The police are a big net positive.
if you're white, perhaps, or rich, but certainly not for a disproportionately large number of non-white citizenry.
Imagine the police were right now dissolved.
Well, obviously no State is just going to say, "Ok, right this very second all of the police are fired. Now, maybe we should talk about what to do next in a few months? Put some ideas in a bottle and toss that into the ocean and when someone finds it, we'll come up with a plan."
Many, many more innocent people would be murdered. And raped. And robbed. And beaten up badly. And you name it.
You realize that the police can't
prevent crime, right? They only come into the picture
after a crime has already been committed. They are the clean up crew and the investigative arm.
So it becomes a question of mental deterrance; of getting caught. But deterance doesn't work on anyone intent on committing a crime. It only works on people who aren't otherwise criminals, but due to certain circumstances may find themselves in a unique situation that has driven them to contemplate committing a crime.
Iow, it only works on people who aren't actually going to commit a crime, but were merely
thinking of it and the fear of getting caught overrides that contemplation and they move on. But, again, I doubt many states--including Minneapolis--are saying they aren't going to do ANYTHING any more, so it's the wild west all over again (which, actually,
wasn't all that wild).
Here, btw, is an excellent
breakdown of the history of policing in America. Not surprisingly, in the South, it started as a means to retrieve kidnap victims that managed to break free from their captors. Aka, slavery.
Augmenting the watch system was a system of constables, official law enforcement officers, usually paid by the fee system for warrants they served. Constables had a variety of non-law enforcement functions to perform as well, including serving as land surveyors and verifying the accuracy of weights and measures. In many cities constables were given the responsibility of supervising the activities of the night watch.
These informal modalities of policing continued well after the American Revolution. It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring 1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984). By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place.
These "modern police" organizations shared similar characteristics: (1) they were publicly supported and bureaucratic in form; (2) police officers were full-time employees, not community volunteers or case-by-case fee retainers; (3) departments had permanent and fixed rules and procedures, and employment as a police officers was continuous; (4) police departments were accountable to a central governmental authority (Lundman 1980).
In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.
The key question, of course, is what was it about the United States in the 1830s that necessitated the development of local, centralized, bureaucratic police forces? One answer is that cities were growing. The United States was no longer a collection of small cities and rural hamlets. Urbanization was occurring at an ever-quickening pace and old informal watch and constable system was no longer adequate to control disorder. Anecdotal accounts suggest increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with some frequency. Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban centers than it had been rural villages (Walker 1996). But evidence of an actual crime wave is lacking. So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to?
More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to "disorder." What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the "collective good" (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.
Much more at the link. Highly recommended reading for anyone that actually gives a shit about proper perspectives and the like. The history of it all is far more vicious and corrupt than anything we're seeing today, ironically, so what's being contemplated these days is really more a final, we've had enough of this centuries-old social experiment and tried everything we could to rein it in, but it is the fruit of the fruit of the fruit of a poisoned tree and it's never been a net positive.
Again, just read
this in regard to Minneapolis:
For years, activists have argued that MPD has failed to actually keep the city safe, and City Councilmembers echoed that sentiment today during their announcement. MPD’s record for solving serious crimes in the city is consistently low. For example, in 2019, Minneapolis police only cleared 56 percent of cases in which a person was killed. For rapes, the police department’s solve rate is abysmally low. In 2018, their clearance rate for rape was just 22 percent. In other words, four out of every five rapes go unsolved in Minneapolis. Further casting doubt on the department’s commitment to solving sexual assaults, MPD announced last year the discovery of 1,700 untested rape kits spanning 30 years, which officials said had been misplaced.
1,700! That's mind boggling. That literally means there could be upwards of 1,700 confirmed rapists that have raped with impunity over the past 30 years
with an active police force in place the whole time. So, far from acting as any kind of deterrent, imagine you're a rapist
whose crime has been reported and a rape kit taken from your victim--so you're facing the very real possibility of being arrested/imprisoned--and nothing happens. Instead of acting as a deterrent, the police force now acts as an
encouragement for you to rape again.
So here's an idea of what is being contemplated:
The Council’s move is consistent with rapidly-shifting public opinion regarding the urgency of overhauling the American model of law enforcement. Since Floyd’s killing and the protests that ensued, officials in Los Angeles and New York City have called for making deep cuts to swollen police budgets and reallocating those funds for education, affordable housing, and other social services. Law enforcement officers are not equipped to be experts in responding to mental health crises, often leading to tragic results—nationally, about half of police killings involve someone living with mental illness or disability. As a result, public health experts have long advocated for dispatching medical professionals and/or social workers, not armed police, to respond to calls related to substance use and mental health. Polling from Data for Progress indicates that more than two-thirds of voters—68 percent—support the creation of such programs, versions of which are already in place in other cities such as, Eugene, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Denver, Colorado.
“Our commitment is to do what is necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis Police are not doing that,” Bender said Sunday. “Our commitment is to end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe."
Basically, put the money into the communities where most crime occurs to begin with and change the first responders from armed thugs to trained specialists who know how better to deal with the majority of the underlying issues.
There's a meme going around social media these days about how nurses routinely deal with people whacked out of their gourds on all manner of drugs violently acting out and yet none of them had to kneel on any necks for nine minutes until their patients died.
And then there is
this:
Would defunding police lead to an uptick in violent crimes?
Defunding police on a large scale hasn't been done before, so it's tough to say. But there's evidence that less policing can lead to less crime. A 2017 report, which focused on several weeks in 2014 through 2015 when the New York Police Department purposely pulled back on "proactive policing," found that there were 2,100 fewer crime complaints during that time.
The study defines proactive policing as the "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" and heightened police presence in areas where "crime is anticipated."
That's exactly the kind of activity that police divestment supporters want to end.
Here's the study:
Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime. Snippet:
In the last few decades, proactive policing has become a centrepiece of ‘new policing’ strategies across the globe. The logic, commonly associated with the broader theory of order maintenance policing (OMP; also known as broken windows), is that rather than wait for citizens to report criminal conduct, law enforcement should proactively patrol communities, maintaining order through systematic and aggressive low-level policing. According to proponents, increasing police stops, quality-of-life summonses, and low-level arrests deters more serious criminal activity by signalling that the area is being monitored and that deviance will not be tolerated. As a corollary, following a phenomenon termed the Ferguson effect, disengaging from proactive policing emboldens criminals, precipitating spikes in serious crime.
But while elected officials commonly justify proactive policing by pointing to the enforcement of legal statutes, the strategy’s efficacy continues to be debated. A serious concern is that proactive policing diverts finite resources and attention away from investigative units, including detectives working to track down serial offenders and break up criminal networks. Proactive policing also disrupts communal life, which can drain social control of group-level violence. Citizens are arrested, unauthorized markets are disrupted, and people lose their jobs, all of which create more localized stress on individuals already living on the edge. Such strains are imposed directly through proactive policing, and thus are independent from subsequent judgments of guilt or innocence. Inconsistency in aggressive low-level policing across community groups undermines police legitimacy, which erodes cooperation with law enforcement. The cumulative effect increases ‘legal cynicism’—individual reliance on extra-legal sanctions and informal institutions of violence as a replacement for police. Reflecting these mechanisms, we propose that sharply reducing proactive policing in areas where it had been deployed pervasively may actually improve compliance with legal authority, thereby reducing major crimes.
Communication in the form of letters, haggling, and protests aren't directions; they're requests. Public employees don't have to comply with them. The only thing the public can tell an official to do that the official actually has to do is "Get out of your office; it's your successor's office now."