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 ...
If criminals and law abiding citizens carried weapons then these strategies could work.
But, far too many people are looking for LEO’s to solve even verbal spats.
It comes down to this: The author has not the least grasp of human nature.
Heck, when I was in high school (70-72) I would say that Socialism is the most efficient form of government - and God help the human beings that lived within it. It would work with automatons only.
Like Gitmo prisoners?
Or like the Hells Angels at Altamont. Esquire titled its Altamont story, "Aquarius Wept."
>>I once had a liberal boss who blamed Pres. Reagan for closing the mental hospitals.
They all do. That’s their version of history.
Is this the same magazine that published a fake story about a gang rape at a campus? Why would I take this rag seriously?
Informant #7
“What has this person been smoking?”
A lot of the stuff he wants to decriminalize.
Why, did you boss wanna check in?
Badam tish.
Put everyone who belongs to a fraternity in jail. They are all going to be charged with serious offenses anyway, and as we all know it is the seriousness of the charge that matters.
Rolling Stoned has NO credibility outside of modern music.
There were very few cops in the US prior to the Civil War. Most places had a sheriff...but he had the right to REQUIRE any and all able bodied men to help him chase down criminals. That was the militia: men capable of using arms to protect their community, who could be called upon at any time to stop robberies, etc.
“The notion of a posse comitatus has its roots in ancient English Law, growing out of a citizen’s traditional duty to raise a “hue and cry” whenever a serious crime occurred in a village, thus rousing the fellow villagers to assist the sheriff in pursuing the culprit. By the seventeenth century, trained militia bands were expected to perform the duty of assisting the sheriff in such tasks, but all males age fifteen and older still had the duty to serve on the posse comitatus.
In the United States, the posse comitatus was an important institution on the western frontier, where it became known as the posse. At various times vigilante committees, often acting without legal standing, organized posses to capture wrongdoers. Such posses sharply warned first-time cattle rustlers, for instance, and usually hanged or shot second-time offenders. In 1876 a four-hundred-man posse killed one member of the infamous Jesse James gang and captured two others.”
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Posse+comitatus
I would love living in the land of liberals, because in the world of the blind the man with sight will be king.
Ah, yes, let’s fire the cops and go back to vigilantism. This kid has too much time on his hands.
"Anyone else want to negotiate?"
The problem is that just being a cop makes many people bad. Few people are capable of having power over others and not using it.
Throughout American history vigilante groups either did their work and quickly disbanded, or they led to the formation of anti-vigilante groups to oppose their excesses, and something very like civil war.
If you want to test the liberals “plan” for a world without cops, let me suggest putting a fence around Chicago (or any other demodummie controlled city) and let those inside the compound fight it out to the last man. It probably would not take too long, look what was happening in Ferguson, MO and they didn’t even have a fence. Turn them lose on one another and stand back.
Author apparently believes that crime would disappear if tight-ass upper-class people would recognize that most of this disorderly behavior is simply the normal leisure time activities of what he calls “working-class people.” (Ignoring the fact that this group today does very little actual work.)
Thus “crime” is simply a problem of definition. Redefine 75% of it as “not crime” and we’ve reduced crime by 75%!
What he ignores is that this “disorderly behavior” he finds so charming when viewed from a distance makes life very, very difficult for those forced to live in the middle of it.
This is similar to those who want to “decriminalize” disorderly behavior in our schools when committed by Designated Victim Groups. The primary effect of this is that those students who actually do want to learn will find it impossible.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.