Realistically, that's what will come from "abolishing" the police.
That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).
This is underappreciated. It's hard to seriously change organizations in less than a decade when employees have long tenures.
Opinions and behaviors are only truly malleable at the beginning of careers, and later change is fighting against the inertia of old timers' "Let me tell you how it's done."
Which isn't only negative. Esprit de corps is what holds together people doing tough jobs for long careers.
But if you want to say "No more of that. Now we're doing this" then a rebuild isn't a bad idea.
How would they go about doing this in practice? Are they going to fire the entire police force, and recruit new people from scratch? If that is the case, can the current cops apply? How would they make sure bad cops from the current force don't get recruited again?
A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
> A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
This is the kind of baby steps solution that is completely not the answer even if it's part of a solution for one of the problems. This is systemic and with strong opposing forces (current police officers and their unions, as one example), you can't believe that a database of bad cops would be enough if they aren't even being fired for the abuses being committed right now, if there is already a system of protecting bad police officers why do you believe that they simply wouldn't fire or prosecute even less abuses to avoid a harsher punishment?
I've not researched enough to delineate a step-by-step process of dissolution of the police but there are enough parallels in history and similar experiences to be studied.
The little I've read about seem to include that previous police officers can re-apply but would need to go through the new revamped hiring process. Such hiring process would be defined by citizens' organisations, experts, human rights organisations and so on. There is enough scientific knowledge in that, there are enough police services in the world that use them, it's a matter of shaking the status quo and removing the old roots that US policing stems from.
This can't be achieved by steps if the roots of it are deeply rotten, you gotta understand that.
I think applying to cops something along the lines of what we have for professional engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. could be a solution.
All cops nationally would be required to have a license from this organization in order to do some "reserved acts", like arresting someone, using force, firing a taser, etc. Any complaint about cops would be evaluated by this organization, and could result in the suspension / revocation of their license. There would be a strong emphasis on deontology, and the organization's explicit mission would be to protect the public.
This would probably have a similar effect overall to what you're describing, but it'd be more of a whitelist than a blacklist.
I tweeted about this a week ago being from the area. It helped the city get rid of officers that the police union were protecting not fire-able. Further, it helped the city (which had declared bankruptcy) get rid of police pensions negotiated decades ago that were draining city coffers.
How does firing people get rid of pensions? That sounds pretty wrong - punishing every cop by taking away their pension because of the act of one? Why would anyone join the police at all if that's possible?
I don't think anyone is against more police, but rather the tactics used and how that money is spent. Twenty years ago, police deploying tasers was an outlier. In 2020, it's become normalized and happens thousands of times a year. There's no reason we can't have better trained, restrained police at the same or greater budget. It's the tactics that are in question, and qualified immunity which allows bad actors to do as they please with little-to-no impact to themselves (thanks to local governments picking up the tab).
Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".
Can't speak for anyone else, but I'm against more police. I think communities would be better served by an increase in social workers in most cases. Drug usage and homelessness won't be solved by imprisoning people and forever branding them as criminals. You need bridge housing, treatment programs, and services for these people. And an educational system that is well funded, regardless of the community it serves. I think criminalizing social issues has proven to be pretty ineffective, generally harmful, and really expensive. I'd recommend checking out "The End of Policing" for a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for decreasing the number of police.
The ebook is free: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
I am fine with more police if we entirely redefine police to mean social workers, counselors, community assistants, etc.
And if they didn't carry guns nor drive unmarked cars. Police should be seen and they should be seen interacting positively with the community, not patrolling in a gradient of (un)identifiable vehicles.
Unfortunately, there are now so many care workers that many people with issues are getting fed up with all the people that come to their house for all kinds of help (think a care worker for finance, one for mental issues,one for physical issues,one to help the person get back to work, one for the kids etc. etc.)
So if there will be a shift from 'police as is', to more like a care worker system, this would be something to consider.
But other than that, it seems to work well. The police is considered your friend. They pretty know each of the people that have issues or who ever committed crime.
They continue to offer help to them,but will make sure they also get off the streets when they become a potential threat.
There continues to be a lot of criticism from certain groups within our country that wants the police act tougher, but I think the majority of people are happy with how the police does it's job here.
