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[return to "How much do we need the police?"]
1. Burnin+uc[view] [source] 2020-06-03 23:13:41
>>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]

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2. torb-x+yX[view] [source] 2020-06-04 05:57:02
>>Burnin+uc
Anyone I've talked with that believed in abolishing police understood that it would need to be replaced by some kind of other institution. Suddenly removing the police like that is therefore not a valid way to consider the abolishment of police in general.

I'm a bit surprised by someone who's familiar with an anarchist theory to be this naive about this stuff.

Today in Rojava (society in Syria based in part on anarchist principles) they are replacing the police with alternative institutions.

You can read more about it here: http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...

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3. hef198+ul1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 09:43:00
>>torb-x+yX
It is worth noting so, that of all western style democracies only the US has the kind of problems with police violence. Not saying other countries don't have police violence, but not even close to the degree the US has.

So instead of looking at alternative societies in Syria, how about looking at European countries and the way they are policing? Or Canada?

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4. oblio+ip1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 10:24:37
>>hef198+ul1
No, the US is too special for that.
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