LogFAQs > #908574965

Nrrr posted...

Genuinely don't see how anyone can support anything but the complete abolition of the police at this point. It is an inherently immoral institution that only serves the purpose of protection of property rights and turning poor people into slaves.

https://www.thenation.com/article/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/

From the perspective of someone who is white and female...no I don't agree with abolishing police. (Although granted I am aware there are people with similar demographics to me who are in favour of abolishing police such as Chelsea Manning).

I fully understand that there are police departments in need of reform, and that training of subconscious bias really needs to be a part of basic police training. But I also think there's a lot of vulnerable people who do currently benefit a fair bit from police. Police currently kind-of go off of intuition and stereotypes, which means they will protect old people and women (and yes often fail quite badly at protecting african american men). I would rather reform police departments than protect nobody.

There's pretty clear trends in statistics when you look across multiple countries that for any given crime rates of that crime will go up if punishment is lower, and rates of that crime will go up if enforcement is lower.

I will say, one of the things that the Nation seems to take issue with is that police are primarily enforcing property rights and business rights. And yeah, the Nation is a socialist/communist publication, so it makes sense that they would take issue with property and business rights. But it's not really the job of the police to determine the laws. They just enforce laws. Politicians write laws.

(Whether or not property rights/bussiness rights are a good thing is a different question).
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