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Communities organizing themselves into squads to handle criminals and undesirables is also how we ended up with the KKK. Also the kinds of people who volunteer for unpaid security work tend to be pretty conservative in my experience.
yeah, it was only when we added in paychecks they became police.
a) isn’t “the police” just a wider definition of “a community organizing itself”
b) half the police are in the fucking klan anyway lol
If a society is a the point of calling for a substitute to police, then you are fucked. at that point you are just gonna build two armed factions which are illegitimate in each others eyes. thats how you get a civil war.
You can’t draw blood from a stone. If community self-organizing gets you the KKK, that community was fucked to begin with. The USA has always been extremely racist, it’s a matter of to what extent we give the racist police a legal monopoly on violence and place them above the law. At least when they wear ghost outfits you don’t have an illusion of reasonability.
Also note that the KKK never aimed to replace the police for the community the KKK came from, but rather to build upon police oppression of people outside the community. The two situations are not analogous, and if KKK members had to police their own community they would be much more gentle and constructive in their methods.
Are you fucking comparing the goddamned KKK with the Black Panthers?
No. Abso-fucking-lutely NO! Do better.
They aren’t, they are pointing out self-organizing groups like this can be made into something good as well as something bad. That’s kind of the whole point of government and regulations, to try to prevent that. Obviously that has failed in most cases, but it doesn’t mean the goal itself is pointless.
Here’s a more recent example. These groups can often end up exploiting the things they claim to protect. That’s just humans being human.
gasp you mean cops can be cops without being cops!!!???
Please don’t assign the kindest possible interpretation to his words. It’s pretty obvious what he meant to do.
You’re losing a discussion to someone named Snot Flickerman. L
Works both ways unfortunately.
Do better.
Improve the world, start with yourself. You muppet.
As a minimum, how about frequent rotation and a sortition + selection system to staff the squads?
Imaginary example:
Two “cops” are needed for a term of 90 days (side note: in this hypothetical society, it could be that a cop is not a first responder but an investigator - first responders may be selected by proximity to the event and called up using some automated emergency messaging system). An investigator is allowed to request expert assistance from outside their department and often does.
At first, 10 candidates are sortitioned at random. Out of them, 3 refuse the job for various reasons, 7 go through instruction and pass evaluation. Out of them, 3 either step out during training or fail exams, 4 complete exams. Among them, another round of sortition occurs: 2 are selected at random, while 2 are paid compensation for study and assigned to reserve. If lottery chooses them again, they won’t need to pass exams.
This might be possible to enhance with other tricks. If feedback shows that cops cannot be impartial near their home, then they don’t work near their home. If however, feedback shows that they perform best near their home, then the opposite way.
The main goals this would aim to achieve:
- ensure that corruption will not start
- ensure that investigation is not biased (or that chances exist of bias being quickly exposed)
- ensure that offices cannot be given by people in power to whom they prefer
- ensure that competence is valued and unqualified bozos won’t be appointed
I feel like this sounds like a great idea until you end up with a bunch of unregulated militias run by the George Zimmermans of the world in every red state with a government who doesn’t give a shit, but I’d absolutely love to be proven wrong
We already have that. Cops with qualified immunity are almost definitionally an unregulated militia
Cops still have rules of engagement. Whenever you think “this could not get any worse” it could actually get worse. A lot worse.
We could have large gangs of white men conducting pogroms, moving house to house shooting anyone they found who wasn’t white. They could be torching every house and creating wildfires that destroy large sections of the cities.
This is all the kinda stuff that happened in the past. Antisemitic pogroms in Europe in the 20th century and earlier, for example.
The fact that they commit less brazen violence than unregulated militias of the past doesn’t change the fact that they are unregulated militias. How many times have you read about the bastards being punished for “excessive force” (read, cold blooded murder in broad daylight), then found that their “punishment” was a few months of admin leave and a new job in another precinct? Regulations don’t exist unless they’re enforced, and we have a wildly long public record of cops breaking the law followed by the legal system choosing not to enforce the law in those cases.
No, that’s not how it works. Regulations do exist even when they’re not enforced 100% of the time. Otherwise no regulation would ever exist since no regulation has a perfect track record of enforcement.
The other side of the coin is community norms. Most laws that regulate behaviour need to operate within a space of norms. Look at prohibition on alcohol for example. It was WIDELY disregarded (at speakeasies for example) because it was a regulation that disregarded norms around alcohol consumption in the US. On the other hand, alcohol consumption is illegal in some Muslim countries and the law rarely needs to be enforced because norms against alcohol consumption are deeply embedded in Islamic beliefs.
