Harvard Law School Hosts Discussion About Abolishing Police
“acknowledged the impossibility of eradicating all police services at once”
Wouldn’t it be funny to walk into an event like this and just start taking stuff?
The College Fix reports:
Harvard Law hosts discussion on abolition of police forces
Two of the more radical proposals to come out of our nation’s colleges of late are the dismantlement of the country’s prisons … and police forces.
Last Thursday, Harvard Law School hosted Alex Vitale, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He discussed his book “The End of Policing” which examines “alternatives to the police system” and “the dangers of modern policing tactics,” according to The Crimson.
Vitale says mental health is “the number one indicator of likelihood” of being shot and killed by police, but funding for cops continues instead of being funneled to mental health and drug treatment. “Improving training, increasing gun control, and ‘hiring a few black police chiefs,’” Vitale says, are ineffective in dealing with “harsh drug policies.”
From the story:
In his talk, Vitale acknowledged the impossibility of eradicating all police services at once. However, he maintained that there is a great need for systemic change.
“No one is talking about, ‘tomorrow we flip the switch and there are no police,’” he said. “The reality is we have a massive infrastructure of policing and criminalization, and we need strategies to get out of this mess, and those strategies do not include implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras, et cetera.” …
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Comments
That sentence would only make sense if the police’s function were to shoot and kill people. In that case, since the police mostly shoot and kill only crazy people, if we had no crazy people we wouldn’t need police to shoot them, so why not fund mental health instead of police.
But shooting people, crazy or not, is not what the police are for, it’s just an unfortunate and unavoidable byproduct of the police’s actual function. Police are there not to shoot people, and not even to arrest them, but to deter them from crime by the prospect of being arrested. Obviously that doesn’t work on crazy people, which is why the police so often end up having to shoot them. And yes, curing crazy people, to the extent that can be done, would be a wonderful thing, especially for the police who would no longer have to deal with them, and would be free to do their actual function. But it wouldn’t rid us of the need for police.
The “progressive” party line used to be that poverty causes crime, so if we got rid of poverty we’d get rid of crime. That is no longer viable, so their new line substitutes mental illness, or maybe adds it. If we got rid of mental illness (perhaps and poverty) we’d get rid of crime. But it’s just as fallacious as the original line. Why can’t the left accept that most crime doesn’t have an external cause; people commit crimes because they’re criminals, not for some other reason. Therefore the only way to stop crime is to stop crime, not to stop some other factor that causes it.
For the leftilibral, every thief is a Valjean, and every policeman is an Inspector Chaverre.
And every homeless person is a character from The Grapes of Wrath.
We can already see how a reduced police presence is making life in Portland less enjoyable.
Ideas so looney, only the most sheltered pseudo-intellectuals entertain them.
It’s a good idea to go back to the times of Ol’Wild West.
There were very little police and prisons, compared to today.
Let’s switch to lynch mobs, a tree, a horse and a rope.
Ah, it’s not what they’re proposing?
How about they start with the Harvard campus police, then advertise the fact in nearby diverse neighborhoods that a new source of white women has become available.
If like to see Harvard-diploma-ed Members of Congress, and members of the Judiciary abolished.
Getting rid of the police could work if we make a few changes:
1) universal concealed carry.
2) citizens can kill in defense of life or property.
3) reform civil law so citizens who kill criminals are protected from lawsuits.
I won’t be first to volunteer to live in a non-policed community.