All I’m saying you can get rid of anything resembling our current police and police system and still curtail violent crime. Your average cop probably doesn’t manage to prevent any crime ever. As JT said it is an illusion. And having a bunch of racist morons running around with guns on a power trip is incredibly bad policy that has obvious bad outcomes.
How many murders a year does your average beat cop actually prevent? How many rapes? The answer is obviously zero. Meanwhile they kill a ton of people. They beat and harass people. They haul millions of people off to jail for petty drug crimes or whatever. They literally are criminals themselves with no one to hold them accountable in many situations. The current system doesn’t work. It needs to be completely eliminated and replaced with a different system that has some chance of working.
No, just that if police are going to be confronting heavily-armed violent criminals like the North Hollywood bank robbers they will have to be armed as well.
Probably just a few. I think cops should at the very least keep their guns locked in their cars instead of wearing them all the time. If WichitaDM means unarmed like the UK police, then sure, fine. I don’t consider the UK police to be unarmed because they have access to arms if they need them, and I think they carry around a stick or whatever.
So why would this society without a police presence, one that is fucked up or not, be worse than or equal to a society that contains those who want to partake in a crime whenever a minority/female steps foot or breaths in a manner unsuitable to those that grip the power?
The police are restricted to a degree at this point. Remove them, and those motherfuckers x100 are free to do what they want and no one would could call the police to stop them.
Maybe it could work, I don’t know. But if you’re interested in another perspective, read that Yglesiasias vox article. You’re saying that beat cops are worthless. Maybe. He’s saying that beat cops prevent crimes from happening and lead to lower arrests, and the more beat cops there are the bigger the effect will be. And dividing your four points up, Yglesias’ approach is complementary with your last two, and more beat cops won’t solve petty crime but could probably prevent it.
I’ve spent a few minutes reading the thread and was interested in responding to Johnny’s point about “calling a friend” and “burning down the house” for a home invasion instead of calling the police.
This isn’t an argument that I am trying to win regardless of facts.
I’d appreciate if you wanted to state what abolishing the police means or I could look up thread. It’s a big thread.
I’ve read many of the what the regs have posted here for over ten years
on 22 and met a few IRL but I have no problem stating that I disagree with something even if the whole thread is against me.
I do disagree with my initial post to JT and again admit that I was wrong and out of line.
Did you read that Vox article? You scoffed at my suggestion that having unarmed grannies in uniform walking the beat might be worth looking at.
They found that surges led to both less crime and more “stop and frisk”-type incidents where officers stopped citizens (typically young black or Latino men) without probable cause. That suggests a sharp trade-off between crime reduction and civil rights. But the same study, by looking at the covariance of “stop and frisks” and crime reduction, found that the additional stops were doing nothing to reduce crime. All of the anti-crime impact, in other words, came from putting more cops on the beat rather than from the use of aggressive tactics. New York City, not coincidentally, has continued to enjoy low and falling crime rates since stop and frisk tactics were curtailed. What’s helpful is more officers, not more harassment.
So, why does this work? My theory is that having more potential witnesses has a chilling effect on crime. Maybe we don’t need more beat cops. Maybe we just need some organization that patrols the streets who aren’t trained cops.
Traffic enforcement cameras catching infractions such as speeding and running a red light are known to decrease accidents, according to studies. Maybe significant electronic surveillance of “hot spots” would reduce crime.
You should be familiar with the idea of hot spots, which are mentioned on in a link within a link from the Vox article which leads to a New York Times article in which a drop in crime despite a reduction in police force is attributed to a focus on crime hot spots. While crime mapping of hot spots was used to justify stop-and-frisk, there is evidence that just focusing on the areas was enough and that such investigative stops did not really add any value.
More beat cops may reduce crime, but can that reduction be achieved in other ways? Can non-cops, or even technology, fulfill those functions? Is it a problem if there is a lack of imagination for considering ideas that have never been done before?
Cops pull you over for burnt out tail/head lights because it’s dangerous to other drivers and if you weren’t given fix-it tickets, you would probably procrastinate.
Cops show up when there is an accident to make sure everyone is safe, write an official report for the insurance companies, make sure drivers are properly licensed/insured to begin with (again, to protect OTHER drivers), and to get the road back in service. Just because you are a reasonable person who will take the other guy’s insurance info and handle it like adults doesn’t mean everyone will.
In fact, the most common reason cops do anything they do on a daily basis is because many people cannot respond to even minor situations like reasonable adults.
The people ITT claiming they’ve been robbed/jumped/beaten/whatever and using the fact that the cops didn’t protect them at that exact moment as an excuse to get rid of the institution altogether are just dumb. No other adjective is suitable. What if there were cops on every corner in America? Do you think random muggings/beatings would increase or decrease overall? Most of the violence would just move indoors. Then the same dumb people would be here saying that their girlfriend’s boyfriend beat them up behind closed doors and the cops didn’t help, so why even have them at all?
To the doofus who said suzzer should just sic a dog on the bully: I hope you lose a finger to someone’s adorable pitbull who has never done anything like that before and the owner swears would never hurt a fly! Suzzer’s entire point is that violence exists and the police are the most reliably non-violent way to deal with those threats of violence. Because one or two out of every million encounters with a police officer end with undeserved violence against a citizen does not make the prior sentence untrue.
The people who would suffer the most harm in a world without police are the same group of people you claim to be standing up for.
These types of tickets are revenue streams, commonly used in conjunction with targeting poor and/or BIPOC communities. They don’t solve the problem(the tail light is busted). It’s a great example of the deficiency and ultimate failure of punitive justice as carried out by the currently existing police.
My only response to that is that I’ve received probably a dozen fix-it tickets in my life, and none of them cost me a dime.
10 days to get this fixed and show up with the citation at any police station to prove you did it. They see that you got it fixed and make it go away. No harm no foul.
Thinking that ticket revenue makes up a reasonable amount of law enforcement revenue is absurd. It’s late now but maybe tomorrow I’ll go find concrete numbers for you. The ashtray coins in your car probably represents more of your overall household budget than the tickets written by your average police department.
Yeah, the activity I’ve volunteered for with the DSA mutual aid group is free fixing people’s tail lights/turn signals. It’s partly that some people can’t do it themselves and can’t afford to do it and to have it fixed, but also to try to prevent them from being pulled over.
Good to know that it’s never negatively effected you.
Are you able to acknowledge that your personal experience is not true for everyone? That perhaps the status quo has flaws, and we could focus on improving how we treat those people that are negatively effected in our communities?
