Have you SEEN people? The answer’s not a challenge.
Something being against the law is a pretty big deal. Its one reason I find juneteenth kind of silly. Passing the amendment that made the previous activity illegal is a very big deal and certainly slavery has not disapeared with the passege of it but now folks can’t do it out in the open in that particular way. Its like what ice is doing now. Did police do stuff like this before. Eyup. but it was recognized as illegal and there was recourse that could take effect as quickly as deparmental procedures. Now the “question” of its legality is open. Thats not good.
The police in Australia here don’t really spend there time watching people and forcing them to do the right thing.
A lot of their resources are invested in regulating traffic. Issuing fines for speeding, playing with phones, not wearing a seatbelt. If you don’t punish people for being dickheads on the road it will be a shit show. If there’s an accident they show up in a moment, manage traffic, get the wrecks off the road, et cetera.
Another important function is domestic violence and other related domestic disputes. If someone is getting beaten by their spouse, a neighbor might call the police. They will show up and take the appropriate actions to resolve. Whether that’s just informal counseling or charging one or other combatant.
They also deal with mental health and substance abuse issues. I remember 20 years ago I woke up one morning and there was some teenager in my back yard. He was ranting about the robots attacking or something. I called the police and they showed up and took him to the emergency ward at the hospital.
They also manage petty or minor theft. I remember someone stole a (very nice) pair of shoes from my front door. I had some pretty good footage of them, and it’s a complicated story but they’d actually left a beer bottle with their prints on it earlier in the day. The police showed up and used the video to get the authorisation to search a couple of houses and found a bunch of stolen stuff.
If you didn’t have “police”, you’d need some other organisation to do these things.
Depends on the values of the society, but there will always be a need for at least some security (because some people are just maniacs).
I absolutely promise you if law enforcement ceased to exist tomorrow our society would collapse.
There are a SHIT TON of criminals out there and WAY MORE people who are currently law abiding citizens that would become criminals if there were no police around.
This isn’t really debatable. Law enforcement is necessary. Always has been. We just have horrible standards for law enforcement in the U.S. and have a culture that promotes bad behavior from them. And those standards can vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You can have a law enforcement agency that’s generally solid at their jobs with little to no corruption, and right next door in the next county you can have a shitstain agency that fucks everything up and is awful at their jobs.
The question isn’t whether or not we should have law enforcement. It’s how do we hold them to higher standards and punish them approprietly for their crimes?
"And gee, well, you know, you’ve got to have the police. Because if there were no police, look at what you’d be doing to yourselves. You’d be killing each other if there were no police!” But the reality is the police become necessary in human society only at that junction in human society Where it is split between those who have and those who ain’t got.
Apparently they stuck together multiple speeches from Omali Yeshitela to get the into to the song so I’m not sure which speech(es?) this is originally from.
There’s a balance between physically punitive surveillance state and consequences for your action.
A little bit of each but be careful, some people will take it as police doing what they want, that’s not good.
I used to play indoor soccer. The best games we ever had were when for one reason or another, there were no refs.
I kind of see this in the same vein as Christians saying, “How can you be moral without a belief in God?” I don’t believe it’s a presence of a deterrent that prevents it but a security in your environment or person that is the cause.
Sure there is always going to be people that take advantage of other: theft, rape, violence, murder. But these things haven’t been lost with the presence of police. In fact most studies offer solutions that involve enhancing/improving social and community structures without involving policing or an increase.
https://violenceprevention.tulane.edu/resources/strategies-for-community-based-violence-prevention/
Most “criminal” behavior you see is caused by poverty. The police do not help solve the problem whatsoever. The behavior that should be policed is abuse of power aka white collar crime, as this is the only way to make capitalism sustainable.
Depends. If you want the current social structure to keep existing as it is, police is needed.
Small groups can “police” themselves - you don’t need external people inside your gaming group to ensure Charlie Cheater won’t cheat this time.
Police tends to be a problem of “since we can’t find the actual culprits, we’ll treat all of you as potential criminals”.
I’m currently in a sociology class for the first time and I get a kick out of the idea that humans are so convoluted that we have a field of study about how society works and despite being able to document basically everything we still can’t figure out simple things like this.
What do the experts conclude?
Also, Lemmy. How about that context?
I wouldn’t say specifically police, but society needs rules and methods to enforce those rules. People WILL do whatever the fuck they want no matter how much it hurts other people even when there are supposed to be rules (Epstein, companies causing climate change, general pollution, embezzlement, etc…)
Just imagine what people would be doing if there were no rules or enforcement at all… I don’t even think a society would be able to exist amongst the chaos.
Shitty people just ruin it for the rest of us.
