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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Amen. What I find fascinating and difficult to swallow is impoverished (and non) people’s desire to have kids and not raise them, almost as if they are happy with their shit sandwich, and think “yeah” I’ll give this to a another human. Boy o boy have I seen deplorables breed when they are in no capacity to look after themselves. It comes across to me as a type of evil. The meat grinder is made from this stupidity.
Boy o boy have I seen deplorables breed when they are in no capacity to look after themselves.
This is why I decided I didn’t want kids many years ago. I can barely look after myself, I can’t imagine having to take care of kids.
The cruelest thing you can do to another person is to bring them into the world. If you’re already going to be that much of a monster the least you can do is fucking look after them, too.
Well said.
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
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.
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.
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.
yeah, it was only when we added in paychecks they became police.
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.
Modern police forces are what we decided to do with the slave catchers and mercenaries for hire that would have started gangs if the government didn’t put them to work.
Take the word overseer, like a sample
Repeat it very quickly in a crew, for example
Overseer, overseer, overseer, overseer
Officer, officer, officer, officer Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity? Check the similarity
The overseer rode around the plantation
The officer is off, patrollin’ all the nation
The overseer could stop you, “what you’re doin’?”
The officer will pull you over just when he’s pursuin’
The overseer had the right to get ill
And if you fought back, the overseer had the right to kill
The officer has the right to arrest
And if you fight back they put a hole in your chest (woop)
They both ride horses
After 400 years, I’ve got no choices
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
So this doesn’t work for a variety if reasons. The biggest being stability. Investigator is a technical and important job, you need a certain level of IQ and EQ to perform the role effectively. No one with a good combination of intelligence and know how would wait around for 90 days for their job to reopen. You would immediately lose them to the private sector. Police retain people based on job security and home life stability, especially as you climb the ranks. Second, this does not account for when no qualified candidates are found. Police departments are often understaffed now for these roles. There’s also no greater command structure. If higher rolls have a similar system you are even less likely to find qualified candidates. It will eventually debase into the same two peopke running everytime and just becoming the full time investigators anyway. Something similar will happen with your consultants. Either every group will need the same small pool or they will just eventually be the go to corruptible person. On top of all this you still need beat cops or patrol officers, which despite their current reputation in America do provide valuable services to the community. A first responder sitting at home doesn’t help anyone one when seconds matter most.
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.
So when it’s not state sponsored, it only sometimes turns into racists oppressing poor people and minorities, and you consider this worse than the current alternative?
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
He got ratiod by redditors but he’s not wrong
Community organization is objectively better than our current approach to police which is to act as an occupying military force.
Police is community (government) organized.
The only difference is size.
Yes, it’s better for police to actually be accountable to their neighbors than a top down fedual structure of law enforcement.
Works both ways unfortunately.
Do better.
Improve the world, start with yourself. You muppet.
Removed by mod
Make me.
KKK will
Removed by mod
Lol…
You fookin wat?
Like they say, you can’t fix stupid.
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?
I wonder if they’d become a gang instead. Community police of their own
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.
Couldn’t those community patrols be considered a type of police
Normally theyre called gangs. The thing that made the black panthers special is that as a cause it was killed before it deteriorated. A lot of gangs form to protect from other gangs, police corruption, and general sense of community.
Usually most folks aren’t willing to do things free, so it devolves as it grows. Loses the original basis for formation. It’s why christians is a confusing term, you have atheists, catholics, buddhists, etc. All lumped in while all can and are christian, there is degrees of severity.
Oh so like first it starts out protecting the community from issues but then it turns into “the crips have to pay” and now heroin to pay for a turf war…
That’s interesting
You start protecting the community but who is paying you, your rent, or your food? You have to start charging and now you’re another tax. Tensions rise. And yes this would impact drug trafficking which is usually lethal. Note, junkies are relatively safe, dont get between their drugs or stare and you are good.
Trying to do good is difficult because by definition, the only good thing you can do is retain the status quo. Any change will have negative repercursions.
A good goal quickly deteriorates when the power structure forces you to deal with the devil. And where does he reside?
Atheists and Buddhists aren’t christians? I was gonna say do you mean religious, but atheists aren’t religious either
Atheists can be christians by believing in the structure provided through it, atheism is just not believing in god.
I do not believe in a greater being, I believe in man. Even Jesus himself did not claim to be of god but of man, and that he was purely a messenger.
Buddhist’s can be primarily Christians as well, however they adhere not to just one guide of knowledge. That’s the weakness with my experience in western life, I was born christian. I saw buddhism as a differing way of life, while it really is more structural and philosophical to me than spiritual.
Dramatization and symbolism is lost when talking about something as complex as religion.
The bible itself is a collection of texts, your spiritualism and religion doesn’t end there. It is something you live, endure, question, and eventually absolve yourself of through determination. It’s more just a guise for talking about our mortality, consequences, acknowledgements, and the thereafter.
So in the wake of death, your own or any you love, you have to imagine them. You will miss them and wish it were true, in it you will find your spark. You will awaken the ability to see the suffering, phantoms and demons everyone carries. However in such suffering you will savor the most delicate of kindness, appreciate the little passing moments.
In that you awaken the
sharinganroyalty free eyeball to see something you couldn’t before. I don’t think it is god, rather passion for the nectar of life. Regardless of hardships.For context. Catholic raised. Buddhist by 11. Sikh by 18. Eventually found Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings in a little free library this year. All while atheist - and now I question that, as this book allowed me to believe something I never could.
I agree with you. What would be the use of those patrols if not to police behaviour?
Maybe someone with more historical knowledge could expand on the meaning of “Black Panther style community patrols”.
I think the difference is the idea of people from the community, with the consent of the community, policing said community. From the community, for the community. I think it’s a nice idea, but it really depends on the actual community what that would look like. More peaceful and inclusive in some places, horribly authoritarian and racist (even worse than US cops now) in others.
But yeah it’d just be different form of policing and those doing it could be just called police.
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
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.
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?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.
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.
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.
