zlacker

Why don’t we look at societies without police and contrast them to societies with police and tease out which have better outcomes?

>>throwa+(OP)
In some rural communities the police can be hours away, if there's even an officer on shift right now. Virtually everyone in those communities has guns and it works out pretty well.

>>Consul+K
Yes and many small message boards on the internet don’t require folks to hold a moderator role.

It doesn’t scale.

>>chesch+H1
There's a reason "roof Koreans" are a meme. They were successful in keeping their businesses safe while the rest of the city was looted.

>>Consul+c2
so Pro 2A?

>>Consul+K
Rural communities where there is basically no crime is no comparison to cities with an abundance of crime targets. Also they still have police, it just takes the police a while to get there. A entity with authority to carry out laws; a person who determines what is and isn't a crime, what acts are self defense and which are assault or murder, and tracks down criminals. If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police.

>>metrok+19
>If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police.

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.

>>holler+09
Not at all.

>>metrok+19
Rural areas are far from not having crime, it is just much of it ends up not getting reported because by time the cops come, it is over, the people at fault are gone, and the cops got nothing to do other than harass the non-criminal people that are dumb enough to still be around. Rural police are 90% a money-making racket and the people know it. Threatening to call the police on someone in a rural area is considered a worse threat by most than directly threatening someone with a beating or deadly weapons. If your tractor gets stolen, the only reason to call the police is for insurance purposes. Otherwise the only way you are likely to ever see that tractor again is to ask around and look for it yourself. Plus you gotta be pretty dumb to steal a farmer's tractor. Not only is it noisy as fuck, extremely obvious, and will take forever to actually get anywhere, but the person stealing it is at the mercy of the farmer that has all the time in the world to come out and either force you out by gunpoint or blast you from a half mile away.

>>Consul+9i
I would rather have a group of people trained on how to apprehend criminals with the minimum force necessary and with rules and regulations to follow than have untrained, armed citizens going to retrieve their goods. Would the farmer have the freedom to search any property they please? A criminal would not let the farmer search his property, and if the farmer insisted with force he could be threatening an innocent person. Criminals would almost always be better armed and trained than their victims, and if a "mercenary" service existed which could be hired by victims, that mercenary service is essentially just privatized 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.

>>metrok+xl
First of all, I want to say that I don't support roving gangs of mercenaries. But just as a thought experiment... which do you think is likely to kill more innocent people: roving gangs of mercenaries in a stateless community where most are armed or the US government?

edit: changed vigilantes to mercenaries for consistency

>>Consul+ym
We have numerous examples in US history of that. What do you think they did in the Old West? The sheriff was often outmanned and undergunned, so nobody wanted the position. The bandits were so powerful that ordinary citizens had to be called upon to catch criminals. Not to mention, there were hostile Native American tribes that wanted to scalp you.

>>Consul+ym
Well, we are now talking about the entire US government instead of just US police. Certainly a state has a greater pool of resources to draw upon for war if it chooses to do so, but comparing a state with groups of mercenaries or vigilantes is impossible because of the myriad of different forms they could take. One would be comparing a single large casualty number vs. many much smaller numbers. The Iraq war is estimated to have had 150,000 to over 600,000 civilian casualties in the first three to four years of conflict, although I believe that is total, not just casualties attributed to the US. The US had a population of just under 300,000,000 at the time. Revolutionary Catalonia is the best large example of a large-scale anarchical society I can find, and in 1936 is estimated to have had 8,350 killings for a population of under 3,000,000 [0]. Of course those two examples are more on the extreme side, and there are infinite nuances, such as the fact that not all civilians in the civil war were innocent, the same with Revolutionary Catalonia. They both were extremely different times as well.

I'd say it's a toss-up if I absolutely had to guess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

>>Consul+9i
You don’t “hire” the police, and that’s critical. If you did, they would be accountable to you and not the rest of society. Police are agents of the government which is accountable (to some degree) to the people. This is a tremendous distinction.

>>throwa+8Y
Police and government have something very important in common with you. They are all just people. Regular people without superior morals, intellectual capability, resolve, etc. In this case a government is just a group of people getting together and saying, "Okay Bob, a few of us in the community have pooled our money together to hire some mercenaries and we'd like you to do the hiring." And then Bob just does it.

>>Consul+sf1
No one said anything about superior morals, capability, resolve, etc. The important part is that the state has a monopoly on violence and in a democracy, the state is accountable to the people. This doesn't require agents of the state to be superior in any specific way, only that We The People authorize state agents to enforce and uphold law and order.

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. :)