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
you are intentionally diminishing the issues at hand. the police, yes "the police", have increasingly been militarized, abuse their power, and seen a general lack of repercussions when they do something wrong, even heinous crimes. this is systemic. whether you think that this was "just" a bad egg with three other bad eggs standing around or not, which in itself requires jumping through hoops, these issues are well discussed and documented and are systemic.

now, couple that with systemic issues of rascim throughout all of american society, of which the police are part of, you have a terrible mix of rascism, power, lack of worry of consequences, and a general bad attitude of their role in society in "the police". that leaves the general public at risk and people of color at a substantially greater risk.

the point is that this isn't just a one off case. it happens time and time again. i have seen video after video of it, and that's just the ones captured on film! (still don't face any consequences.) i have seen a video of a black emt who had a patient inside pulled over and choked by a police officer because the police officer felt he hadn't yielded properly to his lights even though the call he was on was obviously less important than choking an emt with a patient. there's just countless other videos and documented cases.

so please, take your false rhetoric elsewhere. these are actual problems. if you think it's just a couple bad eggs, then think about what happens when there's bad eggs spread throughout the country. that's what systemic issues are.

riots and particularly looting are not great. but consider what they generally represent. they represent pent up anger of those at the bottom who feel they don't have any other recourse. some do indeed want to incite violence, but that doesn't invalidate the huge line of events that got us here. i would also ask that you view the police as an active participant in the rioting. i have seen video of police actively destroying property without a protester in site. the media is also a participant because we cannot trust what they report as truth.