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My patience is at an end with that poster...well...statists in general.
But you're going to get it too because the classic retort is coming. You can bank on it...
"Yes, but what if x happens? And what about y?"
The old "We do it this way, even if we know it is morally and logically wrong, until you can give an alternative that is personally palatable to me."
If they only understood that the ends don't justify the means.
It's tough to convince anyone of anything if they're not actually motivated to figure it out. I've said before that when I first realized state authority can literally never be legitimate, I knew I couldn't refute it, but I was still scared of the implications....and that motivated me to start looking into it myself. Probably would be way easier to just pretend the current system is legitimate, but I've never been good at lying to myself.
I appreciate the information. I look forward to seeing their views on replacing publicly-funded police forces with resolution councils. I trust that they will explain how the councils will be formed and funded and to whom they will be accountable. Most everything I've seen so far seems to want to replace one publicly-funded system with another. I'm curious how a resolution council would work without taxation of some form.
Can you please get back to me once you have a bit of time? An initial glance at the information that I found shows that I may have to delay my reading until later on today or tomorrow in order to become fully informed. Thanks again for the names.
I guess I halfway misread your question...not sure on resolution councils specifically. They do talk about private governance in general, private law, private defense, and give some concrete examples from the past, as well as point out examples that we overlook in our everyday lives.
As far as my own thoughts on a resolution council, I'd think there are many ways it could go depending on what agreements people enter into. What I'd say for sure is that there would be competing organizations offering their services rather than a monopoly, so the same reasoning against monopoly in any other context would apply here...and the common criticism would be that you'll then have organizations violently fighting it out with each other, but I'm not convinced that would be the case. There's a lot of incentive to work together to ensure their services work across the board, the same way cell phone companies have different networks, but you can still call or text someone with Verizon using Sprint, or whatever...wouldn't make sense to not work that out.
But even if that's not convincing, I really do think it's an interesting topic worth looking into.
I have read this piece by Stringham on FEE and I agree 100% with everything he said, but I do not believe that the answer is privatization. I think that rethinking what cops do and why we ask them to do it is critical to solving the problem. I think all drugs should be decriminalized. I think the only people who should be in prison are violent felons, other offenders should be dealt with by restitution community service and restricted movement for a fixed time with an ankle monitor. We are wasting billions of dollars providing gangs with new members. Young offenders in prison are forced to pick a gang to align themselves with but they can't quit the gang when they get released..think about the implications of that. Not to mention, prison guards in many states supplement their wages by distributing drugs in prisons, in some cases leading to a young person who never thought of using drugs walking out of prison with a life long addiction.
Definitely a lot of improvement needed from what exists now...agreed on that.
Being that I've worked with someone having a degree in English from a "traditional university" who couldn't write a coherent sentence and taken a class with someone who held a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering who installed brake pads in his calipers backwards, I don't see that as much of a qualifier of much but the ability to learn enough to pass some tests, certainly not of the ability to think on one's own.
Add my neighbor, a pHd in physics who put a thermometer i boiling water to sterilize it.
But, being informed by friends who recently attended John Jay and the cop college in Huntsville Texas, cops stopped hiring bright people because after training they went to work for private. Short sighted, but that's how we got here.
Definitely a lot of improvement needed from what exists now...agreed on that.
I just think we went too far into the rabbit hole with policing. What's scary is the interests that support law enforcement. Did you know that they hold trade shows for law enforcement where they hawk the latest and greatest taser, vest or spit mask? All those people making equipment for cops spend millions lobbying for new and tougher laws because they know that they need to encourage the hiring of more cops and prison guards so that they can grow their company. And then there's the whole private prison industry and for that matter unions that represent state prison guards. They absolutely have to have a steady stream of new inmates or they will never expand. Drug treatment centers and rehabs argue the loudest against the legalization of drugs because 'treating people' is their bread and butter, even when they have a zero success rate.
The problem I have with privatization is that introduces the same problem we have with private prisons - the profit motive. Private police departments will have no incentive in reducing crime, if that were to happen the local city council might cut back on the contract, they need to turn cities into war zones so they can get big fat contracts from a city council that is scared to death that they might get blamed for the crime rate
The OP is too idealistig and IMHO, lives in a bit of a fantasy world to think police can be privatized.
Who would pay for it?
Would it be funded from neighborhood HMOs or a Melo Roos assessment?
If so funded, who would pay for it where most people rent instead of own?
Where would neighborhood security be based, for optimal response times? Would every neighborhood have one "cop" in a little prison-cell sized shack? Would they be based in a tiny office in each strip mall? Or would they just drive around your neighborhood 24/7?
Would multiple neighborhoods or even large regions of counties band together to fund a region-wide security force. If so, what kind of contract would that entire for individuals/city governments/county governments? How would you treat breach of contract when parties fail to pay their share?
