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Communities organizing themselves into squads to handle criminals and undesirables is also how we ended up with the KKK. Also the kinds of people who volunteer for unpaid security work tend to be pretty conservative in my experience.
yeah, it was only when we added in paychecks they became police.
If a society is a the point of calling for a substitute to police, then you are fucked. at that point you are just gonna build two armed factions which are illegitimate in each others eyes. thats how you get a civil war.
You can’t draw blood from a stone. If community self-organizing gets you the KKK, that community was fucked to begin with. The USA has always been extremely racist, it’s a matter of to what extent we give the racist police a legal monopoly on violence and place them above the law. At least when they wear ghost outfits you don’t have an illusion of reasonability.
Also note that the KKK never aimed to replace the police for the community the KKK came from, but rather to build upon police oppression of people outside the community. The two situations are not analogous, and if KKK members had to police their own community they would be much more gentle and constructive in their methods.
Modern police forces are what we decided to do with the slave catchers and mercenaries for hire that would have started gangs if the government didn’t put them to work.
a) isn’t “the police” just a wider definition of “a community organizing itself”
b) half the police are in the fucking klan anyway lol
The police is supposed to be a standardized rules based version of this, where the whole force is subject to law and can be held accountable, because chances are that unless you’re lucky or able to move, you’ll have a less than ideal local community.
It’s not exactly unusual for people to be either lazy or unethical.
You’re almost lucky if they just reject your efforts to organize, the guys in your community could easily do like crooked cops and repurpose the group to do crimes like harassment, theft, extortion, assault, kidnapping, rape and murder together. Of course the first ones being more likely.
Some of you might prefer the targets they pick, though. Like beating a racist Asian grocer, threatening a woman 10 blocks away who cheated on one of the guys, and maybe kidnap and sodomize some dweeb none of you liked since high school. Shit like that.
American police probably has too many issues to be reformed without being completely rebuilt with fresh hires across the board and making new rules and procedures. All “cops” should be fired, all “cop” culture must be cleaned out and left to rot in shitty bars where old gangster cops will inevitably gather in the aftermath, where an actual new and accountable police force will likely arrest them and put them in prison for whatever fucked up shit they’ve just done.
Are you fucking comparing the goddamned KKK with the Black Panthers?
No. Abso-fucking-lutely NO! Do better.
They aren’t, they are pointing out self-organizing groups like this can be made into something good as well as something bad. That’s kind of the whole point of government and regulations, to try to prevent that. Obviously that has failed in most cases, but it doesn’t mean the goal itself is pointless.
Here’s a more recent example. These groups can often end up exploiting the things they claim to protect. That’s just humans being human.
Works both ways unfortunately.
I’m always down with the Black Panthers. ✊🏿 They did great community work.
Some of their ranks could work on their acting skills though.
if they hadn’t started school breakfast programs i (decades later) wouldn’t have had food as a kid
I mean, it think it’s the wrong question. I think the question is, what can we do to minimize the need for police? The problem there is it usually involves lifting up poorer communities and no one wants to supply these communities with the resources to do it.
This is true, but also incomplete.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m a socialist activist in Oakland (home of the original Black Panters!), and I gotta tell you, this is where the rubber really meets the road.
First, Oakland knows what’s up. This is a very politically aware town, with some moderate but genuine leftists in government. We do a lot of community uplift here.
Second, Oakland has very few police. We didn’t “defund the police” so much as “mismanage our budget”, but we have very few cops relative to the size of our city.
Third: our poorest neighborhoods are suffering TERRIBLY from violent crime and property crime. The city is still nice, but the same areas in which a lot of poor, non-white folks can tell you stories about bad interactions with cops will be the first to tell you that alleviating poverty is important, but they need help NOW. They need someone to call when bullets start flying.
Frankly, I think OP – and the Panthers! – have it dead fucking right! We DO need folks on the street ready to step up. We need services, we need parks, we need gun control… we need a lot of alternatives to policing. But we also need direct timely response teams to problems happening NOW. And my fellow lefties should start chewing on that idea, especially as the fascist state begins sending the secret police to bag-and-tag your fuckin’ neighbor!
I don’t like it. But that’s where we’re at.
