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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Just going to note since this sort of comment usually gets some really shallow replies: You can maintain law and order without having a bunch of unaccountable armed dudes roaming around doing whatever they want without any oversight, and reform clearly is not changing what we have into what we need. "Abolition" does not mean "so let's move to anarchy"

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Any examples showing that’s possible? I don’t know of any society (aside from maybe some tiny islands) where you don’t have some police to maintain law and order.

It's a bit of a leap from eliminating "having a bunch of unaccountable armed dudes roaming around doing whatever they want without any oversight" to eliminating all police.

A few random ideas:

* fewer armed police, and being armed requires a higher level of experience/training/psych evaluation

* 100% public access to all police body cam footage.

* require police officers to maintain their own liability insurance, and have rates based on the a number of KPIs related to public safety and ethics

I'll note that while body cam footage and citizen recordings have helped bring visibility to police misconduct, in general they don't seem to have actually fixed anything. In some cases they increase unrest because now when a police officer is acquitted for doing something, people can look at the footage and get even more upset about it. Cops also frequently disable their cams and aren't punished for it.

Body cams might be an example of something that is good on paper but actually just distracts people from things that actually address a problem.

To be sure, what I'm suggesting would require a reworking of how those cameras are used and disclosed, and probably would require technical solutions in addition to policy ones. I'm definitely suggesting going far beyond the status quo in an attempt for transparency (pretty much "open sourcing" the camera footage)

Right. Those all sound like great reform proposals. Particularly I feel like there is too little police training in this country.

Parent comment was dismissing reform as a path forward though.

Compared to the US, the NL seems to have far less cops. The cops are mostly just walking around or driving around.. they never pull you over, you just get a ticket in the mail. So there’s police, doing police things. But they never get involved in your day-to-day life unless you’re doing something obviously illegal. Granted, you can do a lot of things here that is illegal in the US, like prostitution, drugs, sit in the park with some beer and wine, pee in public, etc. Things are way more civil than the US was when I last visited a year ago.

What do you think abolition looks like, that won't devolve to anarchy?

And, do you have a working example?

A step multiple municipalities have taken in the past is to disband their entire police department and create a new one from scratch, which makes it feasible to eject large numbers of bad actors who would normally protect each other from expulsion while also setting new policies. I don't personally believe that's a complete solution, but it's a logical step and allows you to retain your existing power structures and systems without having to pass a bunch of new laws and create new roles. There are probably many police departments that would not really benefit from this step or merit it.

Another step would be to recognize that you cannot reform american police departments' roles in non-violent crime cases and offload some or all of those entirely to other agencies that don't carry guns. This doesn't fix everything, but it removes many opportunities for things to go wrong while also enabling armed police to focus on the threats that really need them.

"Abolish and re-create" is a lot different from "just abolish", though.

Especially important to differentiate given that some people really do mean abolish. There's a thought that it's possible to get rid police because people will do just fine policing their own home. And along with that they think that we also don't need a judicial system because disagreements can be solved through arbitration. I feel it should be obvious to most people why that's problematic (I don't want to turn this into a massive rambling tangent in a day old thread)

See this as an example: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/11/abolish-police-georgia-...

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