Abolishing police means ... what? I don't understand this. How do you abolish something only to replace it with... a new copy of that something because you didn't change the rules.
Wouldn't it be better to just fire complete departments and clear them out from top to bottom? This would let you re-hire as necessary but with new rules in play. You might end up with some of the same old people but they now know the trapdoor can open.
Most of the problems with police are at the top. Not the bottom. This includes the laws they use like civil forfeiture and other silliness. That's your real target. Why aren't the abolish people going after that?
>replace it with... a new copy of that something because you didn't change the rules.
You don't abolish police -- you abolish policing. In order to do this society needs to identify and eliminate the reasons for crime in the first place--i.e., ensuring access to basic needs like food and housing, for one thing. Abolition necessarily involves a transformation of our entire society, and may take more than one generation.
Utopias tend to turn into dystopias. What if the transformers say that in order to achieve nonviolence, embryos with certain DNA markers associated with antisocial behavior need to be forcibly aborted?
As far as I can see, we have this thing called a constitution and a bill of rights. I don't know what kind of society you're proposing that would somehow remove those things. I personally would prefer to keep our human and democratic rights. Coincidentally, reducing inequality is a great way to do that.
It sounds like you have some hidden assumptions. To me, it looks like you're casting aspersions on people who advocate progressive social change. But I'm sure that's not your aim, so why not just state outright what you really think and clear up my misunderstanding.
I wish I had your optimism. My take is even a true utopia of boundless affluence and perfect childrearing will still produce the odd psychopath and plenty of people prone to crimes of passion.
From what I have heard, there is still quite a lot of domestic violence going on there, not to mention raping of female servants. And it has zilch to do with material insecurity.
Genghis Khan didn't build towers out of severed heads because he lacked gold and silver. Some people are just, sorry for saying that, sick fucks.
"The prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population can be estimated at 4.5%." Remember: it's much more frequent in males, where that number can be 2-3x of that, can be close to 1 in 10 in males.
"prevalence of psychopathy among university students is significantly higher than among people from the general community". I'd guess increased affluence and better childrearing will result in more university students as well.
I'd go as far as to say that "boundless affluence" and "perfect childrearing" may in fact produce even more psychopaths, not less, as it is not quite a pathology many assume. Many traits are actually more adaptive vs general population.
It's probably important to point that there is further nuance. in primary(as in born that way) psychopathy the hallmark is total absence of anxiety and remorse. In secondary (upbringing, trauma, etc) psychopathy, anxiety can often be fairly high.
You might reduce some secondary cases of psychopathy with your proposed measures, but boundless affluence will also result in higher SSRI usage to prevent unwanted anxiety or stress (the rich tend to use antidepressants more, don't have the reference handy now, but its fairly obvious the rich have fewer problems with access to mental health services), and SSRIs tend to increase some psychopathic traits (charm+boldness), which perhaps can push some borderline cases into the proper psychopathic territory: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3202964
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"
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)
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.
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.
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)
Wouldn't it be better to just fire complete departments and clear them out from top to bottom? This would let you re-hire as necessary but with new rules in play. You might end up with some of the same old people but they now know the trapdoor can open.
Most of the problems with police are at the top. Not the bottom. This includes the laws they use like civil forfeiture and other silliness. That's your real target. Why aren't the abolish people going after that?