There is also a wijkagent - "neighborhood cop". Actual policeperson (with gun and all) that has "office hours" when they are walking around the neighborhood talking to people (even just for a chat) at the playgrounds, business owners and so on. People come to them with problems. There is a website where you can look up wijkagent for each neighborhood. Sometimes they're also active on Twitter, FB... Works quite well
It's very important that police is connected to the community they police, and cares about that community. My impression of police in the US is that that is rarely the case in cases where this police brutality occurs.
I'm fairly happy with Dutch police. They're visible and approachable. They're not perfect; there was a case in the 1990s where they cracked down unreasonably hard on a peaceful student protest. And in that case, it turned out that many of those cops were indeed looking forward to a fight, which is a dangerous and harmful attitude. Those instances are fairly rare, though.
Even so, no tear gas, no beatings, and despite the protesters resisting as much as they non-violently can, the police are not using any violence beyond pulling and shoving them into the bus.
(It's surprisingly hard to find anything online about events before 2004. This was all over the news at the time, but now it looks like it never happened. My quality newspaper lacks proper archive functionality for searching more than a year ago. Search engines and Youtube have never heard of this, frequently returning 0 results.)
I am an American living in Netherlands, and policing is very different here. Think Dutch police (or at least Amsterdam police) have a much more positive impact on neighborhoods than American police (or DC / San Francisco police). I have seen more mediation and deescalation between neighbors from police in a few years in the Netherlands than decades in America.
This is a tangent, there also seems to be way, way less paperwork in routine police work in the Netherlands than in America.
@malnourish has a good point, though. Quite often police respond to calls that require a social worker or mental health professional. And in some of those cases, the police decides that a bullet is the best solution to the problem that they are equipped to provide. Many problems require very different solutions, and many police officers are not equipped to provide those solutions. That is a major problem.
Either police officers need to be trained as social workers and mental health professionals, or part of their work needs to be taken over by those that have that training.
Every country has unmarked cop cars in use alongside high visibility marked cars. Every country has armed officers in addition to unarmed officers.
Given the US has liberal gun laws, how would that even work? It's shortsighted & reactionary unless you want people who are already in dangerous situations to be lambs led to the slaughter because you'd like to think you live in a unicorn reality.
I agree with all your points; and while we’re on the subject of optics reform, I have an entirely unsubstantiated pet theory that if we made police uniforms pink, we would see abuse of power drop substantially - the idea being to create a very different (visual and emotional) image of what a police officer is and what they do, and the pink specifically serving the dual purposes of a) reminding police that their job is less about force and more about supporting the community, and b) filtering out any men whose sense of masculinity is so withered/warped that they’d take issue with the standard uniform of a highly-esteemed servant of the community.
> I think communities would be better served by an increase in social workers in most cases
I couldn't agree more. I think there's an appropriate ratio of police/population, though I don't think I'm even remotely qualified to speak on that subject. But when I think about the "police/prosecutorial/prison-industrial complex", I can't help but hope that the only real path to a long-term solution is actually giving a shit and genuinely wanting to help people get better, vs "justice".
One thing that must happen is we must impose enhancements to penalties for crimes committed by law enforcement/police.
Assault, battery, theft, etc., by a police officer is inherently worse than that by an ordinary citizen. They have abused the immense power, privilege, and trust of their position and there should commensurate consequences.
NPR carried a segment talking about making free market liability insurance mandatory for police, with departments only paying the average rate.
There needs to be a neutral third party to assess risk, because all of the current stakeholders are biased (executive government, judicial government, community organizers, police unions).
> Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".
I have a slightly different take on this, and to be clear, seeing that video was absolutely shocking and made me feel nauseous and even light-headed.
The officers were part of a unit that was specially trained by FEMA to do exactly what they did;
> "The unit’s training is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA’s, Field Force Operations course. It’s a three-day training which covers skills including baton-holding positions, mass-arrest procedures, and riot-control formations, according to the website." [1]
Suspending the officers is deflecting the blame from where it really lies. The state (politicians) deployed that team to do exactly what they did, and knew or should have known that people would be hurt as a result of those tactics.
I guess you could imagine some sort of active riot scenarios where people are under attack by a mob, and where those tactics are specifically necessary to essentially rescue hostages..., but the situation they were actually deployed into was not remotely that from what I understand.
