Yeah for people downvoting this, cops being a problem is largely an American thing. In many other places around the world they are actually beneficial.
If you don’t have someone authorized by the state to enforce laws, you’re still going to get people enforcing “laws”, it’s just going to be vigilantes, people with grudges, etc. Just look how frequently you see incidents of road rage. Cops basically exist to prevent people from taking revenge into their own hands.
Take all those incidents of people calling the cops on black men having a picnic or taking their dogs for a walk. If there were no cops, do you think these white “Karens” would just leave the black men alone? Or do you think they’d get together and lynch them?
I think the US needs to scale its policing way back. It needs mental health specialists to respond to certain kinds of calls. The person who responds to a report of a stolen bike probably shouldn’t have a gun. But, at some point you are going to need people who will use physical force to enforce the law. Those people should be heavily supervised by a truly independent body. But, they still need to exist in some form.
luthis@lemmy.nz 13 hours ago
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 25 minutes ago
Yeah, Thunberg was definitely arrested in America. Just, uh, don’t google it.
Cops can be amenable with enough controls, sure, but they ultimately serve capital, man.
binux@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
Yeah, this is what a lot of people fail to take into account when it comes to the purpose of policing in society. There’s obviously a lot of inherent problems with the way the police are structured in a lot of countries as a whole, but to believe that we can just make do without something like them altogether is pretty shortsighted to say the least. I think that prevents a lot of otherwise sympathetic people from taking the backlash against police institutions seriously.
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Yea it’s dunny how they just angry downvote, and if they reply at all, they don’t really respond to the points. Who will do the fucking policing if there’s no police??? There will always be people who need to be forcefully stopped from what they’re doing.
binux@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
I think the idea generally is to replace the police with social welfare programs and unarmed crisis responders, but that’s jumping through so many hoops that it just sounds way too simplistic tbh. It sounds practical, but it treats the problem like it’s something that can be improved with just a few institutions reforming/being abolished.
There’s never been a society without some form of justice system since cruelty is a part of human nature, and at this point these systems are far too intertwined and embedded in our societies for them to change dramatically without some form of societal collapse or retraction.
Idealism is well and good but the things many want in place of police institutions seem like they’re ignoring how complex and non-specific the issues are as a whole. It’s definitely not a one size fits all situation, especially with how many factors there are. People can disagree with me but I’d prefer to hear why at least.
7101334@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
No, cops exist to protect capital.
This is just one example too, they’ve issued multiple similar rulings. Also, uh, see: Uvalde.
…you think cops keep black people safe? Are you being remotely serious here?
JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
The cops were (and still are) the ones doing the lynching, whether off-duty in white hoods or on duty lol