Yeah, the ACAB people really have a giant, gaping hole in their philosophy if we consider Epstein and his associates. Like, what would they prefer happen to these people in their ideal world…? That an angry mob just shows up at their doorstep and beats them to death?
And how often is that angry mob going to get the right person?
And that’s the obvious issue (just remember how many times the reddit geniuses “cracked the case” only to be completely wrong about everything).
Who does the work of tracking them down to arrest them - they are super rich, they have the ability to go to any number of locations and live comfortably indefinitely. You need people to find and question associates, perform wiretaps and search known residences and properties, trace bank accounts, and file extradition paperwork. And in any reasonable society, we don’t want mobs to be able to do this on a whim to anyone they feel like, so at the very least we need a legal system to assess and issue warrants for these things.
Then suppose you track them down, and they are living in a mansion in some remote part of Jamaica. Who goes to arrest them? A Jamaican angry mob? Or is an American angry mob going to book a bunch of plane tickets? When they get to the front door, how are they going to handle the concrete walls, iron gates, and private security guards - possibly armed with military-grade firearms?
Suppose the suspect gives chase in an automobile - do you now have the mob jump in their personal cars to chase after them, trying to coordinate via cheap walmart walkie talkies and performing pit maneuvers like they saw on TV?
And then suppose the mob somehow manages to catch them. But maybe we decided we don’t want to be quite so barbaric as beating people to death on the streets - if for no other reason than the fact that we are often wrong about the guilt of particular people. So we arrest them and they are awaiting trial. Great. Where? Some random person’s house? In the stocks in the town square?
Our current law enforcement system exists because it solves problems that we have faced in the past. That doesn’t mean that it is perfect or that no parts of it should be questioned - but if your solution to problems in the law enforcement system is “end all law enforcement”, then you are, quite frankly, living in a childish fantasy land. You may as well say that the solution to law enforcement problems is to mount all cops on unicorns and have them shoot everyone with love-and-friendship rays.
Universal public access surveillance and arming everybody is one non-cop option.
To my knowledge it’s currently illegal to be a vigilante, but if it were made legal that could be a non-cop solution. There would need to be a lot of thought and guardrails put into that though, more so than what I’m capable of. I’m generally pessimistic and lean slightly misanthropic lol
We don’t need cops. In the US they aren’t even obligate to protect you. Just ‘enforce’
Not to mention their racist, warrior-coded and instigative training that they only need like 6 weeks for to carry a gun and end your life with no repercussions.
I have never in my life been in a situation where a police officer did anything but make the situation worse or threatened to ruin my life.
We need to use more common sense and protect our neighbors and communities. Bad actors need not apply to strong networks of local support.
We need police to a degree, it’s just since the crime waves of the late 70s into the 90s politicians used it to stoke The Fear, and it was used to make the police unaccountable, given total discretion and laws allowing them to take down any working person for one reason or another and ruin their life.
We are to trust they use the power wisely, even as cynical malicious politicians and rich people that control them seek to use that police force to further abuse people.
But because of The Fear, which is not enitrely misplaced, even if the system is the one driving the violence underlying it to a large degree, you can’t get rid of police, and you would never get the public support to do so. Even in blue districts, the more experience people have with crime the more they want the police around, people living in the hood in the cities will not support getting rid of the police anymore than folks in the country will.
But we can put controls on them, put their operations back within the boundaries of the Bill of Rights, and common sense and decency, to not write laws so broadly as to give them discretion to charge any person with serious felonies. And to not decide bail on how much money you have in the bank.
Most prosecutors run unopposed, Sheriffs too I bet. City police are unaccountable to those that appoint and oversee them for several reasons, and are often unrepresentative of their communities. They are often rw extremists in blue cities, and there is no reason for fascists coordinating with paramilitary groups in training like counter protesters targeting protests in places like portland and berkely to be running the police departments. Telling the paramilitary groups in training like the proud boys of their movements, of the protesters’ locations, etc. Or arresting the people that defend themselves from those groups but not the victims attacked without cause by those groups.
We could go on, but by electing corrupt local politicians, they can be taken down by the police if they tried to reform them. So as always, getting good leadership is where we would need to act.
How about on Lemmy? You know, mods
There might be mechanisms that render them unnecessary. Let’s say we have an instance with 10 users. If 5 of those users have blocked a spam bot, that block could propagate to the other users as well. Of course that setting should either be opt-in or clearly advertised.
Pretty good in theory but technically hard to implement, as per usual.
Oh so you tried to implement it. How’d that go?
Indeed, lots of cases to consider.
So a kind of democratically crafted block list. It’s a good idea.
In Lemmy, direct democracy becomes very feasible.
It sounds like your question needs more context.
You’re waffling
You’re arguing in bad faith.
That would be difficult seeing as how I have yet to offer you an argument.