I think of it this way. When we look back at Tienanmen Square, do we blame the person driving the one tank at the front of the column, or do acknowledge that every driver in every tank was not strong enough to refuse to follow those orders, but ultimately the leaders of the regime are to blame.
That's why I think making the story about the officers is actually missing the point, and further blaming the other 57 officers who resigned doubly-so. The officers are resigning because they are being hung out to dry to take the blame for the leader's mistakes. I was hoping to see the "57 officers resign" story used to pivot the blame onto the police and political leadership rather than reinforcing the notion that the blame is just on bad actors / bad apples.
There are systemic issues with the system, and this is a perfect example of where officers are being trained to act in exactly the wrong way, and then being deployed inappropriately. These weren't rogue officers. The criminal case to charge is not so much assault by an individual officer, but reckless endangerment by the people who made the decision to deploy an aggressive riot control team out into the general populace.
> When we look back at Tienanmen Square, do we blame the person driving the one tank at the front of the column, or do acknowledge that every driver in every tank was not strong enough to refuse to follow those orders, but ultimately the leaders of the regime are to blame.
Both. It's the whole "just following orders" thing. It's not an excuse. You (the officers) know for a fact that it's wrong to push a 75-year old man down to the ground like they did. You don't need anybody to tell you that, and no training manual is going to tell you that it's ok or not ok to do so.
The 57 officers resigning, good. They aren't quality police officers that we need on a police force. It doesn't matter what training tells you - and if they can't see that, then good riddance. There are plenty of people out there who can make fine police officers.
Disbanding and replacing a PD eliminates the old police union contracts.
Those lopsided contracts are at the root of the impunity and violence we've seen over the past week.
Many cities have made extraordinary contractual concessions, including:
- Secrecy clauses. Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him, but the city is contractually forbidden from making that information public, or in some cases even retaining the records after X months.
- Arbitration for firing. Those clauses can be shockingly strong. The Philadelphia PD fired an officer for having Nazi tattoos. They were forced to reinstate him after arbitration. https://twitter.com/dburbach/status/1269638494466514955
Those clauses and more often add up to police that are effectively unfireable and therefore not under meaningful civilian control. Witness the head of a NYC police union taunting the mayor and openly flaunting the Right to Know Act / announcing that officers will be covering up their badge numbers.
Camden got a start fresh with no pre-existing police contract. For many cities, that's potentially worth a lot.
I don't understand why there isn't a professional license required for LEOs.
I'm a paramedic. If I harmed a patient once (let along 31 times), my card would get revoked and that would be that. A cop, meanwhile, is likely to face no consequences at all, and in the absolute "worst" case scenario, they would just get a job in the next town over.
Paramedics and police are at opposite ends of the union representation spectrum. Paramedics have no union and are thus treated like livestock. The police have the strongest unions in America and are thus largely untouchable.
You're conflating allegations of harm vs harmed. Given your position is just assisting the person and not enforcing the law(which the person does not want the cop to do against them), you are magnitudes less likely to have allegations made against you.
Allegations aren't an objective historical fact. They can and are used to spite.
> Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him
A complaint is an allegation. It's not a confirmed incidence of bad behaviour.
Using Chauvin as example (17 complaints), From WAPO:
> A summary of the complaints against Chauvin posted by the department offers no information on why they were filed, and police declined to comment on the nature of the cases. Sixteen of the complaints were closed without discipline. The remaining complaint resulted in two letters of reprimand against Chauvin, according to the summary.
A letter of reprimand for excessive force should be the end of a police office's career in law enforcement (a similar incident would certainly be the end of my time as a paramedic).
It’s important to note these provisions are given to police in lieu of salary increases. Citizens and elected officials could choose to raise police wages, attract better candidates and not substitute legal concessions for salary increases. When cities are trying to cut costs, these “free” provisions can seem like a no brainer, as opposed to giving in to wage increases.
1. I don't begrudge the police union for negotiating for all this. It's their job, just like it's the job of my city to play hardball with negotiations.
2. Police are some of our best paid public servants.
Hiring more police is not a problem, as long as you fire all the old dysfunctional police, and get rid of all the mechanisms that kept dysfunctional police in place for all those years.
