I am not all in on this one. When I think about it, it sounds nice. But I hedge that there is some probability, say 25%, maybe higher if I'm having a bad day, that a total abolition of the state would be worse than a minimal state, or even worse than what we currently have. Granting that, I think we could make a significant move in that direction without things going badly. However, I don't think it would be wise to institute this change overnight. That is, "abolish the police, then hope my ideas work out and something better replaces them" is a terrible idea. For massive institutional changes like this one, it is wise to make incremental steps in the right direction. That way, you can tell if you've gone too far, or are going about it the wrong way. (I would say that sufficiently evil institutions, like the drug war, should be abolished immediately. It was right to abolish slavery, rather than incrementally chip away at it. A Burkean conservative could argue that complex structures have been built atop this edifice, and removing it suddenly will cause unpredictable harms. But some things really are sufficiently evil that we should pull off the Band-aid all at once and deal with the pain.)
There really are bad people in the world who will prey on the weak. There are sociopaths who just don't care about the suffering of other human beings, and there are criminal opportunists who can be nudged into committing property and violent crime under the right conditions. There needs to be a policing function, whether it comes from the government or a private entity. People who commit crimes (real crimes, not victimless ones) need to be dealt with somehow. I think that if local governments said, "We're going to cut the budget of our police departments by 5% of this year's budget, each year for 20 years," that would be enough time for institutions of private security to establish themselves. We'd know ahead of time that police will be less available. We'd have some kind of assurance from the government that armed private security would be tolerated. Perhaps a few court cases involving the use of force by private security would get adjudicated by then, so people would be clear about the legal environment they live in. On the other hand, simply abolishing the police, starting right now, with no warning and nothing to fill the gap would likely be disastrous.
Bret Weinstein put it well, saying (paraphrasing here): No matter how bad your police department is, its sudden and complete absence would be a lot worse. (His podcast where I heard him say this, Dark Horse, is excellent.) He would know. He and his wife Heather essentially had the police abolished on them, as he puts it. When he committed a (perceived) social justice misstep at his former college, Evergreen State College, he was harassed by mobs of students. The president of the university told the local police department to stand down. He received a phone call from the chief of police telling him that he shouldn't return to campus. Student "patrols" were searching for him car-to-car and the police could not ensure his safety. If it were common for people to buy their own security an open market, like signing up with an insurance company, he might have fared better. "Oh, the free government service won't help me today. That's okay, they're only a bit player. (pulls out private security subscription card) Oh, hey, I have platinum coverage anyway! I get one free escort per policy term." I don't know how likely that scenario is to play out, but I'm sure it's not going to emerge overnight to fill a vacuum left by the sudden abolition of a long-standing institution. (I doubt Weinstein shares my vision that a world of mostly private security is viable. He makes it quite clear that he is not a libertarian.)
This will be another post that I'm not sure if I should even bother with, because the people using the #abolishthepolice hashtag are totally unserious. Given the politics of the people using the slogan, I'm quite sure they aren't endorsing anarcho-capitalism. On social media, I raised the question of what exactly they are proposing. I had this feeling of getting six different answer from five different people. There needs to be some kind of conversation, a coordination of messaging. I find it odd (though not unbelievable) that people would congregate around a slogan while supporting very different policies. What exactly do these people mean by "abolish the police"?
It means exactly what it sounds like.
It means abolish the police, then reconstitute the police.
It means we'd be left without police protection, but everything would turn out fine.
It means we'd be left without police protection, and that would in many senses be horrible, but it's worth doing because things are so bad right now.
If we abolished the police, we'd live in a harmonious utopia, where social problems just get solved because we are all suddenly public-spirited. The incentives to do violence will be removed by a more robust social welfare system.
On Twitter, one could find an almost eye-rolling, exasperated, "Of course we don't literally mean 'abolish the police.' We really mean 'reform the police.' It entails the following slate of policy changes..."
And, of course, some people changed it to "defund the police," which obviously seems like a softening of the original.
What truly astonishes me about all this is the willingness to ignore a vast literature on the various claims being discussed. You think we can just spend money on social programs and get to the "root causes" of crime? This is a very old idea. People have been discussing it for decades.
The accepted wisdom has long been that there is a trade-off between levels of policing and levels of incarceration. You can have large numbers of police patrolling neighborhoods to deter crime, or you can have less patrolling but stricter enforcement for those who have been caught. This is the Gary Becker notion that you can have high-likelihood and low-severity punishment, or low-likelihood and high-severity punishment, to achieve a given amount of deterrence. I see no appreciation of this idea in today's conversation about "abolishing" the police. What's more, it seems Gary Becker was quite wrong. He actually preferred low levels of policing with very high penalties, thinking this was more "efficient" in the sense of getting more deterrence for a given public expenditure. Well, you can't just multiply "probability times severity" to get "expected penalty," because the response to severity is non-linear. Criminals don't respond twice as intensely to a 10-year sentence than to a 5-year sentence. You get more crime deterrence by having more boots on the ground, ensuring a higher probability of conviction. By contrast, the "abolish the police" crowd seems to want to eliminate police and prisons at the same time. They are completely ditching a rich thread of thought and research on criminology.
See also here and here by Alex Tabarrok. Megan McArdles book The Upside of Down also explores the concept of achieving greater deterrence with high-probability punishments.
