Quote:
Originally Posted by
fred41
Defund the police...hmm... can anyone on this site that agrees with that sentiment, please explain how it would work in the real world, and what would effectively take its place.
As you probably know by now, it goes beyond de-funding, as Minneapolis City Council member Lisa Bender has argued:
Yes. We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.
https://twitter.com/lisabendermpls/s...44819628224513
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/...tments-future/
And this from the Telegraph, for once not hidden behind a paywall:
"Pledge to 'dismantle' Minneapolis police force
The president of the Minneapolis City Council has pledged to "dismantle" the city's police force and "replace it with a transformative new model of public safety" in the wake of George Floyd's death.
During a meeting on Thursday night, Lisa Bender said she would support shifting from a traditional police force into a broader public safety department. Under such a system, some of the incidents the police currently respond to would be handled instead by staff such as social workers or medics.
Ms Bender stressed that she was voicing her own views, rather than the council as a whole, but said the idea was likely to be given more consideration later this year.
“To do this kind of big work, we need a deeper, broader conversation than we’ve ever had before,” Ms Bender said. “We need white people like me and my neighbours to show up in a different way.”
The idea has already been touted by grassroots social justice organisations in the area, such as Black Visions Collective and United Against Police Brutality.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...-matter-us-uk/
This seems to me to be loaded with questions and problems, and is something I would expect from Libertarians explaining how public order would be maintained in the absence of government, assuming that in a country with zero to minimal government, pubic safety would be locally organized. The most obvious problem is that in the absence of a formal police force, a 'Neighbourhood Watch' would emerge -after all, some of them (in the UK for example) emerged because local people felt neglected by the police. In the US with so many guns and automatic weapons, Neighborhood Watch only works when the people involved are responsible, but you only need one George Zimmerman to decide who is in control in a given situation, to undermine the argument.
The broader argument is also flawed, because the nature of a Liberal Democracy is one in which the State has a legitimate monopoly of the use of force, and setting aside how and when it uses it, this right takes away the right of indivduals to bear arms, because they are protected by that police service- indeed, the right to bear arms and use them is one that indivduals surrender to the State in order to receive its protection.
The last point is this: there were riots and looting in Boston, but the City has acquired a reputation for Community Policing that has seen a decline in crme, and one assumes, a better relationship between police and their community- so I am not sure if the riots and looting undermine this trend, or have been a one-off. But it does show that a different style of policing, and a closer working relationship with local people does mean change can happen without dismanting the force. In many urban areas of the UK we suffer from the opposit of community policing, namely confrontational policing and numerically Black Britons are more likely to be in confrontation with the police than any other group. I think we need a Boston model here.
This is I think a fair review of the model in Boston-
https://pioneerinstitute.org/better_...success-story/