The same can be said around regulation of police. Different police cultures exist in different countries. Police in countries other than the US vary quite a lot, and in some countries the police have very strict norms of professionalism and non-violent conflict resolution. Police in the US frequently have a warrior mentality and the literal belief that they are entering a war zone when they go to patrol in certain neighbourhoods. Is it any wonder that they don’t develop any bonds with those communities so that they don’t feel any reluctance to behave like violent thugs?
I’m not complaining about spotty enforcement of the law against American police, I’m complaining about things like qualified immunity or the thin blue line shit used to protect cops from consequences when they explicitly and clearly break the law. A regulation with less than perfect enforcement is still a regulation. A regulation with legal doctrine (QI) explicitly stating that it can be broken with no consequence however absolutely stops being a regulation.
I generally agree with the content of your second two paragraphs, but i do not see how they are relevant to discussion about whether the police can accurately be called an unregulated militia. Yes, law is subjective and generally defined by the mores of the society that follows it. “Cops don’t have to follow the law and should be allowed to murder people with no consequences” is absolutely not part of the zeitgeist
“Cops don’t have to follow the law and should be allowed to murder people with no consequences” is absolutely not part of the zeitgeist
Tough on crime politics continues to be very big in a lot of places where the worst police abuses occur. For every one of those stories where a cop seriously injured or killed someone unjustly, you can find people in that community cheering for, not protesting against, the police. The “thin blue line” and “blue lives matter” flags and bumper stickers are very popular and frequently displayed by people who are not cops themselves.
Qualified immunity came out of Pierson v. Ray (1967), a landmark case right in the middle of the civil rights movement. There are many people in the US who continue to believe that civil rights are a mistake and that the government should’ve cracked down on the civil rights movement much harder. Watch a movie like Dirty Harry (1971) if you want an example of popular reactionary sentiment towards civil rights. Rather being called a villain, Clint Eastwood’s character was seen as a hero defending American values against violent leftist thugs.
That all said, police are still regulated by use of force rules. Here’s a case from December 2024 where a Fort Worth Texas cop was fired for unjustified use of force.
That officer was “fired” for similar abuses from a different department in 2013. Eventually being reinstated AND given back pay before then moving to Fort Worth and doing it again. He received no punishment and it is very likely this case will resolve in a similar fashion. The police union is currently defending him, this will end up in arbitration just like when he was fired in Irving.
Or the meth making bikers with the enormous pile of firearms decide they want to run the county. Jan 6 happened because one side was absolutely not afraid to use violence and another side wanted to play fair and by the rules.
Never underestimate the capacity of assholes to be assholes.
It’s called the local police
I’m always down with the Black Panthers. ✊🏿 They did great community work.
if they hadn’t started school breakfast programs i (decades later) wouldn’t have had food as a kid
Some of their ranks could work on their acting skills though.
Why are so many people convinced the Police we have are the only ones we COULD have?
We don’t want NO Police
We want BETTER Police
Ive repeated this argument so many times.
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They need to have a FEDERAL licence to provide law enforcement. So you cant just move when you get in trouble.
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Each officer needs to carry their own “malpractice” insurance so the city/state doesnt have a financial interest in ignoring bad behavior.
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Make “Abuse of the public trust” a federal felony. Officer making bad judgement calls in the heat of the moment is one thing but calculated corruption should be a federal offence.
You know… I’m a big fan of some of the wild lefty stuff OP is posting, but I also endorse all of this! Those are some great ideas.
Frankly, I don’t hate cops. I don’t like the system (and I’m not a big fan of the individuals who participate in it), but if someone is willing to be agree to operate with this kind of accountability, I’m willing to give them a chance.
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I had an argument about this with a friend once. I was saying if we just abolish the police, private enterprise will probably step in to fill the gap. I don’t want that. I don’t want amazon offering policing services (as part of Prime. vomit).
I think the police need to be split up into smaller institutions, and have a lot less murder powers.
Someone needs to address the “Someone broke into my house and stole my TV” problem, without a profit motive and with accountability.
There should be something to address “My neighbor is screaming at his wife and I think he’s hitting her” that doesn’t involve some low empathy assholes with guns rolling up to mock the woman.
I don’t know how to fix this.
