The Damned Cops Are Out Of Control

[jerry mcmasters]

Well it’s hard to debate the merits of plans that are that vague and ill-defined.  Violence and crime isn’t going to go away if we abolish police departments, so “democratic” and “localised” solutions need to be spelled out in detail, otherwise we are just counting on utopian fantasies.

 
Considering how bad your current situation is, any changes is going to be helpful. The US has the worst police and justice system of the first world by all available metrics. You have the highest level of incarceration, the highlest level of recidivism, the highest level of racial bias, the highest level of police brutality and you are spending a LOT to keep that system going. I think you underestimate how poorly you are doing in that domain. 

 
Yes many changes are on the table that are clearly good and that I support. 
 

Those are great solutions that as you say work with the police.  They would reduce crime and de-escalate and prevent flash-points between cops and people.  This will require more funding, not less.  My concern is that ultimately force is needed against violent criminals, rapists, gangsters, school shootings.  We can change the name from “cops” to something else as far as the agents we send against them, but I don’t see how we can abolish them.

 
As mentionned before, the function  isn't what's abolished, it's the institution. Police, as in armed professionals who deal with dangerous and violent criminals would still exist because things like murderous gangsters, terrorists would still exist and sometime, an armed response will be necessary. You don't need about a million armed professionnals in the US (which is the current number) you, at best need a 100 000 and the rest could transformed in "community police", social workers and "street workers". Most cops never use a gun in their career yet they are trained extansively to use them making much of their training time and skills pointless. Look at all the recent case of highly mediatised police killing, all of the people killed were non-violent offenders, most often petty crooks, low level drug dealers, drunkards or even completely innocent people. The only exception I can remember was Michael Brown in Ferguson who, while unarmed, was violent, but even then. Had there been two or three officers doing the arrest instead of one and had they acted more intelligently, Brown would probably be alive and would be back on the street. The dude was suspected to sell small quantity of pot and had an altercation with his client who was working as a clerk who wasn't injured in the process, not exactly the stapple of hardenned violent criminal requiring a heavy armed response either. 
 
Note that cops don't protect you all that much from rapists. In fact they are terrible at it. I can't remember the last time a cop has interrupted a rape in progress and the rate of conviction and reporting of rapes is abyssimal because the police handles it poorly. School and mass shootings, while they occur in every country, are a typically American problems with a legislative solutions. Social workers are more efficent at stopping them before they happen than cops. Gangsterism is solved more efficently by community development. The most powerful tool to stop it, especially for youth, has been, by far, openning youth centers with free sports and entertainment there. Put a couple of social worker there and you got yourself an improvement. Violence and threat of violence don't diminish violent behavior. They cultivate the idea that violence is a solution to problems and that's just stupid and everybody, deep down, kinda knows it. A police officers axiom is "stop what you are doing!", but what you need to truly stop crime, especially the crimes that seem to worry you, is "how are you doing?" and that's not a police officer's job, that's a social worker's job.

 
We are having a semantics argument is what it seems to me.  Cops that don’t suck do all these things.  I know a cop I talk to frequently that operates like you describe, sees policing as serving and helping the community, rarely has to use force.  So we can abolish the police and then replace them with (whatever we call these new social worker officers) but you still end up with something like cops, just well-trained social worker cops.  Or you can keep the institution of cops and (ideally) fire bad cops and retrain everybody else.  We both seem to want the same thing.  Selling all this as “abolishing” the police is muddy and confusing marketing.
 

Bringing ISIS into this is a bizarre and distracting rhetorical flourish.

 
It's not. The exercise was to give you an absurdly obvious example of the concept that the scope of difference between the various people call "police" is extremely large and cannot be reduced to cosmetic elements. I think that because you have grown and lived all your life in that sysem that it's difficult for you to realise just how shitty your system is. You live in a first world country, the richest, most powerful country in world, but ou have the worst police system of all developped and democratic nation. It's a terrible, costly, and inefficient system. The behavior and policies of your police department would be considered appaling in other countries.

 
Dramatic hyperbole is unneeded here, this should be an unemotional nuts and bolts discussion of policy and reforms.  That said, it’s not derailing the discussion or anything.
 

I’m simply trying to get into the nuts and bolts of what it is exactly that you and BLM activists are imagining as a police force.  I’m already on board with many ideas for reform that I have heard, but when I hear “abolish” I think any reasonable person would want some details on what exactly that is going to entail, because again senseless violence and crime and wife beating and school shooting isn’t going to go away so absent cops something has to step into the breach.  While the cops were overworked and occupied with protests, something like 16 people, mostly young black males, were killed in shootings in Chicago in 24 hours this past weekend.

 
And that's the core of the issue. The police doesn't stop senseless violence. They don't solve the overwhelming majority of murders and violent crimes and they have completely failed in cities like Chicago, Detroit or St-Louis to name just a few. Those communities are protesting at the moment because they feel the police is useless and threatening. They don't want more cops; they want community services and a police force they can trust and hold accountable and they have neither (not that they were intended by your government to have either in the first place either). Police officers don't stop wife beatings. In fact, on that specific area, police officers are significantly more likely to beat their spouse and abuse of them than civilian society; they are even worst than veterans and soldiers in that domain who are themselves more likely to abuse their spouse. Social workers, therapists and refuges help with DV. Rapes aren't stopped by the police either. In fact they are a large part of the problem of extremely low reporting of sexual crimes. They handle them terribly poorly. See, what you think your police does, it does bad if not even add fuel to the fire; that's what you don't see because you don't live in a poor, racialised community nor are a victim of domestic or sexual crimes. You see police only on their best side, when they actually aren't doing all that much, but not where they would truly be needed, not that they can help much either. They don't have training or the skills to do a proper job.

 
Great arguments for either extreme re-training or replacement of regular cops with social-worker type neighborhood officers (“police force they can trust and hold accountable”). 
 
How about their presence as a deterrent to crime? (outside private houses of course, your point about not stopping domestic violence and rape is well made)  Knowing cops are around generally deters criminal activity. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/...ker-harris I think you’re too optimistic about crime going away with some new social programs and neighborhood sports events.  Are the new social-worker cops going to be authorized to get physical if they see criminal activity or need to break up fights etc.?  Do you imagine them being armed and if so with what level of force?