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
It was a natural experiment in what happens without police when the city is in the midst of an extreme wave of crime and violent protest, and one of the protests turns into a riot while the police were on strike.

The idea that this incident demonstrates that any city will go up in flames immediately if the police take the day off is a misreading this specific moment in history.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot

That's not to dispute the idea that cities will generally retain order if police are absent. I imagine it varies wildly from one time and place to another.

>>markc+Hx
But here we are in the middle of ongoing riots discussing the role of the police. Maybe the comparison is not so inappropriate after all.

>>cheese+n11
Then maybe the fact that the riots have been caused by the police in the first place should be considered too.

>>Netcob+pp1
The triggering cause was the act of one policeman and his three colleagues who stood by (which might indicate the constriction was perhaps a kind of standard procedure that went wrong - or not. Personally I am waiting for an official verdict). That's not "the police". If you say that's "the police", you can also say "that's black people" if a black person murders somebody.

In any case, there is no excuse for riots.

>>cheese+BJ1
Hmm, I've seen current USA riot footage where the police seemingly got spooked (by an umbrella), and proceeded to gas a couple of hundred peaceful protestors.

Some riots and current outbreaks have certainly been caused by police.

In other incidents riot police have been filmed purposefully and willfully attacking already subdued members of the public; looking around first to check for observers of course! One of the cases the policeman put a weapon in the have of a subdued arrestee as a precursor to beating them.

These sorts of actions inflame the public and cause ongoing rioting.

It's been interesting witnessing quite measured, in relative terms, vigilante justice against some rioters too.