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.

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.

I can also see community “policing” in cities devolve into chaos as a bunch of petty kings pop up in every neighbourhood.

The guys in those hypothetical lynch mobs are the cops today.

At least in this scenario you could get your buds and shoot back at the klan fuckers, maybe.

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.

Agreed. It is multi step

You reduce the need for it, you reduce their military power. You give them better training and force them to use non lethal forces when possible (usually it is)

Stop breaking into people’s houses incorrectly and shooting them

Also forced body cameras and strict follow up

Police should be needed less, but police still need to be policed by the people

Ive repeated this argument so many times.

1. They need to have a FEDERAL licence to provide law enforcement. So you cant just move when you get in trouble.

2. Each officer needs to carry their own “malpractice” insurance so the city/state doesnt have a financial interest in ignoring bad behavior.

3. 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.

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.

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.

I agree with you. What would be the use of those patrols if not to police behaviour?

Maybe someone with more historical knowledge could expand on the meaning of “Black Panther style community patrols”.

Crips, which have been given the backronym “Community Resistance In Progress”.

But it doesn’t take much research to show they do not stand for the types of values you’re referring to.

yeah, it was only when we added in paychecks they became police.

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

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.

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.

As a minimum, how about frequent rotation and a sortition + selection system to staff the squads?

Imaginary example:

Two “cops” are needed for a term of 90 days (side note: in this hypothetical society, it could be that a cop is not a first responder but an investigator - first responders may be selected by proximity to the event and called up using some automated emergency messaging system). An investigator is allowed to request expert assistance from outside their department and often does.

At first, 10 candidates are sortitioned at random. Out of them, 3 refuse the job for various reasons, 7 go through instruction and pass evaluation. Out of them, 3 either step out during training or fail exams, 4 complete exams. Among them, another round of sortition occurs: 2 are selected at random, while 2 are paid compensation for study and assigned to reserve. If lottery chooses them again, they won’t need to pass exams.

This might be possible to enhance with other tricks. If feedback shows that cops cannot be impartial near their home, then they don’t work near their home. If however, feedback shows that they perform best near their home, then the opposite way.

The main goals this would aim to achieve:

• ensure that corruption will not start
• ensure that investigation is not biased (or that chances exist of bias being quickly exposed)
• ensure that offices cannot be given by people in power to whom they prefer
• ensure that competence is valued and unqualified bozos won’t be appointed

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.

So when it’s not state sponsored, it only sometimes turns into racists oppressing poor people and minorities, and you consider this worse than the current alternative?

Are you fucking comparing the goddamned KKK with the Black Panthers?

No. Abso-fucking-lutely NO! Do better.

I wonder if they’d become a gang instead. Community police of their own