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Grace's avatar

Great post. The thing that makes me most concerned about the future of policing in the US is the worry that the increased divisiveness of police-as-a-concept is going to lead to a situation where the only people who want to be cops are those that are totally bought into the whole "Blue Lives Matter" ethos, while anyone with perhaps more nuanced views would steer far away (including because of social pressures). Maybe this is a situation that already largely exists - but I feel the only way we are actually going to get better policing is by recruiting cops who are willing to think critically about their role in society, and strive to improve it, and it just feels like the current environment is going to make that harder, not easier. The answer may lay partly in the "less job security, better pay" option Matt described, but I don't know if that's powerful enough to counteract the cultural aspect of this.

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Nicholas Sooy's avatar

Back when Defund hit big and you did your article on Alex Vitale, I tried to find more sources on how we would respond to violent crime once the police were abolished and I could never get a good answer. Most people I asked accused me of being a bad person for asking this question. The best answer I found is that some police abolition activists argue for "community self-defense." I found a few articles detailing how this works, and the clearest answer was a story of a group of women who all learned martial arts and started "policing" their neighborhood.

What this essentially amounts to is either 1) comic book style vigilantism as the alternative to policing where each neighborhood or city has their own martial arts "justice league" or 2) organized private security firms that offer response to violent crime. Either way we are essentially privatizing violence. I'm not sure that private security will be any more effective or accountable than public security. The third option, of course, is the one you quoted above, that there's a small "elite" police force to respond to violence. But that isn't police abolition. That proposal still involves having police.

It sort of boggles my mind how much time we spent pushing for abolition without spelling out what privatization would involve.

Another proposal I heard was "unbundling" police, which involves creating dedicated mental health and homeless response, etc. I also found it puzzling how sold we were on this solution, given that in places like Sunyvale, CA, the opposite seems to be successful. In Sunnyvale they bundle all public response personnel. The same people are police, fire, and EMS. They found this increases the quality of policing because police are trained to respond not just as warriors but also as medical care providers and as rescuers. So another solution to police brutality is to expand the police and to make the police do everything!

The lesson I take from all of this is that we need a lot more reflection and investigation of our options here because the "right answer" here is far from clear.

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