Amen. What I find fascinating and difficult to swallow is impoverished (and non) people’s desire to have kids and not raise them, almost as if they are happy with their shit sandwich, and think “yeah” I’ll give this to a another human. Boy o boy have I seen deplorables breed when they are in no capacity to look after themselves. It comes across to me as a type of evil. The meat grinder is made from this stupidity.
Boy o boy have I seen deplorables breed when they are in no capacity to look after themselves.
This is why I decided I didn’t want kids many years ago. I can barely look after myself, I can’t imagine having to take care of kids.
The cruelest thing you can do to another person is to bring them into the world. If you’re already going to be that much of a monster the least you can do is fucking look after them, too.
I love this meme because this is the absolute spiciest take and I’m totally here for it.
I know people don’t like this concept, but I think it needs more genuine discussion. There is a general unwillingness to address the question of who comes to lend aid to someone who is being threatened. Personally, I like the answer “your neighbors, who’ve trained in deescalation and have no unique authority” a lot better than either “the state” or "no one ❤️ ".
The entire system would need to change for this to work though - there ain’t no way that in an unequal society such as ours where not everyone’s needs are met (and crime essentially staying as high as it is today) community self-management would be sustainable.
Often crime is committed out of frustration (like violence born of inequality) or necessity (theft), so imagine being in a community in some larger city and having to deal with this every other day - I’d argue most people would just grow apathetic.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. It’s not that the entire system needs to change for this to work, it’s that this working changes the entire system. Community self-management would quickly result in the redistribution (and hopeful removal) of the inequalities, possibly with help of guillotines. The primary job of the police is to prevent this redistribution.
Historically, pretty much every “thriving local culture” is the result of a downtrodden wretched hive of scum and villainy where self-organisation was more important than police during the time of flourishing. Broadway (and NYC in general), New Orleans, Amsterdam, most Italian and German cities’ high points, London, Hong Kong, Osaka, etc… It turns out that when people don’t have enough, they will work together to get enough, and the benefits of that cooperation can be felt in that town for centuries. (Which is why gentrification is profitable - rich people exploit the commons of a flourishing lower class mutual aid network which persist in the design and culture of the space even when the lower class people are gone).
That is, unless a violent organisation like the police or the CIA or a multinational corporation or an invading army forcefully breaks up that cooperation. Like happened when the US government funded drug gangs and arrested black panthers members to specifically break up black communities throughout the US. Or when the US government funded drug gangs and armed fascists to specifically break up socialist communities in central and south America. Or when the US government funded drug gang religious fanatics to break up communist communities in the middle east and South-East Asia.
It’s not that the entire system needs to change for this to work, it’s that this working changes the entire system.
Would it really? Capitalism is fundamentally a system of economic social relations, workers sell their labour power to the capitalism and so on - that’s the fundamental of it and all the various institutions inside (e.g. the police, financial sector, etc) aren’t essential/fundamental to the system. They can be changed/tweaked or abolished when the need arises, but the economic social relation between the two main classes cannot be.
Creating some self-managing community that focuses on eliminating the need for police doesn’t fundamentally challenge the system (economic class relations), neither does it really challenge the police as an institution given how they’ll still exist outside that community and, as you point out, is able to crush this community anytime if it ever becomes a legitimate threat.
Community self-management would quickly result in the redistribution (and hopeful removal) of the inequalities
The community would still operate under capitalist system which reproduces inequality - after all, the community does need money for things like food, rent, utility, essentials, etc. This requires participation in wage labour/markets which means there’s still income inequality, inequality in time one has to participate in the community, some people possibly having extra leverage due to private property ownership or their income/education, therefore new hierarchies spawning as a result, etc.
A commune like that under a capitalist system would be good as a survival strategy where the least well off can be supported and be kept over the poverty line (therefore reducing the need for theft but not eliminating it), but it wouldn’t remove economic or social inequality - it will just seep back in from the outside.
No matter what system you have, the luck of the draw will give some people more powerful hands than others. If that is enough to destroy your system, then your system can never be implemented in reality.
The self-managing community would have inequality, but its organisatory principles would address that inequality in the same way that they would address an inequality that is caused by natural randomness. If that method of addressing inequality is more empowering for the community than capitalist democracy, then the community would gain in power relative to capitalist communities. This inspires other communities to likewise empower themselves, and either together or alone they can fight off police action and start a revolution.
