the dhs as a whole – and ice, as a part of it – was a horrible idea for civil liberty, and a wonderful idea for authoritarianism. ( thanks bush jr. )
if nothing else, one good thing about a federalized police force would be forcing cops to move every so often, breaking up the good old boy network. ( tho maybe that’s possible without federalizing them. )
one big factor with policing i think has been that tax cuts – and a lack of money – has forced cops to become responsible for literally everything under the sun. it has brought guns and the threat of violence into situations where it’s both unnecessary and dangerous. and its made civil forfeiture and ticketing a tool for revenue.
i think funding all the social services we need – possibly via the federal government – might help a lot.
for instance, move to funding mental health response under medical services, traffic enforcement under transportation, create an unarmed “force” for noise and nuisance ordinances, and so on. then lock away any revenue they generate into something completely useless.
decrease the importance of police and policing, and they will do less damage.
do you have plenty examples for your peaceful communities? out of the head I couldn’t name a contemporary society without police organisations (this is an honest question)
Christiania is an interesting historical example, although it has lately been reclaimed by the state. Marinaleda in Spain, or in France you could look at the ZADs
These are just high-profile, public examples, though. Bear in mind also that much of the world lives outside the reaches of law enforcement simply by virtue of being in a shanty town, undeveloped region, or undocumented/illegal community. We don’t hear a lot about these places, but could learn a lot from them.
The ‘niceness’ of policing in Canada is sometimes overstated, though…the RCMP, in just one of many examples, has been documented in systematically ignoring if not actively contributing to the very high rates of violence against Indigenous women (particularly along the region now known as the 'Highway of Tears)
I think you are conflating police and armed police. Yes, it is hard to imagine a modern society with no police force at all, and calling them something else, Community Service Functionaries or what have you, would be a mere semantic dodge. And imagining they would be uttely force-free or never use excessive force in the circumstances is a pipe dream.
But lots of places, even pretty rough ones at times, like Great Britain have a long tradition where most police, most of the time do not carry firearms in their daily duties. If you read British press accounts the phrase ‘armed police were called’ or armed officers responded’ clues you in that this was something of a big deal at the dispatch desk. Not a food fight in the middle school cafeteria.
For the uninterested the list they came up with was:Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand.
I can assure you from experience that is far from comprehensive. I can’t recite the policy manual, but in my travels I have seen a lot of beat cops without firearms (but with other less-lethal tools on belts) in Japan and Taiwan. Many Alaska native villages have a trained but unarmed police officer or two with full arrest powers in residence and would have to call the State Troopers to fly in if gunfighters were needed.
It’s also worth mentioning that in many non-USAdian places with armed police, it is a Very Big Deal for the police to even draw their weapons, let alone use them.
The casual use of firearms as first-option compliance tools is a very unusual thing.
Christiania is the only one I can comment on and this is imo not an example of a “community which keep the peace without the involvement of armed and legally privileged “professionals””. The freetown thrives and works within the Danish state, best example is probably the self-imposed ban on hard drugs: Within the first 5 years (or so) of the existance of Christiania the residents cooperated with the Danish police to accomplish this goal. Denmark recognizes the quarter as social experiment, it is not deteached from the public institutions.
[quote=“bobechs, post:48, topic:85355”]
I think you are conflating police and armed police. […] But lots of places, even pretty rough ones at times, like Great Britain have a long tradition where most police, most of the time do not carry firearms in their daily duties.[/quote]
You have a point here, and my point of view is Germany. The police is armed but weapon usage (or even the threat to use a weapon) is extremly rare. I cannot assess how often in happens in the US but I never read* that a German cop was fired because of not shooting down a suicidal person (like this article) or all the stories about gun usage because a suspect was not able to fulfill all orders at once (“lie on the ground, give me the papers, hands where I can see them”).
* Germany has it’s fair share of unwarranted police shootings, well-known is a 2013 case of a killed guy with a knife, standing naked and clearly confused in a fountain. But this is already 3 years ago, and I cannot remember a similar WTF event since then.
Looks like the “two other cops” then rapidly decamped to Cleveland and shot a 13-year-old boy:
(ETA: /s of course, I know the OP incident happened some time back. But this is exactly the kind of scenario where officers of Mr. Mader’s quality would have saved lives.)
