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]
The issue isn’t even just “crime” in the sense of robbery, etc. When there is no police, organized crime can take over. When we lived in Bangladesh in the 1980s, a minibus full of criminals showed up at the gate of our house. (This being Dhaka in the 1980s, we had a brick wall around the whole house with broken glass on top and a big metal gate, and an armed guard out front.) I don’t know if it was because my dad hadn’t bribed the right people or what, but it took police an hour or more to respond, during which time the criminals tried to drive through our gate.
(I don’t actually disagree with the thrust of the article, which is more that we need to rethink the roles where we have police. I’m just sharing this because I’ve seen a lot of “defund the police” in my Facebook, and I strongly suspect it’s from people who have never lived somewhere without effective policing.)
Just a heads up that "defund the police" isn't actually that different from "we need to rethink the roles where we have police"
They will, for example, say they cannot investigate the rape of a white woman, supposedly because lack of funds. But they will have plenty of funds to harass poor and non-white people for maybe smoking pot, but mostly for being poor and/or non-white.
We can see it right now, in that they teargas, shoot with rubber bullets, beat and arrest completely peaceful protesters and people just on their own porches but do nothing about looters. It is obvious why: looting makes protestors look bad (especially if news coverage cooperates with the police's narrative), makes people scared and proves that police are necessary.
Of course, the mafia can also provide safety if you obey them and pay them. Might even be a better deal for some populations than the current police.
If you want police that work for the population and are not an occupation force extracting tribute through use of force, you need to do more than reduce their budget. You need to punish the offenders (jail, not layoffs) and replace the people in charge (their union bosses and informal leaders, not just the nominal chief of police who might have little actual power).
And some of those completely peaceful protests have still met tear gas, and/or pepper spray. For example, see the protest in DC that was peaceful and broken up before curfew.
Is your assertion that nationwide, over 9 days, there hasn't been any peaceful protests?
The media focuses on violence and crime, because that's what media does — "if it bleeds, it ledes" — but that violence/property damage/theft has not been connected to the large Cap Hill/downtown protests for most of the week.
Your claim of "dozens of cars burning in the street" is, as far as I know, completely unfounded. As is "busting through every retailer's window and looting stores until they were bare." There isn't all that much retail downtown — do you mean Westlake?
There was some looting and some police cars burned on the first weekend, but it is important to understand (1) that these actions do not reflect the majority of protesters and (2) the history of violence perpetrated by SPD against citizens and especially citizens of color.
It is also important to understand that the SPD has responded to peaceful protest with violence every evening, through at least June 2. (I have not yet caught up with last night's protests.)