zlacker

>>js2+(OP)
Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police.

Steven Pinker describes how that went:

> "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."[16]

>>Burnin+uc
I’m not convinced that eliminating police altogether is a good idea, but after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot (which cites your Stephen Pinker quote), I don’t think that a situation which also involved “taxi drivers... armed with Molotov cocktails” is representative of what might happen if police departments were disbanded under other circumstances.

(Edit: I regret putting snark over substance in this reply. See my response below, and others’ in this subthread, for a more detailed rebuttal.)

>>wolfga+Zg
" I don’t think that a situation which also involved “taxi drivers... armed with Molotov cocktails” is representative of what might happen if police departments were disbanded under other circumstances"

Why not?

>>kyleee+tq
From the sounds of it, tensions were already running high in the city (and the police felt that they weren’t getting paid enough to deal with it); on top of that the police had incentive to time their strike to happen at the worst possible moment. They were also joined in their protest by other groups inclined towards violence, and had reason to encourage those groups (in order to show that they were needed). The reason all of the quoted incidents happened at once is because a lot of different groups were handed an opportunity on a silver platter by a group who had it in their best interests to see a lot of violence break out.

This is a very different scenario from a controlled, scheduled spindown of a department by the city government.