Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody's Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World

rollingstone ^ | Dec. 16, 2014 | José Martín

[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.

[samtheman]

The reason liberals believe crap like this is that they yearn for the jack-booted full government iron-mask power that would quickly evolve from these wistful flirtations with commune living. (And they all fantasize being at the top of the jack-boot hierarchy.)

The pattern is clear:
1. Subvert laws and lawful authority (most importantly, the US constitution)
2. Promote anarchy and street-gang flash-mob random thuggery
3. Embrace the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that will surely (and quickly) follow #1/#2.
4. Live in a “perfect world” in which all formerly normal people are slaves and a few lucky Top Intellectuals (and all liberals fantasize that they personally will make the cut here) are the slave masters.

[cpdiii]

This, this is a crazy one: mental health care
 Liberals love to forget that it was them who sued to end involuntary commitments of crazy people/

They are now the editors and journalists at the Rolling Stone"

[SaraJohnson]

He needs to return to Mexico. Good grief.