their work on this article they were given 157 kudos, a bunk bed, and 437,329 demerits.
jackissocool
Member
"History" is an empty bullshit statement lacking any critical thought whatsoever and you should, quite frankly, be ashamed to use it to justify your non-argument. If you actually examine history, you'll see that the vast majority of humanity's time on earth was spent in peaceful, egalitarian groups without official leadership. Based on the way humans naturally are, it's incredibly, blatantly, shockingly obvious that we aren't naturally violent, but cooperative and friendly. Only when the few selfish and fucked up individuals were allowed to accrue power did shit go bad. They used their power to exert force on others, increasing their wealth and making others poor and desperate. That desperation drove people to violence and what would eventually be considered crime. And even that has only ever been a minority of the oppressed and suffering, because people are generally nice. If you remove the structures that keep them oppressed, you can then begin to fix the issues that create crime and violence: poverty.
Poverty is not the natural state of man, and as it is the source of violence in almost all but the mentally ill, neither is selfish violence. This is shown to objectively be true if one simply looks at societies that are like all humans would have once lived. So our entire goal as a society should be to evenly distribute power and constantly work against those select few selfish people from fucking it up for the rest of us. Resigning to anything else is giving up and letting those power hungry people perpetuate the systems of poverty, violence, and crime that they then use to justify their power.
Policemen are also citizens. They are not some sort of opressive master species that needs to be separated from us poor innocent humans.
All this alternatives seem like a sorry excuse that would crash against reality and had to become a police force eventually.
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