Cops are deliberately trained to be be fearful and quick to shoot. You start by reforming how cops are trained. Literally following how the military trains their troops would be a big improvement. This vet got fired for deescalating a situation, per his military training, but counter to his police training.
How the fuck is military training actually doing this better than police training… wow
Because the militarization of police is just them larping after watching too many war movies.
Strict hiring policies so you aren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel. Better and longer training pipelines so you’re getting career professionals instead of thugs. Better accountability and enforcement of regulations so they’re being held to standards consummate with their responsibilities. Letting beat cops police their own communities so they have a stake in things.
And this I think is unique to the US, getting rid of the mind boggling layers of law enforcement. In Australia, we have state and federal police. Not state, federal, county, city, campus, sherrifs, and whatever.
Without cops, who will throw people out on the street when they can’t pay rent?
Or who will arrest the folk giving less fortunate people food?What we need is a police force of negotiators and social workers.
A police officer should only get a job after a mandatory time spent as a social worker and a expensive study of law and peaceful conflict resolving.
Before that: no weapons and no authority.
Also accountability: every bullet and every taser use has to be explained. Cams 24/7 on the job, disabling them should be a grounds for immediate expulsion.
Oh and of course, cops should no longer be above the law.
I think this would also scare away a lot of the people who become police officers for the wrong reasons.
Yes, I believe it could be possible to have good cops - it’s just not possible under the current system. Hell, the current system is a deterrent to good cops.
Mmm, not sure I like this better. If the majority in your community are filled with religious crazies suddenly you’re ruled by backwards ass religious laws from millenia ago. Laws and enforcement would be even more incoherent, not less. No matter who is enforcing the laws, we need ways to keep ALL people in power accountable regardless of how it’s organized and I don’t think that goes away in a more anarchist kind of world.
The entire system would need to change for this to work though - there ain’t no way that in an unequal society such as ours where not everyone’s needs are met (and crime essentially staying as high as it is today) community self-management would be sustainable.
Often crime is committed out of frustration (like violence born of inequality) or necessity (theft), so imagine being in a community in some larger city and having to deal with this every other day - I’d argue most people would just grow apathetic.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. It’s not that the entire system needs to change for this to work, it’s that this working changes the entire system. Community self-management would quickly result in the redistribution (and hopeful removal) of the inequalities, possibly with help of guillotines. The primary job of the police is to prevent this redistribution.
Historically, pretty much every “thriving local culture” is the result of a downtrodden wretched hive of scum and villainy where self-organisation was more important than police during the time of flourishing. Broadway (and NYC in general), New Orleans, Amsterdam, most Italian and German cities’ high points, London, Hong Kong, Osaka, etc… It turns out that when people don’t have enough, they will work together to get enough, and the benefits of that cooperation can be felt in that town for centuries. (Which is why gentrification is profitable - rich people exploit the commons of a flourishing lower class mutual aid network which persist in the design and culture of the space even when the lower class people are gone).
That is, unless a violent organisation like the police or the CIA or a multinational corporation or an invading army forcefully breaks up that cooperation. Like happened when the US government funded drug gangs and arrested black panthers members to specifically break up black communities throughout the US. Or when the US government funded drug gangs and armed fascists to specifically break up socialist communities in central and south America. Or when the US government funded drug gang religious fanatics to break up communist communities in the middle east and South-East Asia.
It’s not that the entire system needs to change for this to work, it’s that this working changes the entire system.
Would it really? Capitalism is fundamentally a system of economic social relations, workers sell their labour power to the capitalism and so on - that’s the fundamental of it and all the various institutions inside (e.g. the police, financial sector, etc) aren’t essential/fundamental to the system. They can be changed/tweaked or abolished when the need arises, but the economic social relation between the two main classes cannot be.
Creating some self-managing community that focuses on eliminating the need for police doesn’t fundamentally challenge the system (economic class relations), neither does it really challenge the police as an institution given how they’ll still exist outside that community and, as you point out, is able to crush this community anytime if it ever becomes a legitimate threat.
Community self-management would quickly result in the redistribution (and hopeful removal) of the inequalities
The community would still operate under capitalist system which reproduces inequality - after all, the community does need money for things like food, rent, utility, essentials, etc. This requires participation in wage labour/markets which means there’s still income inequality, inequality in time one has to participate in the community, some people possibly having extra leverage due to private property ownership or their income/education, therefore new hierarchies spawning as a result, etc.
