Well, this is going to be an interesting experiment to watch.
It is interesting. Over in FB, I read arguments about security in gated communities, and then I thought about campus police at both private and public schools. Many examples of smaller, more local, well-focused and better prepared groups.
The idea of a sheriff using respectable men as needed, or using local militia, sounds nice. But too anachronistic.
I see NYC may also have a majority of city government considering extreme changes. That’s a massive organization. One good thing that was noted is that the NYPD has 18,000 civilians (non-cops). Reminds me of the administrative largesse at academic institutions. It would be good to see a lens focused at administrative costs. Businesses regularly go through such self-analysis.
@cameroonstarr, I invited Sereirath to join us here. What are your thoughts?
I like the arguments for smaller, more local law enforcement groups rather than huge, far-flung bureaucracies like the NYPD. Now of course, gated communities and universities are a more controlled, defined area than your average neighborhood or city block, so there would be complications in applying the model to those locations. I think it would difficult to implement in many places because such a policy would work best among people who are able to protect themselves and are generally self-sufficient. Many Americans rely heavily on the government for everything and would not be able to effectively police themselves. I think the increase in the power and militarization of the police can be traced to people giving up on their own self-government and then wanting the state to fill in the gaps, as has happened in many other places in American culture.
Even universities that have their own PD typically also rely on the local “real” PD for many things.
That’s true in many cases. I think it also depends on the university. My alma mater, University of Southern Indiana, had campus “security” officers who weren’t much more than glorified rent-a-cops with EMT training. Other universities I seen like Purdue and IU have much more organized police with substantial authority.
The people who are trying to abolish the police are also the people who have been trying to ban the law-abiding from having the tools of self-defense and indeed trying to abolish the legal concept of self-defense altogether.
There is a broad bipartisan feeling in this country that policing methods need to be reformed. But instead of pursuing that bipartisan consensus, one team has chosen to defend looting and lawlessness, and to drive a wedge into racial issues and center on the genuinely insane policy of abolishing the police.
Why is that? I don’t have any firm answers, but I have been wondering where the spiritual component has been to the Covid crisis, and I think I found it: it’s here, in the religious revival triggered by George Floyd’s death. It just isn’t our religion.
Yeah this is actually a push, not for less policing but a shift toward national police powers. That’s what they’ll be asking for next.
I think you’re right. If God isn’t our Lord, then the state will be our nanny.
If God isn’t our Father, the state is. Read “Idols for Destruction.”
I honestly do not see Minneapolis (or any town in America - especially big cities) completely getting rid of their police departments (PDs). If they try, it will not last very long. I distinctly remember what happened in Baltimore in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray. There was a serious spike in homicides as the PD “backed off” in their normal policing duties as officers were afraid of what would happen if they policed too aggressively. As I see it, the disappearance of any major city PD would quickly make them uninhabitable. My wife and I were talking about this today and she thinks that calls to dismantle PDs are ultimately political statements. They will use it as an opportunity to scale them back, reform practices, or perhaps completely reconstitute them. I think this is a likely scenario as getting rid of them is simply not possible.
If PDs are seriously scaled back, one result will be neighborhood patrols and vigilantism by civilians desperately trying to protect their streets and business from criminals and possibly moltov cocktail throwing rioters. I believe this will make things worse than before. There are certainly bad policies and wicked people in big city PDs, but taken as a whole they actually know something about the law, policing, and fighting crime. Armed citizens with no such experience would likely result in even more people getting shot and even more outrage and riots. A private citizen using a firearm to defend themselves or their family from an armed man who has just kicked down the door to the house down in the middle of the night is one thing. Patrolling a neighborhood, setting boundaries with protestors, responding to citizen calls about potential crimes, and catching wrongdoers is very different matter. I pray that this is not a burden that people must take upon themselves because of the actions of an overzealous city council.
