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Originally Posted by GodgersWOAT
Are police even a net positive at this point?
Why not just disband forces and...do something else regarding public safety?
This is one of those things that can't really be answered in a tweet, but it sounds really cool to say "#disbandthepolice" because watching a guy lynch a black dude while he begs for his life is such a clear cut case of wrong that no one can plausibly debate it.
The problem here is the same issue you run into with a lot of other situations: there aren't a ton of better solutions. There are obviously better ways to police a society. First and foremost, focusing on demilitarization and deescalation training would probably show the biggest immediate benefit, but it's not like we can just snap overnight to a disarmed police force because we've got a lot of cultural factors working against that. Namely that we still have a lot of other institutionally racist systems around so impoverished areas are still going to be high in violent crime and disarming the guys that work in those areas is probably a bad idea.
The most extreme solutions you typically hear are things like getting rid of police forces and replacing them with civilian forces that have periods of service (say 6mo. to a year) and are directly accountable to the public they serve. The most obvious issue there is that literally no one is going to volunteer to do that job. We struggle to get enough qualified people to be police now (and it's not hard to argue we're already scraping whatever is below the bottom of the barrel), it's not going to get better when it morphs into a glorified mall cop position with all the same danger.
We need to completely overhaul the relationship the police have with the jurisdictions, but we also need to fix the issues causing the poorest members of society to be so goddamn poor that their essentially left behind. Once that happens, crime, chemical dependence, and untreated mental health issues are basically a guarantee.