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.

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.

Do you have evidence? A controlled study?

Also firefighters may be racist magas, but they provide a universal good with no downsides. I’ve never personally witnessed three firefighters gang up on a homeless person chilling on the sidewalk, for example. Very unaware of any firefighters trying to charge you a fee for not knowing your tail light was out.

Your post makes it look like a binary choice between cop-filled reality and cop-free fantasy. But there are marked differences between how many cops (many = often more stupid, untrained, poorly selected, corrupt) a society needs and what activity is expected of them.

Existing societies also demonstrate a vastly different need for imprisoning people.

Myself, I think that prisoners per capita is a better indicator than cops per capita. The latter gives weird results heavily tilted towards microstates (lead by Vatican, Pitcairn Islands and Motserrat).

• Maximum of prisoners per capita: North Korea (undisclosed but estimated), El Salvador (1600 per 100K), Cuba (794), Rwanda (637), Turkmenistan (576), United States (541).
• Minimum of prisoners per capita: go and have a look, it’s interesting. The leading 5 have a trend towards microstates and very poor developing countries, but if one filters them out and chooses sizable countries with functioning economies, the first that comes across is Japan - with an incarceration rate of 33 per 100K. That’s 48 times less than El Salvador and 16 times less than the United States. The first European country on the list is Finland with 52 per 100K, indicating approximately what a “western style” society can achieve. The EU average seems to be around 100 per 100K. The highest rated EU country seems to be Poland with 194 per 100K.

Notably, the first somewhat sizable European country and western-type society on both lists is Finland. It has the lowest prisoners per capita in Europe (at 52 per 100K) and the lowest cops per capita in Europe at 132 per 100K. It is not a known haven of rampant crime - it has really low crime rates too. Apparently in some conditions, you can have few cops, few prisoners and limited crime.

My guess - I could be wrong - is that the quality and coverage of social security, education and health care are what actually make the difference. Most people don’t start criminal activity for fun. Contributing factors include desperate poverty, poor parenting, lacking education, mental illness and exposure to trauma, damage from disease and substance abuse, etc, etc. Lots of full prisons are probably a factor that contributes to criminality, by making a “higher education in crime” accessible to more people.

OP: [proposes alternatives]

You: “So you’re basically suggesting Mad Max”

We already have that. Cops with qualified immunity are almost definitionally an unregulated militia

Or the meth making bikers with the enormous pile of firearms decide they want to run the county. Jan 6 happened because one side was absolutely not afraid to use violence and another side wanted to play fair and by the rules.

Never underestimate the capacity of assholes to be assholes.

It’s called the local 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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

wakanda

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

1 is actually not as hard as people make it out to be, people just think ‘mediation’ and ‘giving orders’ are the same thing. I did care for developmentally disabled adults, and part of my training was in conflict mediation. I’ve also worked in a low-cost hotel that housed drug dealers, and preferred to de-escalate conflicts between tweakers myself instead of calling the cops. One of the huge problems with the US police forces is that they generally assume conflict mediation isn’t going to work and jump straight to guns.

I also don’t understand why it’s not a political talking point that happy people don’t commit crime to begin with. The US is allergic to taxes being used to increase happiness. Benefits keep getting shot down like, oh no, we can’t have aid because people won’t use it to better themselves, they’re just going to stop stealing booze and start paying for it. Even their supposed downside is an actual improvement, I don’t get it.

holy shit my dude black panther style means irl black panthers from actual history not marvel movies ffs

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

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.

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”.