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.
> 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.
The hole can also get filled in unexpected ways. This past weekend during the riots and looting, when the police in Chicago were stretched too thin, some people were happy the local gangs were protecting them from the looters.
Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?
It doesn’t scale.
I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence done by the police (and you could argue that it'd risk increasing it, in fact - George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch leader, not a cop). But it would straightforwardly eliminate a host of excesses from militarized equipment and training to asset forfeiture to the blue wall to qualified immunity to even (relatively) minor things like quotas.
(And to be clear, I'm not saying that "arm the populace and set up civilian watches" is a complete or good replacement for the police - I'm just saying it seems like the minimal possible step to take if you're carving the police out of a society that evolved around having police. If you don't even take that step, the results of a "natural experiment" of a day without police aren't meaningful. But it's not an actual policy proposal; a serious attempt at getting rid of the police would in fact want to be careful about making an even less-accountable shadow police.)
I'm not saying that Trump supporters should not be able to, but the anti-police crowd seem to not think far enough ahead to realize that taking power away from police and giving it to the people means giving it to people that they see as political and ideological enemies as well.
Edit: would someone like to dispute this instead of just downvoting? I'm trying to discuss in good faith; this seems to be a real problem with the idea of arming the populace: inevitably there will be citizens who have different ideas on self-policing their community. Would we only allow people with socially acceptable ideologies to have arms?
Isn't this what the administration of virtually every major city have been working for decades to create? So this is an experiment that matches current conditions. Somehow I don't see most folks arguing that we don't really need police also being for unrestricted firearms ownership and repeal of the myriad of barriers that exist between the law abiding citizen and gun ownership right now. So maybe start with that if you want less police?
http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...
So the civilian watch would effectively only have lethal force to stop a threat then? All of those things have a purpose. Armored vehicles for example are most often used to approach armed suspects who have holed themselves up in a defensive position without risking seat or police lives. Stingrays are used to track gang, cartel, weapons dealing, and terrorist activities.
You could argue that only federal entities should have that power, but then the FBI/DEA/ATF would inevitably fill the power vacuum and take over a lot of roles that would otherwise be done by police. The alternative of course if that we simply don't use Stingrays, armored vehicles, riot shields and rubber bullets, but then a lot of crime would go unpunished either from lack of information gathering or simply from fear of death (for example, a civilian with just a gun would have a much higher chance of death trying to free a child from an armed abductor that a swat team with armored vehicles, bulletproof shields, etc.)
Imagine an armed and dangerous HOA, functioning as its own "community policy force."
What fresh hell is this?
Obtaining arms should be, for every single adult, as quick, easy, convenient, and cheap as obtaining a blog.
Many, many of us have been saying that for hundreds of years.
You just described the situation today, both inside, and outside, of the police.
Many (naturally, well-armed) police are both Trump supporters, and racists.
Many Trump supporters, and racists, are extremely well-armed in the USA.
That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of disagreement is really narrow on this issue.
Yet they are not bestowed with the power of self-policing, and are still subject to a higher authority which regulates what is and isn't acceptable defense of self or property. Who would regulate their behavior? Instead of a small subset of racists having power, you would have ALL racists having power. I think they would love to have the ability to police their own communities without having to go through the trouble of becoming a police officer. There would be George Zimmerman to type situations happening every other day since they know police are not coming. Last year 9 black and 19 white unarmed people were shot by police out of a population of 328 million people. Any number may be unacceptable, but that number would certainly be orders of magnitude higher if untrained citizens who do not have the protocols that police must follow are given the power to self-police.
Yes, there are often police who do not follow the regulations on how to interact with suspects, but I believe it is better to have guidelines which are sometimes broken than none at all.
edit: changed vigilantes to mercenaries for consistency
A pamphlet might be typeset in an hour by the unskilled printer's apprentice.
Have you ever lived in a country where people don’t have weapons? It is like night and day really - I never heard of a shooting in my neighborhood, and when Police shoots someone unarmed by accident, it is nationwide news (in a nation of 40M, I remember one situation happening a few years back).
edit: I found some stats for my country. Every year, for 40M population Poland: 125 uses of guns by Police (warning shots etc), around 25 times shot towards a person, 1-2 people killed.
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)
Also Trump supporters don't equal Pro 2A. Most of my USA based colleagues are Pro 2A, including the Biden supporters, and most are not Trump fans.
Also most people that I know with gun permits in my country (extremely rare) are more knowledgeable on laws than most policemen; same for gun training, we do train policemen in the range and we see that.
In a neighborhood where people are armed there is no need to patrol on the streets. Guess what is the place around the gun range that is never robbed? The gun range. People don't take risks, they pick the easy targets, gun-free zones are perfect targets for people that ignore the laws.
This is the kind of behavior that I expect to see widely across America if we rely on random citizens to patrol instead of police. He was told by 911 to stay in his car, but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".
I'd say it's a toss-up if I absolutely had to guess.
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-...
Police in the US are professionally credentialed faster than a master plumber. After less training, less testing, and less oversight, they're handed lethal discretion and informal qualified immunity latitude, in less time than it takes for someone to hang a shingle out as a one-man plumbing business.
The same solutions will not be applied universally across the US because the challenges are very different for different communities. Many Black communities that are asking for community policing will benefit; doing community policing in white spaces is not guaranteed to make them any safer for Black people, but I don't know if that's being called for. And honesty I'm not sure it makes them less safe, either, when you look at what happened to Treyvom Martin and Ahmed Aubrey's cases (and all the others that do not get media attention).
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...
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.
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.
I know for a fact that the police in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Balkan countries is extremely shitty. You do not need an armed police in order for them to be violent.
The wikipedia article says that he was injured and that he got into a conflict with him before shooting. He claims that this was while he was returning to his car and he was attacked by him. If this is true I see no misconduct by him.
We literally cannot remove the police without a collapse of the state and consequently the rest of our civilization, and if you think for even one moment about how that would play out it would be apparent: everything fractures into private armies with no incentive to uphold democratic rule of law; the most powerful private armies become de facto states and their ruler a law unto himself--effectively a king. Obviously modern society can't survive under these conditions--no one can trust rule of law which absolutely underpins our economy. So congratulations, you've rediscovered the dark ages and doomed hundreds of millions to deaths from violence, illness, and starvation. :)
Not many enough, apparently. There are many cities where it's literally impossible to own a handgun legally unless you are connected to either law enforcement or one of the political mafias. There are even more places where it's possible but has so many idiotic limitations that the intent is clearly to discourage all but the most determined and evade lawsuits by pointing "yes, you need a form that can be only found in a disused closet behind the door saying 'Beware of the leopard!' - but the form is there, your honor, so no undue burden for firearm ownership!"
And the funniest thing that all these things happen in exactly the same places where they talk about not needing the police anymore.