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The problem with the police is that they are a self-policing enforcement arm of the state. The state gives the police various forms of liability immunities that breed bad behavior. The term "police" here also includes other services too - child protective services, social workers, judges etc.

1) If the state itself acts maliciously, eg mass deportations, gulags etc then it's the police that enforce this. Even if the state is unjustified, you cannot fight back because fighting back itself is an offense against the police and society. Even if you are eventually cleared of the injustice that the state enacted on you, you will still have to deal with the consequences of having fought back.

2) If the police act maliciously, eg police brutality or a social worker separating kids from families as political retaliation[0], then you cannot fight back either. As fighting back will get you punished. On top of that, the police are not held liable for their actions so that they can do point 1).

I think what would help enormously is if the police were more liable for what actions they take. It shouldn't be such an uphill struggle when police or social workers or judges do something very clearly wrong.

[0] https://reason.com/2022/09/08/brickbat-very-protective/

If the problem isn't that someone is employing existential violence, the response shouldn't be to send a bunch of people with guns. Often the police are called on to harass people who are on the fringes of society, such as the mentally ill or the homeless, and the best case scenario is these people are arbitrarily harassed, but they often end up imprisoned or dead. If someone is having a crisis, there should be a resource society provides you to help protect yourself and them; the police are not that resource.

If we're going to have a bunch of people with guns, we can't tell them that they're warriors, the last line of defense, the thin blue line, et cetera. It greenlights abuse by creating a culture where the rules are viewed as impediments which can be discarded as long as you get away with it, justified as "doing what is necessary," a sort of Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer theory of policing. This creates a culture that imposes it's desires on society rather than one that protects, serves, and defends society.

Sure. Agreed. And agreed a priori and proactively in my post. We can and should improve and change and reform police and hold them accountable and reduce their mandate and so on.

My response was specifically to the notion,explicitly stated, that we don't need and shouldn't have police no matter how defined, and that it's purpose is not worthile. Later I think that position was clarified and we are all good now.

Yes, what we need is so far from what we have we should start over and in the process find a different name for it.

and that's fine and we may in fact find a strong point of agreement there.

"We don't need police" though says very different thing. It may be that it was a quick statement of strong belief, but for what it may be worth, it may not communicate to others the message/point you intend to communicate.

It's a complete fantasy from someone who is lucky to have never needed to call the Police. Unfortunately someone's gotta take out the trash. The real problem is we need police to be accountable, but that's easier than it sounds, apparently.

The police certainly serve their purpose well for those comfortable calling other people trash, yes.

My assertion isn't that they're ineffective at their purpose, but that their purpose is not one worth serving.

We almost certainly disagree on this, but you should not be making any assumptions about what my relationships to the police are or have been.

Interesting.

1. I took a much more charitable interpretation of their post - "Somebody has to take out the trash" to mean somebody has to be the janitor / garbage disposal expert, even though it's not traditionally a desired or easy position. And therefore in the context of this discussion, to mean "Somebody (Police, or whatever we call them) has to respond to crime and danger".

2. When you say "their purpose is not one worth serving", I don't think we merely disagree; I am honestly having a hard time fathoming the framework/thought/life perspective/point/literally anything. The purpose of police is to "serve & protect". We can agree or disagree how well they do at that; what the margins and scope and mandate and methods and oversight etc etc etc are; but if you believe protecting the weak from the strong, preventing crime is purpose not worth serving, we may have an axiomatic difference so massive we may not be able to meaningfully proceed in discussion.

(and fwiw, I've lived in Canada & USA, as well as in what some might consider police state; I've been poor and well off; I've been on the privileged and on the harassed side of class/ethnicity/nationality/religion/group; me and mine have had our share of being harassed by various police in some places, and I also had friends who are police officers in other places; but I still cannot envision a societal framework anarchic enough to say that civil protection, which is the purpose if not the implementation, is not worth serving in principle)

re:1 Yeah I mean that's obviously what I meant they're stretching to make me seem bad. If someone is going around murdering, I don't have time or the gumption to try to deal with it and somebody should.

