The problem with the US is that we don’t really have many actual communities. We don’t even have neighbors, we just have people we live next to. And it’s also full of racist assholes who think a Black man walking into his own house is a burglar. Real community policing is looking out for one another and living together, not snitching and bitching while hiding behind your curtains because you’re terrified of the person across the street whom you’ve never even met.
Police don’t stop crime. At best they clean up after it, and at worst they instigate and perpetrate it themselves. All the policing in the world isn’t going to save you from getting burgled. But living in an actual neighborhood with a community that knows about and checks up on everyone else very well might. There’s solidarity in that. Now, it would also help if we gave people the things they needed so that they would have less incentive to commit crimes in the first place, but “just give people houses” is even more of a radical concept than “we don’t need to be controlled by state-sanctioned wielders of violence” for some reason, so it’ll probably be a while before we get to that point.