A commune like that under a capitalist system would be good as a survival strategy where the least well off can be supported and be kept over the poverty line (therefore reducing the need for theft but not eliminating it), but it wouldn’t remove economic or social inequality - it will just seep back in from the outside.
Crime isn’t high today
Don’t take what i say in the wrong way but what is listed does not really work any better than police. And before i go further, I also live in a place where police is lazy corrupt and racist to some extent, but first 2 are also a result of the fact they are not paid well.
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Teach everyone self defence - that is good in principle, but it is double edged sword - you are also possible training a future criminal, and it would most likely still be a net benefit
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organise your local communities and do community patrols (I don’t remember much about how it is done in wakanda, only saw the first movie and also a long time ago) - there are 2 possible ways - either we cycle through the population - then the quality of patrol would “vary” to put it gently, if we make a small subset of people who are nominated for the job - then you have made police again - they can still get corrupt
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Handle conflict mediation without a racist incarceration system that doesn’t work? - it is spoken in a self fulfulling prophecy way - it assumes (1) conflict mediation is always possible and (2) and you do not want a system which is racist. (2) is fine, but (1) is not easy. We do not a systematic framework (constitution) and people who understand it well. Not everyone can be put in burden of understanding the law (everyone should have basic understanding, but most people already do, but most real world crime is not that easy)
What is written, mostly works for a small community (of the size of a village (< 1000)). This may also justify living in smaller self sufficient communities, but this is not efficient (in sense of resource usage) - too many people would be constantly reinventing wheels. Also, the “quality” (read threat level) of criminal would vary from village to village, and if a criminal goes on village hopping rampage, these disconencted villages would be at a disdvantage, they can act like fediverse network - share the “post” with federating “communities” but if they are not federating with a community (either intentionally, or they have never come across yet) then the “post” would go unnoticed.
holy shit my dude black panther style means irl black panthers from actual history not marvel movies ffs
then i know even less, what and how do they do?
They were a group of black people who went around and did stuff for their local black communities. Specifically in this case, we’re referring to how they would ride around and watch cops so that they wouldn’t brutalize black community members. They also did food for kids and stuff like that. They got shut down by the FBI because they were feeding too many people (quite literally, the FBI admitted to it, look it up).
the behaviour definitely checks out as american. I did not know this (not an american, and do not know much of american black history). Thanks
Most Americans also don’t know about them. Its rather sad, cause as far as I understand, they were one of the most successful groups both from a communist and from an anti-racism perspective.
wakanda
it assumes (1) conflict mediation is always possible and (2) and you do not want a system which is racist. (2) is fine, but (1) is not easy
1 is actually not as hard as people make it out to be, people just think ‘mediation’ and ‘giving orders’ are the same thing. I did care for developmentally disabled adults, and part of my training was in conflict mediation. I’ve also worked in a low-cost hotel that housed drug dealers, and preferred to de-escalate conflicts between tweakers myself instead of calling the cops. One of the huge problems with the US police forces is that they generally assume conflict mediation isn’t going to work and jump straight to guns.
I also don’t understand why it’s not a political talking point that happy people don’t commit crime to begin with. The US is allergic to taxes being used to increase happiness. Benefits keep getting shot down like, oh no, we can’t have aid because people won’t use it to better themselves, they’re just going to stop stealing booze and start paying for it. Even their supposed downside is an actual improvement, I don’t get it.
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I’ve never needed a cop for anything, and in the case of theft, I hardly expect the item back in any usable condition anyway.
If someone shoots me and runs off, the cops can’t unshoot me, or unbeat me up, or unrape me. They might beat me up just for asking for help. Who’s to say I get a good cop that day?
Can we get the slavery aspect far the fuck away from punishment as well? I’m sick of this country (America) acting like the moral arbiter of the world while we still practice slavery.
Cops dont responsibly handle the authority they have been given and they desperately need to be put under adult supervision. We cant count of either of the two political parties to do that. Its been that way for at least 100 years. So maybe getting rid of them and letting something new form is the only way. They are hopeless.
Who needs cops anyway?
CHOP/CHAZ
I love this meme because this is the absolute spiciest take and I’m totally here for it.
I know people don’t like this concept, but I think it needs more genuine discussion. There is a general unwillingness to address the question of who comes to lend aid to someone who is being threatened. Personally, I like the answer “your neighbors, who’ve trained in deescalation and have no unique authority” a lot better than either “the state” or "no one ❤️ ".