Look if you can run a society without any kind of police to enforce laws, by all means. People are mostly good and maybe it'll work out. Maybe everyone will just behave.

> The purpose of police is to "serve & protect".

This is the purpose of police as stated by the police and the institutions that create and endorse them. It doesn't make it true and I don't believe it is.

That's really what it comes down to I think. I'm not asking for a lawless world where all are free to commit whatever harms they wish without consequence. I'm saying an institution actually designed to protect people would bear almost no resemblance to policing as it exists now. And also that we should create that institution instead of police. There is no path that I can see from police as we have them to that other thing.

We may be in agreement then (it'll depend somewhat on locality, I think there is implicit assumption in this thread and HN of USA and that's fair enough). FWIW, wording can sometimes obstruct our message; to my literalist mind, "we don't need the police" and "their purpose is not worth serving", are radically different statements then "police currently is so broken, that if we wanted to fulfill their stated purpose, we need to start from scratch"

Yeah I definitely agree we have a serious lack of accountability in policing.

>The purpose of police is to "serve & protect".

This has gone to the supreme court and police are not bound by this. In fact, what ARE police bound by here in the states?

There’s no elaboration to be had. They just say we should have no cops because it’s the twitter-correct thing to say and move on.

Nah it's actually because of living most of my life under police terrorism but go ahead. I've lived situations nearly exactly like the one described in the article. These are relatively normal interactions people have with police. Maybe not people like you, but we've been trying to tell y'all for decades. This shit was 1981 and nothing has changed this still happens every day. What are you defending, why?

Have you ever actually lived in an area with zero legal enforcement of law?

I'm not asking for zero enforcement I'm asking not to have a paramilitary force dedicated to terrorizing poor people.

> Maybe let's try "don't have police" instead.

Maybe you should work on your phrasing then.

I think the problem is actually that you can't imagine a world where we have rules and governance without a militarized force which uses violence to enforce those laws, and so when someone suggests getting rid of the police, you assume they want to get rid of the rule of law.

That's putting lots of words in my mouth. I agree that police reform is desperately needed, but people saying we don't need police are sabotaging their own argument. If they had any nuance at all people might actually listen to them.

Well forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you, but "I would have listened to your argument if you phrased it differently, you just aren't expressing yourself well" is something people often say when they're being dismissive, and I don't believe significantly more people would be receptive to "defund the police" if it has been phrased a little differently.

The requests to water down the rhetoric would simply continue until it was diluted down to, "we should do something nonspecific about this problem which may exist."

>>I don't believe significantly more people would be receptive to "defund the police" if it has been phrased a little differently.

FWIW, anecdata, per my other comment [1]: I and large majority of my friends & family (Canadian lower-case-liberals by and large) all fall into that category. It took us a LOOOOONG time (I mean weeks and months) to give the platform and movement enough benefit of doubt to investigate underlying proposals (and then largely agree with them), after having immediate and strong negative reaction to "defund the police".

And most people will not give it benefit of doubt. I literally to this day have conversations with acquaintances of the sort: "No, they're not actually advocating anarchy and everybody fend for themselves! No, I'm serious! Yes, I know that's what the term implies. Hear me out, this is what I think they're saying..."

It's a horrible horrible term that does horrible horrible disservice to the intent.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927430

Most people won't give you the benefit of the doubt anyway. If you only express ideas that are agreeable, you won't be expressing much at all. If the movement hadn't existed, you wouldn't have had those conversations in the first place.

You giving it the benefit of the doubt, and reaching people who were just shy of doing so, _is_ the rhetoric being effective.

Wouldnt «Safer Police!» or «Demiliarize the police» be better ways to start a conversation thats effective towards the end goal that’s wanted?

There’s being right, and there’s being effective (to steal a quote from Obama). The current phrasing is worse at turning public opinion than some of the more us/them-rhetoric that comes from I.e. vegans in that regard. Sure eating lots of meat is bad, and animals should probably be treated better, but screaming “meat is murder” won’t actually make any carnivores drop a single steak of their menu, whereas measures that don’t immediately make the respondent feel attacked might.