@compostgoblin Please take a moment to think and tell me why, in your opinion, someone could come to hate cops.
Well, there are many reasons someone could come to dislike cops, but their legacy and ongoing patterns of brutality and racial discrimination both come to mind.
Why are so many people convinced the Police we have are the only ones we COULD have?
We don’t want NO Police
We want BETTER Police
Ive repeated this argument so many times.
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They need to have a FEDERAL licence to provide law enforcement. So you cant just move when you get in trouble.
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Each officer needs to carry their own “malpractice” insurance so the city/state doesnt have a financial interest in ignoring bad behavior.
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Make “Abuse of the public trust” a federal felony. Officer making bad judgement calls in the heat of the moment is one thing but calculated corruption should be a federal offence.
You know… I’m a big fan of some of the wild lefty stuff OP is posting, but I also endorse all of this! Those are some great ideas.
Frankly, I don’t hate cops. I don’t like the system (and I’m not a big fan of the individuals who participate in it), but if someone is willing to be agree to operate with this kind of accountability, I’m willing to give them a chance.
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I had an argument about this with a friend once. I was saying if we just abolish the police, private enterprise will probably step in to fill the gap. I don’t want that. I don’t want amazon offering policing services (as part of Prime. vomit).
I think the police need to be split up into smaller institutions, and have a lot less murder powers.
Someone needs to address the “Someone broke into my house and stole my TV” problem, without a profit motive and with accountability.
There should be something to address “My neighbor is screaming at his wife and I think he’s hitting her” that doesn’t involve some low empathy assholes with guns rolling up to mock the woman.
I don’t know how to fix this.
Cops are deliberately trained to be be fearful and quick to shoot. You start by reforming how cops are trained. Literally following how the military trains their troops would be a big improvement. This vet got fired for deescalating a situation, per his military training, but counter to his police training.
How the fuck is military training actually doing this better than police training… wow
Because the militarization of police is just them larping after watching too many war movies.
I feel like this sounds like a great idea until you end up with a bunch of unregulated militias run by the George Zimmermans of the world in every red state with a government who doesn’t give a shit, but I’d absolutely love to be proven wrong
We already have that. Cops with qualified immunity are almost definitionally an unregulated militia
I live in a small town in the rural south.
The ‘community patrols’ would very quickly turn into KKK lynch mobs going after anyone that was ‘woke’.
Yeah, ACAB, but the alternative that would happen in most places is pretty bad too. There’s gotta be a 3rd way to keep people safe without using either cops as they exist now or vigilance committees.
I think the 3rd option is just this with licensing.
I don’t expect a system of community policing right now to be good, but let’s start with the idea of cops who are required to live and serve in the same area. No traveling to the next town over to police people.
Next, no qualified immunity. No special exemptions to laws or unique authorization of violence. You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
If you required local protectors to organize within a licensing body that only let people participate in their organization after meeting requirements I think what you’d get would be an improvement on what we have without being totally chaotic and lawless.
Mostly, yeah. But being part of the community also means having potentially the same bigotry as the community. Again: I’m in a very, very white town in the rural south; most of the residents are low-key racist, and some aren’t even low-key about it.
You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
This one I would disagree with. I don’t think that there should be a general right for citizens to arrest people; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t too terribly far from me, and that started as citizens trying to arrest a guy for jogging while being black. (Come to think of it, based off police arrests, doing pretty much anything while being black is an arrestable offense.) I think that powers of arrest should be limited to people that have gone through a minimum of two years of training in law enforcement–including law!–and have passed exams to become certified. (So yes, I agree that there needs to be a licensing body that exists outside of the control of the police departments or police unions.)
I absolutely agree that qualified immunity shouldn’t exist, or at least, not the way it does now. What is covered should be codified into law, and everything that’s outside of that should be not covered. Take, for instance, a high speed chase, where an objectively dangerous person is fleeing police; without qualified immunity, if a police officer lost control of their car and caused harm to a bystander, that officer would be criminally liable. I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome, given that the alternative–not pursuing an objectively dangerous person–seems like the worse option. (Yes, yes, they could use a helicopter, but that’s not always an option.) But there are a lot of things that do get covered under qualified immunity–like killing someone by tazing them repeatedly while their hogtied in the back of a patrol car–that absolute should not, under any circumstances.