Yes. And by untrained, afraid people who are the same ones that already issue alerts on Nextdoor about a black man delivering packages for Amazon saying things like this:
Watch out for the white van with the creepy guy in it driving around the neighborhood! He’s a kidnapper. He stopped and took a picture of my daughter! If anybody sees a white van call the police. I think he was heading towards M___ Street. My sister in law says that he offered her kids a ride! The police are on their way. Please let them know if you see him.
(We’ve seen this multiple times near us in the past few years. And the responses are just as bad. “He is on M St! OMG! I’ve got my kids locked in the basement and I’m following him towards G___ St right now.” “Thanks for the warning! I can’t believe the police are chasing a dangerous criminal through our neighborhood! I thought this place was safe!” And on and on.)
Can you imagine what would happen if there were no police to call? The poor guy would get shot at his next delivery for being black in a white neighborhood and not knowing the streets well yet.
Never mind the fact that there really are a lot of people perfectly willing to steal and mug and rob and… if there is no danger of being arrested.
A few years ago a man was intensely telling me that police were immoral and unconstitutional. At that time, I gave quite a bit of thought to what would happen if we abolished police. I always came back to the fact that there would have to be a group trained to specialize in apprehending dangerous criminals if you wanted to avoid lynchings and panics and such. I figured we could call them… police.
I don’t know if this is a fair comparison: in the UK policing is organised around the equivalent of several state police forces, 46 for a population of 67m. Perhaps if we discuss the issue in terms of, “what is a good size for a police force?” and then work back from there?
Are there any police or other law enforcement officers on this forum? I’d be very interested to hear their take on this situation.
I’m not sure there is a simple formula between LEO ratios to the public and the proper amount of policing. Back in college I remember reading a book called The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy by David Kopel. The topic was should America adopt the gun laws of other countries? From what I recall, and it’s been a long time since I read it, he made the case that the cultures of some nations that people point to for policy examples are so utterly different from our own, and that their effectiveness of such policies was deeply rooted in those cultural differences. I suspect the same is true of policing in general. Different communities have different needs, based on different temperaments. I would say some of that has gotten jumbled up many leftist have abandoned their urban experiments and moved to more Suburban and rural communities. But generally, I still think it’s impossible to declare any sort of perfect sized police force. The perfect size is the one that promotes the highest amount of virtue among its citizens.
Maybe in the middle of the anarchists’ demands for the defunding of law enforcement, what should be said is not that this might result in better organization of law enforcement, but that it is anarchy. That is the goal. That is the purpose. That is the dream and hope. My own judgment is that no one anywhere in this obscene rebellion is interested in using it to further subsidiarity. As always, rebellion will give birth to rebellion while authority continues its massive slide to D.C.
The work in front of us isn’t esoteric. Just tweeted: “Good shepherds expose lies and hypocrisies seducing their sheep to wander into idolatry of state, cheap moralism of SJW, propaganda of media, narcissism of social media, white xenophobia, black extortion, BLM anarchy… Truth will set them free.”
All of us who have discernment need to be hard at work right now with sheep protecting them from all the filthy lies. Love,
Concur. In the UK, police officers do not (normally) wear side-arms, but it works in our context where it would not work in other contexts. The number of people killed by police n the last five years, and the numbers of police killed in the line of duty in that time, is little more than a dozen in either case.
It appears sometimes disbanding the police department and starting over from scratch is what is needed to bring about drastic reform. This seems to be what happened in Camden.
While it does not change your point, the CNN article leaves out some context. In Camden, they increased the size of the police force from ~250 to over 400 officers, and they rehired 40% of the original department (100 officers per the CNN article). Source: this twitter thread, which links to this page on google books.
Perhaps what the best policy is reform plus an increased presence of a more community-friendly police. But I agree with Tim that good policy is opposite of the goals of the current movement. They primarily want power for themselves and/or anarchy.
With only a few exceptions I think most supposed anarchists are really just communists. They don’t actually want a power vaccuum, they want an ideological and power shift. I agree that at its root is rebellion and a hatred for God and all things that resemble godly authority, but the end result is almost always a more concentrated heavy handed government than what they started with. Samuel’s warning concerning a king is prime example.