Yes, “defund the police” will turn heads, but it also immediately leads to being written off as fringe madness. A better slogan should be possible, that actually contains the message of demilitarization.

Those are good slogans, but they represent different, parallel ideas.

This is what I'm getting at; in changing the language, you change the idea, and an abolitionist agenda becomes a reformist one.

If you want to advocate for reform, then that's great, that makes sense. But telling people who are advocating abolition, "you're doing it wrong because you aren't doing it my way or appealing to my sensibilities," is patronizing.

And it won't be long until someone says, "Safer Police alienates law enforcement, we should call it 'Better Policing', that way we're sure to be taken seriously," and after a few rounds of this you're left with nothing. It's a losing game.

Society at large will take you seriously when they can't pretend otherwise anymore, because you have repeatedly demonstrated the veracity of your views, often for decades. There is no end to the excuses people can come up with to dismiss you if that is what they want to do. People either won't change their minds, will change their own mind, or will have some experience that shakes up their world view. The rhetoric you use almost doesn't matter; you can't change someone's mind _for them_, no matter what you say. The most you can do is share your ideas, giving them the opportunity to change their mind, if they so choose. What matters is that you're a part of the conversation, and that what you're demanding is just. People will come around. The ones who don't will get old and die.

"Safer Police" would've been radical 20 years ago. Many people's world views were shaken up by repeated videos of police misconduct. "Defund the Police" is radical currently; in 10, 20 years, it might well be mainstream.

The reason I wrote why I did, was that my understanding of “defund the police” is that it’s not actually intended as abolitionism. If that is the case, then it’s not a suitable slogan at all for reformism.

You're right. Saying that you don't want to use violence to enforce laws sounds a lot like you don't want to enforce laws.

If one is not willing to use force for enforcement... does one have enforcement?

Has no one in your life ever corrected you on something without striking you?

"Enforcement" already presupposes violence. I'd suggest "governance" as a better term. Violence is an exceptionally poor mechanism of governance. It creates an outsized amount of unjust outcomes without working especially well.

Police are often called on to force homeless people out of an area, for instance. This often results in violence but never results in solving the problem that people need homes. The war on drugs has resulted in the over policing of impoverished areas and an inestimable amount of misery, but it hasn't helped a single addict to recover and has only enhanced the power of drug cartels.

The question I think people need to ask themselves is, do the police accomplish the goals I believe they accomplish? Am I bringing a lot of preconceived notions to the discussion that I should examine more carefully? Are there better ways to achieve governance?

I'd encourage this thought experiment. Let's say there's a stoop outside your apartment where people smoke, and they litter their cigarette butts. You want them not to litter. What's going to be more effective; threatening them with violence, or putting a trash can out there?

Please explain how you'd govern your way out of a string of armed robberies committed by someone who goes from town to town.

Please explain why you think the conversation must boil down to this question, when police respond to a wide variety of incidents, very few of which involve violent crimes. Violent crimes are an important subset, but you seem unwilling to acknowledge the breadth of this topic.

Armed robberies would probably require an armed response, which would certainly imply we'd need an organization with the resources to investigate this & dispatch armed people to interdict this robber.

That doesn't imply this force should be patrolling the streets or have the power to pull people over arbitrarily, and if you believe we need people serving in those roles, it didn't imply they should be armed or that lethal authority should seamlessly blend from responding to armed robbers to responding to a noise complaint.

You said:

> I think the problem is actually that you can't imagine a world where we have rules and governance without a militarized force which uses violence to enforce those laws

Then you said:

> Armed robberies would probably require an armed response, which would certainly imply we'd need an organization with the resources to investigate this & dispatch armed people to interdict this robber.

The only purpose for a paramilitary force in society is to respond to violence in an organized and accountable matter. There is no society that can possibly survive long-term without the organized ability to deploy violence on occasion.