What happens when individuals or neighborhood associations go bankrupt and could no longer fund their share of the private security?
How would poor neighborhoods be policed where funding is minimal and deficient? Would "rich" neighboorhoods have to pay for "poor" neighborhoods.
All of the questions above are on funding alone. I could go on for pages about funding, then add similar questions for all manner of other things like training, logisitcs, lawsuits and immunity, recruitment, fraud, equipment, community relations, response times, riot response, swat teams, active shooter scenarios, drug overdoses, domestic squabbles, traffic accidents, traffic and speed enforcement, demographics, on and on, ad nauseum.
The OP's proposition is not a serious reality. Responding more is a waste of my time.
If somebody waved a magic wand and tax based funding for public police agencies disappeared, I am sure we could muddle through all of the features necessary to create and maintain a private police force that was adequate to protect us. I am not saying it would be impossible. It would have its own problems, and many of them would be much bigger than the problems with public police agencies.
I hate big government. I believe government is best that governs least. There are very few things government does better than the private sector, but what it does better, it does very well.
The US Armed Forces are an example of what the government does better than the private sector.
Police are a cousin to that, and the government does it far better on a county wide scale than trying to create county-wide private security agencies or worse still, break them up into neighborhood private security agencies.
If all we did was abolish the police and pay private security companies to police on a county wide bases, you would wind up with the exact same policing we have now, except every year you would have a new private security company due to low bid competion when every year some new company wins the bid in your county.
It would be a royal mess. Really bad idea. Unworkable. A pipe dream.
Last edited by Igor Blevin; 06-18-2020 at 05:51 PM..
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
11,974 posts, read 25,476,450 times
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I don't see how private security would solve the problem of excessive force and racial profiling. Couldn't rich people hire security personal with a history of racism behavior? How would you get rid of bad officers dealing with a huge number of different security companies rather than a couple municipal police departments? Wasn't the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery part of a neighborhood watch? George Zimmerman was playing cop when he followed and killed Trayvon Martin.
There is widespread support for making changes to policing. Pushing fringe ideas like Defund The Police (some good ideas but bad slogan) and replace police with private security will make the majority resist any changes.
I'm still waiting for you to take your turn. Do you need me to find the question for you again or can you find it this time. If you don't answer, then I will infer that you have no meaningful response. As I said, I'm not talking about theory or "what would you do if" scenarios. I want to know where on this planet effective resolution councils exist to resolve violent actions. I know that the weregild system existed centuries ago, but I can't find anything current other than civil resolution councils in South Asia.
At this point I wonder if you can even support your claim with evidence. Keep in mind that I have made no claims and thus do not have to offer support for such.
Again, your turn.
I made no claims either. That is what I would do.
I'm sorry. You must not know me. I'm me. An individual. Now, who are you? An individual? An involuntary collective? A corporation?
I'm not your daddy. Do you have any original ideas on the matter or are you just going to go on and on about this question?
Do you understand that what you would do and what I would do is different because we aren't the same individual and neither one of us owns the other person?
It's tough to convince anyone of anything if they're not actually motivated to figure it out. I've said before that when I first realized state authority can literally never be legitimate, I knew I couldn't refute it, but I was still scared of the implications....and that motivated me to start looking into it myself. Probably would be way easier to just pretend the current system is legitimate, but I've never been good at lying to myself.
I can't stand that I'm not good at lying to myself.
I'm being dead f'n serious on that too: I hate it.
Ignorance is bliss. Cognitive dissonance finds comfort in the mind of a statist.
He's still going on and on about where my idea has existed.
Jesus H. Christ.
Statement: Slavery is immoral and must be abolished.
Rebuttal: But that's how the cotton has always been picked.
I'm sorry. You must not know me. I'm me. An individual. Now, who are you? An individual? An involuntary collective? A corporation?
I'm not your daddy. Do you have any original ideas on the matter or are you just going to go on and on about this question?
Do you understand that what you would do and what I would do is different because we aren't the same individual and neither one of us owns the other person?
Damn, the statism is strong with this one.
You made the claim that publicly-funded police would be replaced by, in your words, resolution councils. You have not defined the term, nor have you given any examples of how they work in the real world.
You are an individual. I am an individual. We only know each other through what each of us reveals in our posts. I don't have any original ideas, but I have shown extreme interest in learning more about yours. All the while, you have obfuscated, and now you are trying to turn the tables back on to me, when all I have done is to ask you to elaborate on a topic that YOU brought up.
This does not lend credence to the concept of using resolution councils to replace publicly-funded police forces, and you end up undermining your own position because you can't or won't elucidate. Good luck convincing people to endorse a practice that you can't describe.
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