I'm also reminded of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature. He points out that most lethal violence stems from "altercations of relatively trivial origin," things like insults or other forms of disrespect, stepping on someone's shoes, and so on. This kind of jockeying for trivial status is built into us. Some of us have better temperaments for it, and some of us have a cultural aversion to violence that stops these from becoming fist-fights. Pinker explains that this kind of violence is a carry-over from "cultures of honor," old societies in which one must develop a reputation for a willingness to use violence. Otherwise you may be seen as weak, and your belongings may be seen as up for grabs. Eschewing violence in such a society can mean you don't survive. The American South still has a culture of honor, and Pinker gives examples of experiments that show Southerners have much more relaxed attitudes about the use of violence than Northerners, even today.
The point is that much of this violence stems from disputes over status, not stuff. I have serious doubts that we can simply redistribute our way out of violent conflict, as if getting enough social workers and handing out enough government checks will eliminate the motives to commit violence. Most property crimes have a negative expected payoff anyway, so the notion that people are "stealing to live" never made a lot of sense. It makes even less sense to carry on as if this academic thread didn't even exist. It seems people are just making shit up, like we're in a giant dorm-room bull-session. Let's see a little more acknowledgment of the people who have done the hard thinking about this already.
I'd also like to see John Pfaff's work on the nature of mass incarceration taken more seriously. We simply cannot blame drug policing or mandatory minimums for the massive growth in incarceration. To release a large proportion of prisoners, we need to talk seriously about releasing people who committed violent crimes. Are #abolishthepolice folks really okay with this? Do they think these people won't commit violent crimes again? (Are they indulging the Utopian bullshit in the Twitter cartoon I linked to above, where merely showing mercy calms our tendency toward violence?) I quoted his book in a previous post:
The emphasis current reform efforts place on reducing punishments for people convicted of low-level nonviolent crimes is understandable, but it should be clear by now that the impact will be limited. Any significant reduction in the US prison population is going to require states and counties to rethink how they punish people convicted of violent crimes, where “rethink” means “think about how to punish less.”
A simple example makes this clear. Assume that in 2013 we released half of all people convicted of property and public order crimes, 100 percent of those in for drug possession, and 75 percent of those in for drug trafficking. Our prison population would have dropped from 1.3 million to 950,000. That’s no minor decline, but this sort of politically ambitious approach only gets us back to where we were in about 1994, and 950,000 prisoners is still more than three times the prison population we had when the boom began. Or consider that there are almost as many people in prison today just for murder and manslaughter as the total state prison population in 1974: about 188,000 for murder or manslaughter today, versus a total of 196,000 prisoners overall in 1974. If we are serious about wanting to scale back incarceration, we need to start cutting back on locking up people for violent crimes.
Don't get me wrong, I think we should end mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. I think we should end the drug war and release all prisoners who are in for drug charges. That would grant a very large number of people their freedom, even if it's a small fraction of the total prison population. But we should recognize that this would entail releasing some prisoners who are in for drug charges but whose real crime was a violent crime or property crime. Prosecutors and police will often decide who is guilty and target that person with a drug crime, because it's easier to prove. They sometimes entrap their target with a staged drug sale. I had someone from my community, a prosecutor, say that they do this. He said it in an approving tone, calling it a "great tool." This is disgusting, and it muddies the waters regarding who is or isn't a truly "violent criminal." But knowing this does suggest that there are a lot more violent criminals in prison than even Pfaff's numbers imply. Are "reformers" willing to turn loose rapists? Domestic abusers? Murderers? Police officers who used unnecessary violence against suspects? Do they acknowledge that if we're less willing to incarcerate violent criminals, that decreases the disincentive toward violence? The modern US is an outlier, compared to the rest of the world and compared to our own history, because we have had an increased willingness to imprison violent criminals. That needs to be acknowledged.
If we were to abolish the police, there would be a much higher demand for private security. Are people using the hashtag okay with this? This was my formulation to someone on social media (paraphrasing, not quoting): If you abolish the police, I will hire armed private security to protect my home and escort me when necessary. Without police, you have no means to stop me. Are you okay with that? The people who want to abolish the police may also want to abolish private security for the same reasons, but they have no means of enforcing it. In other contexts, these same people are usually hostile to the notion of privatizing anything that the government is currently doing.
People will do some combination of arming themselves and hiring armed guards to protect their property and their persons. The demand for guns will surely increase. Most of the #abolishthepolice folks seem to be reflexively leftist; presumably many of them favor gun control. But who confiscates the guns or ensures background checks are done properly if there aren't police? Who arrests the non-compliant gun seller? You can say you want to abolish the police, but you then relinquish any control over what the resulting society looks like. You can say how you wish the world would be, but you have no levers to pull or dials to turn to steer the world in that direction without an enforcement arm. Call yourself whatever you like, and paint whatever ideal picture of the world you want. But in a world without police, we are all anarcho-capitalists.
Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe the would-be reformers aren't as reflexively leftist as I think they are. Maybe they aren't hemmed in by stereotypes about the left's policy platform. I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised. Mostly, I think this is another flash in the pan. It's not even registering with people who don't inhabit the Twitter-sphere, and most Americans are shrugging it off as something that's obviously nonsensical. I wanted to put down some thoughts anyway. So here it is, from someone who's done a lot of thinking about what a world without government police would look like.
No comments:
Post a Comment