You keep bringing up nonviolent situations where armed police aren't the best response; I agree with you that the modern people we call "the police" could be reformed, curtailed in responsibility, and replaced with other community representatives, but the core function of police, which is deploy violence when needed, is not appropriate to fully remove from society.

> The only purpose for a paramilitary force in society is to respond to violence

This would be agreeable to me, at least in principle; the specifics would be important. However, the police force is used in all manner of ways.

> You keep bringing up nonviolent situations where armed police aren't the best response

You continue to downplay or ignore that this is the role police are put to, in the real world, and that it routinely results in violence and unnecessary incarceration

"Armed robberies would probably require an armed response"

You're the one who challenged us to think about how to enforce laws "without a militarized force". And now you're saying we'll need armed response. Which is it?

This is why people who advocate getting "rid of the police" (your words) sound like they're talking out both sides of their mouth.

"Get rid of police!"

"No, I didn't mean to get rid of police entirely. Why would you think that?"

It's not a good look. People who talk like this are self-sabotaging their side of the argument by using intentionally double-speak language.

This will never go through so long as people continue to use phrases like "get rid of the police".

There's no contradiction. You're looking for the first chance to dismiss what I'm saying without considering it.

Again, the vast majority of what police do is unrelated to violent crime.

If you don't think that the rule of law requires violence, you are deeply, deeply naive. Nonviolent people are almost immediately terrorized by violent people and have always been throughout history. Even if you are capable of creating a peaceful society where no violent crimes ever occur, the threat of invasion from an outside society that desires your land for resources or living space still exists.

If someone threatens you with violence, you are obliged to defend yourself.

The police often respond to completely nonviolent incidents, bringing guns into the situation, and then people die. That's entirely needless.

In Uvalde, the police arrived, armed and prepared, to a violent situation, and were unable to organize an effective response. School shootings should be a slam dunk to justify a militarized police, it's the literal "bad guy with a gun." But time and again they fail to respond effectively.

Violence is a one trick pony. Hurting people is the only thing it does well.

This is a separate discussion from whether or not there ought to be a paramilitary force. Anyone with a modicum of sense can see they modern police forces are full of under-trained thugs and brutes, who in many cases cause much more harm than they prevent. This does not prove that a police force shouldn't exist at all any more that a corrupt business proves that businesses shouldn't exist at all.

> Violence is a one trick pony. Hurting people is the only thing it does well.

Yes, and when your community is faced with organized violence perpetrated by people residing in your community, what is your non-violent solution? The only way to prevent further violence once it has occurred is by tracking people who committed the violence and detaining, reeducating, exiling, or killing them.

I'd encourage you to consider what communities should do about an organized, violent police force which has and will continue to perpetrate violence against them, while claiming their purpose was to protect them. I think dispanding them and creating different services in their place is what follow naturally from your list of potential solutions.

If you disband and replace the police with different services, one of the services will be armed and capable of responding to violence with greater and more organized violence, which will be a recursive creation of "the police". You're not arguing for the removal of "the police" from society, you're arguing for reform.

I'm in favor of whatever course of action leads to a satisfying result. If reform were the ticket, that'd be fine. It happens to be the case that it isn't.

What I'm saying is that our conception of what the police is, what they do, and what they are for is wrong. This organization needs to be abolished; it's purpose is to inflict violence, in all manner of places, for any infraction the officer cares to enforce (while ignoring those they don't care to). A police force does not create safety or justice. It creates danger for those at the fringes of society, fails to stop bad actors (and often exacerbates the factors that lead to such bad actors), and creates innumerable injustices.

In replacing it, we'll have to address the thorny question of how to intervene in violent situations. It's true that we will need to organize something to address this. You're saying this will necessarily be a recapitulation of a police force; that's certainly a danger, but not a necessity.

A police force is a standing army which has broad authority over the populace. I am proposing we can change those parameters; they may not need to be standing, their authority and mandate can be very narrow.

Do you believe that some level of violence is required to enforce social order, whether or not it comes from a military force?