If you fire tons of bad cops and you want good cops, you're going to have to hire them.
A lot more crime happens, nobody reports it though. Just like in the Bay Area for car thefts. Very underreported because we are discouraged from making reports and after the 3rd break in, don’t even bother reporting. Everyone using Camden as a success on Social media is mistaken.
Poor people hurt the most, while rich and upper middle class likely never has to call the police
Armed police roaming the streets don't solve car break-ins. I specifically mentioned car break-ins in my comment below[1]. I want the police department as we know it to be disbanded so we can have real solutions to real problems.
No one is saying stop solving crimes. Minneapolis may disband their police department, and get out of the union contract. But they aren't going to stop solving crimes. The lack of crimes being solved currently is explicitly mentioned as a reason for disbanding current police department, and looking for smarter solutions.
Armed police who are specifically ordered to not interdict fleeing property criminals (the rule of engagement for most Bay Area police departments) and not respond to break-ins at all, even for fingerprints certainly won't solve car break-ins.
So, you end up with stupid posturing shit, like having two units sit in their cars with lights flashing, stationary, in one mostly-empty parking lot a night, like SCPD does by the Chili's on El Camino near Lawrence.
Indeed, Americans need to realize that almost everything about our society is a bad first draft, in need of prompt replacement. People reflexively defend existing institutions, but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving. Police departments might be a good place to start, but most American cities also need to address structural deficit, disposable built environments, persistent segregation, absurd jurisprudence, and more.
>but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving
There is so much about America that is worth preserving. One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate like they are today. Even discussing the idea of doing this in many countries could get you killed - or worse! That's another amazing thing (again, just off the top of my head), in America the worst punishment we have is death, and even that is outlawed in many places. The idea of an internment camp[0][1] is not even considered.
Sure, we don't _currently_ have internment camps, but we used to have them and the current president, when asked point blank by Time magazine, refused to rule out using WW2-style internment camps for muslims. So there's that.
Freedom of expression is one of those things that I'd prefer to keep, but we can see that it is stronger on paper than in practice. In practice, if you gather in the capital city to bring your grievances to the government, unidentifiable mercenaries will gas you. And if you are a journalist reporting in front of your local police station some cop will shoot you in the head with "non-lethal" rubber ball, leaving you without eyes, or teeth.
It is the institutions of American that need to be dismantled, because are an implementation that doesn't reflect the founding ideals of our country.
Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. While I vehemently disagree with these camps, there's no reason to assume a re-born America's laws would apply to people who are not citizens/legally accepted into its borders. A fix for these camps would be to guarantee the same protections we Americans enjoy to people who come here illegally, which can be accomplished using the current framework we have today.
> Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws.
What's the point in calling them 'human rights' if they only apply to Americans. The US Bill of Rights does not make any reference to citizenship or legal immigration status in the 6th or 8th amendments (which seem particularly relevant). Not to mention you still need due process to prove the person does not have legal immigration status in the first place.
There isn't really any ambiguity here, unless the law specifically targets citizens or people with a valid legal immigration status the law protects illegal immigrants as well.
I'm not very well versed in US law but it's my understanding you can't shoot a man down in the street for jaywalking because he's a criminal and thus not protected by the law.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
It does not define "human rights". It defines some legal rights of people within the jurisdiction of the document - not some global notion of "human rights"
Human rights are legal rights. Human rights vary by jurisdiction. For example, the The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) administers Ontario provincial law.
You should read up on who's in these camps. Most are asylum seekers. Applying for asylum is legally recognized under the Geneva Convention. Hell, I just watched a documentary where an asylum seeker was asked to come to the Tijuana/SD border for his asylum interview, thrown into detention ICE, and then transferred from one center to another before finally being deported a year later. He was imprisoned for asking for asylum, not being in the US illegally.
Applying for asylum is legally recognized under the Geneva Convention
Only at the first border reached. So, only Canadians, Mexicans, and those coming by water directly from their nation of origin are even theoretically eligible.
