People have literally been calling for just that here. The "replacements" as proposed are not by any stretch of thr imagination what you might call a "police force".

Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.

Depends who's suggesting a replacement. Camden literally just created a new police force from the ground up to replace the deeply abusive one they disbanded. It's hard to disentangle the union-busting function from the culture-changing function, since the two are so closely intertwined in the US.

Camden NJ, in 2013? They hired back most of the officers who were fired when the department became a division of the county police. They went through more training, psych profiling, and then put more officers on the streets and implemented a broken windows policy to get the murder rate under control, which later was rolled back after protests.

That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead.

Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma".

This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".

The OP that all this is in response to is not advocating that, which you can tell by the fact that they don't use the word "abolish":

> We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service

There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution.

About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.

If a company was struggling to hire and incapable of performing its primary function it gets wound up.

Why should the same logic not apply to police forces?

Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.

In the case of this city, it is more like a company is having a hard time hiring QA testers because the COO and all the directors have been publicly saying for months that they plan on firing all the testers and making the engineers do their own QA instead, because bugs are a code problem and engineers know code better, and if only we didn't have QA there wouldn't be any bugs in the first place.

> I don't think people are asking for abolishing the police force

Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means.

Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.