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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 ❤️ ".
@compostgoblin Please take a moment to think and tell me why, in your opinion, someone could come to hate cops.
Well, there are many reasons someone could come to dislike cops, but their legacy and ongoing patterns of brutality and racial discrimination both come to mind.
I live in a small town in the rural south.
The 'community patrols' would very quickly turn into KKK lynch mobs going after anyone that was 'woke'.
Yeah, ACAB, but the alternative that would happen in most places is pretty bad too. There's gotta be a 3rd way to keep people safe without using either cops as they exist now or vigilance committees.
I think the 3rd option is just this with licensing.
I don't expect a system of community policing right now to be good, but let's start with the idea of cops who are required to live and serve in the same area. No traveling to the next town over to police people.
Next, no qualified immunity. No special exemptions to laws or unique authorization of violence. You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
If you required local protectors to organize within a licensing body that only let people participate in their organization after meeting requirements I think what you'd get would be an improvement on what we have without being totally chaotic and lawless.
Mostly, yeah. But being part of the community also means having potentially the same bigotry as the community. Again: I'm in a very, very white town in the rural south; most of the residents are low-key racist, and some aren't even low-key about it.
You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
This one I would disagree with. I don't think that there should be a general right for citizens to arrest people; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery wasn't too terribly far from me, and that started as citizens trying to arrest a guy for jogging while being black. (Come to think of it, based off police arrests, doing pretty much anything while being black is an arrestable offense.) I think that powers of arrest should be limited to people that have gone through a minimum of two years of training in law enforcement--including law!--and have passed exams to become certified. (So yes, I agree that there needs to be a licensing body that exists outside of the control of the police departments or police unions.)
I absolutely agree that qualified immunity shouldn't exist, or at least, not the way it does now. What is covered should be codified into law, and everything that's outside of that should be not covered. Take, for instance, a high speed chase, where an objectively dangerous person is fleeing police; without qualified immunity, if a police officer lost control of their car and caused harm to a bystander, that officer would be criminally liable. I don't think that's a reasonable outcome, given that the alternative--not pursuing an objectively dangerous person--seems like the worse option. (Yes, yes, they could use a helicopter, but that's not always an option.) But there are a lot of things that do get covered under qualified immunity--like killing someone by tazing them repeatedly while their hogtied in the back of a patrol car--that absolute should not, under any circumstances.
The police problem is genuinely difficult. I think that a lot of it is cultural, with old cops sharing institutional practices with new cops, and perpetuating cycles. I think that kind of culture needs to be broken, so that cops genuinely feel a sense of responsibility, and want to do the right thing in the right way. I don't know what the best way to approach that is though.
I can also see community "policing" in cities devolve into chaos as a bunch of petty kings pop up in every neighbourhood.
The guys in those hypothetical lynch mobs are the cops today.
At least in this scenario you could get your buds and shoot back at the klan fuckers, maybe.
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.
They need to have a FEDERAL licence to provide law enforcement. So you cant just move when you get in trouble.
Each officer needs to carry their own "malpractice" insurance so the city/state doesnt have a financial interest in ignoring bad behavior.
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.
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.
Keep me honest, isn't the gangsta group called Crypts came from this?
Crips, which have been given the backronym "Community Resistance In Progress".
But it doesn't take much research to show they do not stand for the types of values you're referring to.
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
The police is supposed to be a standardized rules based version of this, where the whole force is subject to law and can be held accountable, because chances are that unless you're lucky or able to move, you'll have a less than ideal local community.
It's not exactly unusual for people to be either lazy or unethical.
You're almost lucky if they just reject your efforts to organize, the guys in your community could easily do like crooked cops and repurpose the group to do crimes like harassment, theft, extortion, assault, kidnapping, rape and murder together. Of course the first ones being more likely.
Some of you might prefer the targets they pick, though. Like beating a racist Asian grocer, threatening a woman 10 blocks away who cheated on one of the guys, and maybe kidnap and sodomize some dweeb none of you liked since high school. Shit like that.
American police probably has too many issues to be reformed without being completely rebuilt with fresh hires across the board and making new rules and procedures. All "cops" should be fired, all "cop" culture must be cleaned out and left to rot in shitty bars where old gangster cops will inevitably gather in the aftermath, where an actual new and accountable police force will likely arrest them and put them in prison for whatever fucked up shit they've just done.
Yes exactly, "Policing activity" will happen one way or another. It's the regulation, transparency, accountability that is used to weed out bad cops that is needed to make it beneficial to society.
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.
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.
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
I mean, it think it's the wrong question. I think the question is, what can we do to minimize the need for police? The problem there is it usually involves lifting up poorer communities and no one wants to supply these communities with the resources to do it.
This is true, but also incomplete.
I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm a socialist activist in Oakland (home of the original Black Panters!), and I gotta tell you, this is where the rubber really meets the road.
First, Oakland knows what's up. This is a very politically aware town, with some moderate but genuine leftists in government. We do a lot of community uplift here.
Second, Oakland has very few police. We didn't "defund the police" so much as "mismanage our budget", but we have very few cops relative to the size of our city.
Third: our poorest neighborhoods are suffering TERRIBLY from violent crime and property crime. The city is still nice, but the same areas in which a lot of poor, non-white folks can tell you stories about bad interactions with cops will be the first to tell you that alleviating poverty is important, but they need help NOW. They need someone to call when bullets start flying.
Frankly, I think OP -- and the Panthers! -- have it dead fucking right! We DO need folks on the street ready to step up. We need services, we need parks, we need gun control... we need a lot of alternatives to policing. But we also need direct timely response teams to problems happening NOW. And my fellow lefties should start chewing on that idea, especially as the fascist state begins sending the secret police to bag-and-tag your fuckin' neighbor!
I don't like it. But that's where we're at.
Agreed. It is multi step
You reduce the need for it, you reduce their military power. You give them better training and force them to use non lethal forces when possible (usually it is)
Stop breaking into people's houses incorrectly and shooting them
Also forced body cameras and strict follow up
Police should be needed less, but police still need to be policed by the people
Couldn't those community patrols be considered a type of police
I think this requires us to look into what the definition of that word is, as a verb.
To "police" is to dominate and enforce conformity, often with the threat of overwhelming consequence. A lot of people don't realize that the origin of the modern police department was crowd control. They were invented in cities in the early twentieth century to suppress riots and protests. The day-to-day patrol work is just an extension of that core mandate.
I think that if you trained folks up the way we do for volunteer fire brigades that'd be a lot more like working as an EMT than a soldier. Sometimes you might have to lay some hands. But, imo that is not policing if you only respond when someone calls for help as opposed to showing up uninvited to enforce the state's prerogatives.
Showing up to assist and protect someone who is crying out for help isn't actually "policing", imo. That's rendering aid. You aren't acting to disincentivize non-compliance with state directives. So I would not consider such a group to qualify as police, semantically.
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?