People on HN thrown "Geneva Convention!" (sic) around like it's a magic amulet. There are multiple conventions with multiple articles, and the USA isn't even a signatory to all of them. When people argue random Geneva Conventions nexus for some element of policy without stating a specific Convention and Article, assume that they're bullshitting you. It's like a lazy Support rep saying, "it's in the manual... somewhere."
The tile is What Happened to a Dream Deferred. During the QandA the director told us how she had to get involved because the subject that applied for asylum was arrested at the interview. Then moved through many detention camps. This is done so their immigration lawyers can't find them and represent them during the hearings. I found this to be really shocking.
I can only assume you've awakened, Rip Van Winkle style, from a extended sleep - not only one so long you missed dozens of people getting severely assaulted by the police and hundreds of people being held for extended periods of time (>24 hours) without charge, but so long that you apparently also missed the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.
You also missed Trump musing on the idea of Muslim internment camps, so "not even considered" is a long bow. We might also include "kids in cages" while we're at it.
There are plenty other worse countries, but this seems like a rather low standard for a victory lap ("Freer than China! Less repressive than Belarus!").
Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully. Recent events are proving the First Amendment sounds great on paper, but is utterly worthless when people actually try to exercise that right.
>the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving
I would suggest living in a third or second world country without outside support. I had your same mindset, and did that for a few years. I could not wait to come back.
Even so, the third world is not our standard. We’re ready for the version two improvements by virtue of the iterative process, and our own expectations for ourselves.
Actually it was living abroad in a third world nation that soured me on America. Bringing my children back to the USA was painful to me and disappointing to them.
East Berlin used to be second World, but many of my American friends moved there because they were tired sick of being harassed by their own country brutality and would never go back.
Even many African countries are safer than the US if you are black.
On the other side, one of the most annoying kind of tourist you can find in my city, which is Rome in Italy, are Americans.
They lack the basic notions about "respecting others cultures and habits"
I sure have, Venezuela. No water, constant power failures, gas at 8-12 USD per gallon (controlled by the military police$$$, though that is a recent development), minimum wage at 5USD per month. Food at international prices. Basically non-existent judicial system. Police brutality several notches above what you see in the US.
So out of the 200+ countries you could have compared the US to you chose a failed state. There are many other 3rd world/developing countries who have fully functional governments.
Obviously not every other country is the same. The situation is not that the US does everything one way, and the entire rest of the world does it another way; there are about 200 different countries, and they all do things differently in some ways. Some countries get most things right, some get most things wrong, but most countries get some things right and some things wrong.
There's a lot to learn and improve by looking at how other countries solve their problems.
This was also the topic of Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next. Instead of taking other countries' oil, the US should take other countries' ideas, and Moore had a couple of suggestions for interesting ideas from other countries, like school lunches from France, prison system from Norway, etc.
Bullshit. If you had really lived there, you would know that Venezuela's problems are mostly caused by USA-imposed sanctions. The police are so "brutal" that they have let the would-be coup leader and CIA contractor Juan Gauido prance about the nation unmolested for a couple of years now. How many poor black Venezuelans have died under the knees of Venezuelan cops in the last month?
Or even Western Europe. I’ve lived in the UK, and it absolutely gave me an appreciation for many aspects of American life.
For example, municipal government and school boards. Yes they can go bad. But as the protestors in Minneapolis are showing, the city is extremely responsive because it is local.
If there was a similar protest in Birmingham (UK), I can’t imagine the city disbanding the police department under any circumstances.
It might result in parliament taking action. But the idea of independent municipal government is very lacking.
Municipal governments in England are very much subordinate to Parliament.
There’s a reason Blair was so pathetically and stupidly pro-American. America actually has a lot to offer.
Not my America. It has problems, sure. But it's the place where people line up to get in. The place where multinationals that hire lots of international colleagues are headquartered. A super-power, and one that has good intent at least as much as any other super-power.
I'm proud of my America, even if it does have warts (some of them ugly.) I have confidence we'll get better in the future.
I live in an area with a bad police department. I've never seen our police care about crime. To be frank, I'm not sure how I'd be any worse off without them. I suspect we need some of the higher-end investigative units (e.g. detectives who solve murders and similar), but the run-of-the-mill police units seems like a waste of my taxpayers dollars. I'd support disbanding our police in an instant.
> One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings.
