Society needs an authority to turn to to resolve disputes or injustice and to maintain order, the alternative is chaos.
That authority may not be perfect, it may have certain biases that need to be worked on, but without it, disputes will be won by the superior marksman.
I guess, then, at the heart of the 'defund the police' movement is an attempt to move toward working on those biases.
That is what is lost in much of the conversation - we need to fix certain things in the policing of the US - because people immediately turn to 'what will we do if there are no police'.
I guess, how do we turn the conversation from 'defund the police' to 'fix this shit' without losing people along the way?
I don't have answers for any of this.
Allegedly the unions have positioned themselves as the chief obstacle to any & all reforms.
Deuteronomy 16:18
I'm not a minority and I grew up solidly upper middle-class. But even as a child, I knew that it was really dangerous to piss off the police.
Because the police were generally considered to just be the biggest and best armed gang. Because they acted that way.
Things have gotten much better in the ensuing 35-40 years here, but there are still serious, structural problems with police impunity -- especially if you're a minority[0][1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/10/13/nypd-stop-frisk-warrants...
Modern polling is what I based by contention on, and I don't think citing the most notorious counter-example (and reaching back before reforms to solve exactly the problem you allege) is much of a response.
Minority communities routinely poll in favour of INCREASED presence in their communities nowadays.
I'm pretty much with George Carlin (at least I'm pretty sure it was him) WRT the police: "It's not that I don't like the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
This is like the review site problem... people don't tend to walk around giving random anecdotes about good experiences with routine or common services.
But the polling is what I based my comment on. Even in minority communities, increased police presence polls significantly higher than decreased presence - and that's before proposing any reforms.
For most people, these two things align.
Most. Not all. That is my point. I live in a community that the police absolutely have no interest in protecting. We are a problem to be dealt with, not a community to protect.
Not everyone has that experience, I understand that. But police are, by virtue of who pulls the purse strings, an extension of the power of government.
I never said all police don't care about protecting you. I said they absolutely care about protecting you, as long as your wants align with the needs of the state.
> If you genuinely believed the police are there to protect you, and not to ensure the status quo is enforced and continues, you are naive, or you are not part of a marginalized group.
Do you know this is just regurgitated political theory from Karl Marx and wasn’t considered even remotely true for thousands of years?
Is it true now? Probably not, but you seem convinced it’s true...
Police (and other law-enforcement) are an exercise of the power of government. The former exists to ensure the latter can continue to exist.
Therefore, police (and law-enforcement) exist to enact laws to preserve the status quo and whatever accepted social mores happen to be in vogue at the time via statute. Protecting you and your loved ones only occurs when your needs align with the desires of the state.
If you happen to be part of a marginalized group, often, power structures dictate that the desires of the state run contrary to your needs, or, more often, the desires of the state are literally enacted to make your life more difficult.
For example - Where I live, we have a saying, "No cops, no problems." This is because a) police take 45+ minutes to respond because we're very rural, b) police generally only respond by taking notes and harassing anyone they find on the scene, regardless of their role, and c) police, once they respond, are well known to run warrants on anyone around just to be able to say they've arrested someone that day (the second part of that is my conjecture, but I also can't come up with a reason they would run warrants on an innocent bystander, regardless of said bystander's past).
My need of having my car not be stolen apparently does not align with the government's need to ensure my father is prosecuted for low-level drug offenses from many years ago. (to use the next word too much, I think) Therefore, police do not have my interests at heart. Please apply this lesson to any other marginalized group to see where the problems with police come from, and why I called you naive.