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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. PeterS+p21[view] [source] 2020-06-04 06:44:25
>>Burnin+uc
That is so weird. I can remember several police strikes here in Belgium, and none of that sort of thing happened.

The latest police strike announcement was for April (12th to 19th) this year, and was over the lack of PPE for field work. The strike was cancelled as PPE was made available before the strike date.

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3. lexpar+GW1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 14:21:08
>>PeterS+p21
It's important to understand that this was already a very violent time in Montreal. Separatist terrorists were running rampant, and had a non-zero degree of public support.
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