Posted on 01/02/2015 9:22:14 AM PST by PROCON
It's time to start imagining a society that isn't dominated by police
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth.
But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:
1. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams
Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns – so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters.
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
This reminds me of the movie with Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock in a futuristic world (I think it was Demolition Man). The movie showed the idiocy of such a world when one evil man appears and they can’t deal with him within the new “rules” that society had accepted. The more liberals open their mouth the more they show they are absolutely divorced from reality.
“Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods”
Like Gitmo prisoners?
On the other hand, it would help if people who shot in self-defense were not labeled as “vigilantes”, as they are not. They are not concerned with justice, or right and wrong, but with preserving their lives.
Sure, they could walk around wearing suicide vests as a crime deterrent.
Brilliant idea!
The mental health issue is a major point. If you just let them out on the street, they will probably end up writing for Rolling Stone and cause more mental health issues.
The writer of this piece needs to put the bong down.
The only way to create a cop free society is to create a society that doesn’t need cops. That’s not going to happen in the urban environment.
Leftist writers like this think that we can survive a Utopian (read: communist) social structure, and the imposition of Judeo-Christian law and order just screws it all up.
It makes me think of the discovery of less advances societies by the crew of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek The Next Generation. Picard, Riker and Data would beam down to interact with and/or study less advanced communities living in mud houses, replete with “ancient customs” and a peaceful communal existence living “off the land.” Of course, Picard and his white, oppressive crew would just F’ it all up for the nice people, as, next thing you know, these formally docile humanoids are now at each others throats. The Star Trek writers cut their teeth at outfits like Rolling Stone magazine.
Judge us by our good intentions, not our disastrous results and unintended consequences.
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In a pollyannaish lala world, this might be possible. It ignores the fact that there are bad people who do bad things. There are evil people who do evil things.
Fixed that. There is damn little real journalism happening in this country.
(1) The ACLU won several important decisions that prevented the commitment of nut jobs to ye olde County Asylum. The courts ordered the freeing of huge numbers of them.
(2) Thorazine and Haldone got invented, which had the effect of making nuts act sorta normal, or at least peaceful, as long as they took them. Of course, once turned out of the asylum, there was no one to make them take them.
(3) Sorry. Lot's of Republicans were actually all for this because it saved a fortune
(4) If you want to see some of the best movie locations in the country, which can pass for schools, hospitals, country estates, etc. Ask a location director to get you a list of abandoned mental facilities near you.
No matter whose fault this is, it is one of the great tragedies of health care in this country. Many of the wack-job homeless would not be
I think you’d need to smoke a lot of weed....to think some type of essay like this would make sense.
Can anyone name a city of 2,000 residents that has no cop? Other than a retirement-style community....I can’t think of any such place in the US, Europe, or Asia.
The only crime in the new Socialist Paradise will be criticizing the new Socialist Paradise.
” Here’s a crazy one: mental health care”
The guy that wrote this could sure use some”
.
Yeah. That'll work.
dominated by police?
I don’t remember the last time I interacted with a cop... oh wait they asked if they could look in the backyard for something a fleeing perp might have dropped. (a guy had taken a shot at cops and run).
Before that.. I draw a blank
“the problem with the vigilantes was that they were often just a lynch mob with no concern about whether the crime had actually been committed”
We get the Salem Witch Trials from such vigilantes.
Surely José Martín is writing from the perspective of life in the barrio where cops are hated and the vatos don’t need no stinkin’ badges. As latino culture displaces the old, tired American one this will be our new world.
We will stand with our homies in defending our turf by challenging outsiders with the traditional “where you from?!!” followed by a fusillade of bullets when they give the wrong answer. Much better than the outdated white people idea of a police force.
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