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Re:Slack Removed a Blog Post Showing How Police Use Its Tech by throwaway894345 on Friday June 05, 2020 @04:25PM (#23433546)
> Police is conceptually good, but in practice can be be anything from net bad to net good.

I hear this a lot, but I have a really hard time imagining a functioning society with no police. A society can't function (pretty much by definition) without law and order and law and order has never existed apart from some policing apparatus (at least not for anything besides the simplest of civilizations). Our police are surely suboptimal, but I don't see any sense in the idea that we would be better off with no police at all.

Re:Slack Removed a Blog Post Showing How Police Use Its Tech by dathinab on Friday June 05, 2020 @04:59PM (#23433882)
Yes, through if you look at the role the police plays for some minority's, especially in some authoritarian or unstable countries they might be better off with no official police and (likely biased and not very good) self mad order keeping.

Through I don't think this is the case for any democratic country.

In the end bad police is normally better for larger societies then no police at all.

But at the same time bad police can do a lot additional damage. I.e. it keeps some sources of danger in check but at the same time adds a new source of danger.

Which is, I thing, one reason why some people believe they can do without police. The other reason is the thing below:

Law and order exists just fine in small isolated (but not simple) societies without police. Especially if the society mostly contains similar minded people.

Additionally you need neither law nor order in the modern sense for a small isolated but we'll working society. A common goal, respect for other people and implicit traditions can be enough in that case.

I also can thing of at least on model for a larger society working without police through some form of self policing and self survilence but that's much more distopian than the US system as far as I can tell.