> These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”
I think firing the police force and starting from scratch is plenty reasonable, given the things I've heard. However, this reform sounds like it goes further and will change how law enforcement is handled in Minneapolis at a fundamental level. It's blowing away the entire organization, not just the staff.
I'll be very interested in how this works out for them and how similar the new solution ends up being to the old one. I suspect it won't be as different as many commenters are suggesting.
Have they released any details about how they expect the new solution to be different?
Camden is in the top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate, according to the googling I just did. Not a great recommendation there.
But this was true of Camden before its police reform as well. From the linked article:
> He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
Wouldn't that suggest that the problem hasn't been solved? That there is some other issue?
I'm not familiar with Camden or the reforms, so maybe there are other metrics by which things have improved. However, "top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate" is an awfully condemning statistic.
> He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
That's significant improvement. Waiting until you can "solve crime" seems unproductive.
The city had already started out with an extremely high crime rate and it dropped significantly after the PD was disbanded and remade. It hasn't gotten to typical levels but I don't think people are expecting magical results here. People want a useful police that treat them with respect and that doesn't use any opportunity to terrorize them and murder them. You know, like the police in every other first world country.
I think a lot of it comes from opinion pieces such as this one https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... which makes incredibly confident and general statements from a very small sample size, while there are many success stories of successful complete rewrites
> Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years."
That's hardly point in favor, given Google's "reputation" for long-term support and stability, and the sheer amount of engineers that they can throw at literally every problem.
Camden had the most violent crime in 2019 [1], but are around the 12th highest population in NJ in 2017 [2]. They are the 10th most dangerous city in the country [3] as of 2020 according to neighborhood scout. The FBI ranked it #1 in 2012. [4]
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but good stats. From #1 ranked dangerous country in 2012, a disbandment in 2013, and #10 today seems at least somewhat successful to me
Milton Friedman said one of the most important aspect of capitalism, more than the profit motive, was that bad companies are allowed to fail & better company can fill the need.
It's directly comparable. It didn't work so well in Ukraine either, which has an educated, Western society. They disbanded and "rebuilt" their police force to step away from Russian influences.
Corruption came back, but in the meantime, a lot of operation efficiency was lost.
Swapping out a police department is much like swapping out a dev team - you are losing a LOT of tribal knowledge, and you have few guarantees that the new dev team won't make their own, potentially different, mistakes. They also lack experience in the domain.
How? Is Minneapolis also disbanding it's entire civil beaurcracy? Is Minneapolis also blacklisting the current police from other jobs? Are they letting the current police take home any equipment they currently have access to?
Your Ukraine comparison is slightly better, but "corruption came back" doesn't address whether the move was beneficial or not. Nobody expects the result of disbanding the police to be a perfect racism free police force.
We don't know yet, which is the point and why myself and others in this thread are expressing what would otherwise be considered useful and healthy skepticism. Given the general rhetoric of the activists, the scene with the Mayor yesterday when he said he doesn't support disbanding the police, and how easily an extreme position gets support online it's totally plausible that one of the conditions for "disbanding" the police and rebuilding it is that current officers are blacklisted from re-hire. The civil bureaucracy is up for grabs too, as the protesters announced yesterday their political goal is to remove the mayor from office. That may be the right thing to have happen, but thinking that the city's bureaucracy won't be "disbanded" and "reformed" is I think a bit naive. It's certainly possible.
>The civil bureaucracy is up for grabs too, as the protesters announced yesterday their political goal is to remove the mayor from office
The removal of one public official is nothing like the deBaath party decision. Acting like there is a possibility this situation mirrors Iraq is ridiculous.
Sure, I'm well versed in what happened in Iraq believe me. I'm not making a direct comparison here. I'm merely saying that a reboot of the civil bureaucracy is within the realm of possibility, not that we're going to see some kind of "deDFL-ification" of city hall.
Right, what they are asking for is oversight on budget and practices, except that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "abolish the police departments!". If they are actually asking to abolish the police departments, that's painfully naive.
No, that's not what police abolitionists are asking for. That's what police reformists are asking for. These are not the same. I posted another comment on this post with plenty of references if you want to read up on the difference.
Apparently Camden, NJ did a version of this in 2013 with a fair amount of success: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camde...