I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask "what about the murderers, thiefs, rapists and criminal gangs? The obvious answer is that you need a police force. You can call it the flower-and-peace-corps if you want, but you need both enforcers and detectives to protect the population.
If what you mean is "reform the police", then don't call to "abolish the police".
> The obvious answer is that you need a police force
Yes, you've been conditioned by society to assume that's the only answer to this. Again this is what I mean by people are uneducated about policing and state power.
It strikes me as odd that someone as familiar with history as yourself would single out the US and the practice of slavery whereas slavery has existed almost everywhere in the world, including here in Europe. Yet nobody in Europe thinks that the formerly enslaved peasants' much temporally disconnected descendants are substantially worse off because of that or that this would somehow translate into today's policing.
In conclusion, abolishing the police is a completely stupid idea that the American people in general do not even support [1] that hurts not the tech elites of Silicon valley, but normal people living in high-crime areas.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dcBdhE...
This is going to need a citation. Cursory searching leads me to Sheriffs being elected in the early 1800s in Ohio. Ohio was also a free state in 1803 when it joined the Union.
These early slave patrols / night watches then fairly organically became the "police department" when that concept became widespread in the mid-1800s. I don't think it looks like said spread is really linked to emancipation, but rather (as with the creation of Peel's Metropolitan Police in London in 1829) in response to increasing urbanization / industrialization. Given that the industrial revolution also fairly-strongly caused the US civil war and thus emancipation, we could say it's more a parallel trend than the implied causation.
The cities going "well, we have a somewhat organized group of people whose job is to enforce some laws... why don't we wedge them into this new trend and have them enforce more laws?" gets us that link.
This summary seems reasonable, though I feel it elides the Peelite influence: https://law.jrank.org/pages/1640/Police-History-Early-polici...
Police in basically everywhere of the world was made by the ruling class to keep people in order. This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves. This is the history of policing in the US.
I think what it generally comes down to is a LOT of Americans, and a lot of people in the world haven't learned the history of their own country. People probably know more about WW2 than they do about the history of abuse in their own country. I unfortunately was one of these people and until I decided to listen to people and start studying the history of America I understood a lot of the things I stood for were based on essentially lies.
I do think saying "lets abolish police" without the context of "why", or "wait what about the murderers?" is harmful. I think people on the left generally assumes too much of people, and assumes that they've also spent many hours reading and understanding and discussing history.