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).
Prioritize rape/violence/home invasion, deprioritize protests/drugs/etc., and as you say punish offenders.
This is obvious.
>deprioritize protests/drugs/etc
Yeah, already done that. And it's miserable. My parents came to visit (from the midwest and right before the pandemic) and were absolutely appalled at seeing needles on the street when we went out to dinner. I don't blame them, really. I blame the people who pretend that shrugging at enforcing drug laws is some sort of "justice". It's not, it's political nihilism. And we've run this test 1000 times at this point across the country. Some will say that "it's not that bad", and to them I say "yeah ... I've been in worse places around the world too". Which is a snide way of saying that I'm really annoyed that people are okay with third world standards of living in the USA because they have this inverted sense of "justice".
Still, I never once considered rounding up all the drinkers, sending them to jail, then disallowing them from ever participating in most of society for the rest of their lives. That's without even considering all the collateral damage, and people hassled for no reason. Worst of all IMO, is a classic critique that dates back to prohibition: Prohibition laws breed contempt for law and order. Peaceful citizens become criminals. Cops become fascists, rounding people up for no reason.
So, I'd say it's pretty reasonable to want to try something else. I'm unconvinced that there's no other option, or middle ground to deal with externalities. I also don't think you're being oppressed, or "living like you're in a third world country", because you sometimes see what's really going on in your city. Perhaps your efforts would be better spent on an anti-littering campaign.
As if that's what we're doing. "Yikes bro", maybe stop straw manning everything I said into some kind of crypto fascist fantasy? Maybe consider that not being able to have your elderly parents take the subway when they visit - because of risk of violence, or you just don't want them around open injection drug use - is a sign that what we're doing isn't working? We've been trying the decriminalization route for a decade at least. Do you actually think this is "success"? Or has real decriminalization never been tried?
> because you sometimes see what's really going on in your city.
And this is the nihilism. Thinking this is normal.
Is criminalizing all drug users the answer though? We have 50 years or so of results there that show that has serious issues as well. Why are we willing to spend 30-40 thousand a year on imprisoning folks at a rate that no other country even comes close to, but not try spending similar amounts of money on actual rehabilitation and welfare programs for the addicted and mentally ill?
It seems worth a shot to me...
I am not advocating this though. I don't see anyone else in this thread advocating this either. I'm merely asking that we at least stop doing the insane thing of just ignoring it and letting people shoot up on the sidewalk or at the bus stop. I'm all for some creative solutions to this, fine, but the only thing that seems to gain traction today is "what we're already doing, but louder".