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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. geofft+DJ[view] [source] 2020-06-04 03:51:24
>>Burnin+uc
But that's a terrible experiment! For one, you're in a situation where the only people with serious weapons are criminals and police (because non-criminals could generally trust the police to handle violence for them). You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches, you haven't done any of the things that would happen in a society actually set up to be sustainably police-free. You took a society that assumed the existence of the police for its stability and then removed them, of course it fell apart.

Apart from violence, there's another big thing that probably went missing, too - authorization for certain people to enter private property for reasons of the general good. The reason we call the police for welfare checks, for better or worse, is that nobody else has the right to enter your house. A doctor might be better suited to responding to someone undergoing a mental health crisis, but they can't break in. Similarly, you see stories of "police rescue deer from rooftop" or whatever because nobody else is authorized to climb onto random rooftops. If a society wants to get rid of the police, it needs to designate some other group to handle this use case. It can't simply get rid of the police.

A "natural experiment" of a world without police is quite unnatural: it's a world built up around the police with a sudden police-shaped gap in the middle.

To pick an analogy that should make sense to folks here, it's like shutting down your datacenter for 16 hours, suffering serious outages, and then concluding that your company absolutely needs its datacenter. Well, yes, it does today, but that's not what the people saying you should look at public cloud are advocating.

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3. virgil+oh1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 08:58:19
>>geofft+DJ
> You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches, you haven't done any of the things that would happen in a society actually set up to be sustainably police-free

It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone".

People are often irresponsible, irrational, intoxicated, etc. Making lethal force easily available to everyone won't solve your safety issues - will only make them worse. I think a big reason why cops are so violent in the US is that they need to be - any bum can have a gun and might kill them; that's not a concern for people in Europe, so police can be slightly more relaxed when dealing with a minority that is known to have above-average stats for criminals & general violence (e.g. gypsy here; yes, they may face many discrimination issues that black people face in US, but nobody shoots them just because they have the wrong skin color)

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4. Capric+hn1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 10:02:26
>>virgil+oh1
>>>It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone".

We've had by far the greatest firearms proliferation in the Western world for centuries. In the 1920's you could buy fully automatic Thompson sub-machineguns from a mail-in catalog. ( http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/web/coltguns.htm ) Yet school shootings are a relatively recent (~30 years) phenomenon. Over that same 30-year period we've also had an increase in single-parent households as well as an increase in SSRI drug prescriptions. There doesn't seem to be anywhere near the willingness to attack those social issues or investigate their impacts on murderous outbursts.

Firearms proliferation seems to work well for Kennesaw, Georgia. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/06/us/kennesaw-georgia-gun-o...

But the data for everywhere else is a mixed bag: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-...

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5. virgil+lA1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 11:59:28
>>Capric+hn1
There's also the fact that school proliferation itself is a relatively recent (~80-100 years) phenomenon; and after that there was a world war, and after said war maybe not everybody could afford to/ had a priority to buy guns ("greatest proliferation in the Western world" does not necessarily equal "proliferation at the same levels as today"). Last by not least, maybe the other factors you mentioned would still result in less shootings if there weren't guns widely available everywhere?
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6. taborj+MP1[view] [source] 2020-06-04 13:42:50
>>virgil+lA1
But time and again we've seen violent crimes rise after enacting gun control, most recently in New Zealand[0] (this particular report focuses on gun crimes, which are on the rise after gun control has been enacted, but it's by no means a problem isolated to gun crime).

It all indicates the problem isn't the gun, it's the person. And taking their gun away doesn't take away their problems. I find it odd that the current climate of acceptance and a desire to help others can so staunchly ignore mental health issues.

[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/416881/rates-of-gun-crim...

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7. virgil+Dc2[view] [source] 2020-06-04 15:23:39
>>taborj+MP1
> It all indicates the problem isn't the gun, it's the person.

Really? How did the persons become worse because of the gun control laws? Because that's what your message implies, that said rise in violent crimes is related to enacting gun control.

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8. depend+8g2[view] [source] 2020-06-04 15:38:37
>>virgil+Dc2
> How did the persons become worse because of the gun control laws? Because that's what your message implies

No, it doesn't.

> that said rise in violent crimes is related to enacting gun control

The person did not become worse but rather found the chance to attack someone who could not defend themselves because they did not have a gun.

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