The police problem is genuinely difficult. I think that a lot of it is cultural, with old cops sharing institutional practices with new cops, and perpetuating cycles. I think that kind of culture needs to be broken, so that cops genuinely feel a sense of responsibility, and want to do the right thing in the right way. I don’t know what the best way to approach that is though.
Couldn’t those community patrols be considered a type of police
I think this requires us to look into what the definition of that word is, as a verb.
To “police” is to dominate and enforce conformity, often with the threat of overwhelming consequence. A lot of people don’t realize that the origin of the modern police department was crowd control. They were invented in cities in the early twentieth century to suppress riots and protests. The day-to-day patrol work is just an extension of that core mandate.
I think that if you trained folks up the way we do for volunteer fire brigades that’d be a lot more like working as an EMT than a soldier. Sometimes you might have to lay some hands. But, imo that is not policing if you only respond when someone calls for help as opposed to showing up uninvited to enforce the state’s prerogatives.
Showing up to assist and protect someone who is crying out for help isn’t actually “policing”, imo. That’s rendering aid. You aren’t acting to disincentivize non-compliance with state directives. So I would not consider such a group to qualify as police, semantically.
Normally theyre called gangs. The thing that made the black panthers special is that as a cause it was killed before it deteriorated. A lot of gangs form to protect from other gangs, police corruption, and general sense of community.
Usually most folks aren’t willing to do things free, so it devolves as it grows. Loses the original basis for formation. It’s why christians is a confusing term, you have atheists, catholics, buddhists, etc. All lumped in while all can and are christian, there is degrees of severity.
Oh so like first it starts out protecting the community from issues but then it turns into “the crips have to pay” and now heroin to pay for a turf war…
That’s interesting
You start protecting the community but who is paying you, your rent, or your food? You have to start charging and now you’re another tax. Tensions rise. And yes this would impact drug trafficking which is usually lethal. Note, junkies are relatively safe, dont get between their drugs or stare and you are good.
Trying to do good is difficult because by definition, the only good thing you can do is retain the status quo. Any change will have negative repercursions.
A good goal quickly deteriorates when the power structure forces you to deal with the devil. And where does he reside?
Everybody just getting along and cooperating and not fucking with each other sounds dope too. So go ahead, make that happen and we won’t need cops. While you’re at it, lack of fires and accidental injuries would be super dope too. Got an ETA on those?
If that makes me sound like a hardline law-and-order type, guess again meme-brain, I’m just intelligent enough to know that seriously thinking we don’t need cops is idiotic.
Don’t take what i say in the wrong way but what is listed does not really work any better than police. And before i go further, I also live in a place where police is lazy corrupt and racist to some extent, but first 2 are also a result of the fact they are not paid well.
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Teach everyone self defence - that is good in principle, but it is double edged sword - you are also possible training a future criminal, and it would most likely still be a net benefit
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organise your local communities and do community patrols (I don’t remember much about how it is done in wakanda, only saw the first movie and also a long time ago) - there are 2 possible ways - either we cycle through the population - then the quality of patrol would “vary” to put it gently, if we make a small subset of people who are nominated for the job - then you have made police again - they can still get corrupt
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Handle conflict mediation without a racist incarceration system that doesn’t work? - it is spoken in a self fulfulling prophecy way - it assumes (1) conflict mediation is always possible and (2) and you do not want a system which is racist. (2) is fine, but (1) is not easy. We do not a systematic framework (constitution) and people who understand it well. Not everyone can be put in burden of understanding the law (everyone should have basic understanding, but most people already do, but most real world crime is not that easy)
What is written, mostly works for a small community (of the size of a village (< 1000)). This may also justify living in smaller self sufficient communities, but this is not efficient (in sense of resource usage) - too many people would be constantly reinventing wheels. Also, the “quality” (read threat level) of criminal would vary from village to village, and if a criminal goes on village hopping rampage, these disconencted villages would be at a disdvantage, they can act like fediverse network - share the “post” with federating “communities” but if they are not federating with a community (either intentionally, or they have never come across yet) then the “post” would go unnoticed.
holy shit my dude black panther style means irl black panthers from actual history not marvel movies ffs
then i know even less, what and how do they do?
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