Who determines what that right thing is?

I recently realized that the ONLY reason we have laws is because some asshole did something obnoxious and society collectively agreed that they shouldn't be able to do that anymore.

Most people can police themselves and be respectful to others, but the inconsiderate assholes of the world can't participate in society without threats hanging over their heads.

That bloke over there.

Assume a high-quality rightness

The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder

- Louis C.K

So yeah, we definitely need a police force to exist.

We don't need cops. In the US they aren't even obligate to protect you. Just 'enforce'

Not to mention their racist, warrior-coded and instigative training that they only need like 6 weeks for to carry a gun and end your life with no repercussions.

I have never in my life been in a situation where a police officer did anything but make the situation worse or threatened to ruin my life.

We need to use more common sense and protect our neighbors and communities. Bad actors need not apply to strong networks of local support.

How about on Lemmy? You know, mods

Not the police. Which is essentially what has gone wrong with police in the uSA>

It sounds like your question needs more context.

I like his work but I do not consider Louis CK to be an authority on these things.

You're waffling

Me neither, but I very much agree with his statement in this case.

So quote yourself. You don't even need to put in the quote marks.

There might be mechanisms that render them unnecessary. Let's say we have an instance with 10 users. If 5 of those users have blocked a spam bot, that block could propagate to the other users as well. Of course that setting should either be opt-in or clearly advertised.

I wouldn't say specifically police, but society needs rules and methods to enforce those rules. People WILL do whatever the fuck they want no matter how much it hurts other people even when there are supposed to be rules (Epstein, companies causing climate change, general pollution, embezzlement, etc...)

Just imagine what people would be doing if there were no rules or enforcement at all... I don't even think a society would be able to exist amongst the chaos.

Shitty people just ruin it for the rest of us.

Lawyers working for billionaires that want to enslave us.

So a kind of democratically crafted block list. It's a good idea.

In Lemmy, direct democracy becomes very feasible.

The people, through consensus.

I don't really get this. The law clearly does not prevent murders. And how come we survived the times before Law if murder was so rampant?

I'm currently in a sociology class for the first time and I get a kick out of the idea that humans are so convoluted that we have a field of study about how society works and despite being able to document basically everything we still can't figure out simple things like this.

Exactly, as it should be. Which resolves OPs question in a way, as the answer then becomes 'neither' or 'the community that reached the consensus are the police'.

Pretty good in theory but technically hard to implement, as per usual.

It does prevent that vast majority of murders.

And how come we survived the times before Law if murder was so rampant?

By carefully stepping over all the murdered people lying around.

But I didn't say it ... he did.

We need police to a degree, it's just since the crime waves of the late 70s into the 90s politicians used it to stoke The Fear, and it was used to make the police unaccountable, given total discretion and laws allowing them to take down any working person for one reason or another and ruin their life.

We are to trust they use the power wisely, even as cynical malicious politicians and rich people that control them seek to use that police force to further abuse people.

But because of The Fear, which is not enitrely misplaced, even if the system is the one driving the violence underlying it to a large degree, you can't get rid of police, and you would never get the public support to do so. Even in blue districts, the more experience people have with crime the more they want the police around, people living in the hood in the cities will not support getting rid of the police anymore than folks in the country will.

But we can put controls on them, put their operations back within the boundaries of the Bill of Rights, and common sense and decency, to not write laws so broadly as to give them discretion to charge any person with serious felonies. And to not decide bail on how much money you have in the bank.

Most prosecutors run unopposed, Sheriffs too I bet. City police are unaccountable to those that appoint and oversee them for several reasons, and are often unrepresentative of their communities. They are often rw extremists in blue cities, and there is no reason for fascists coordinating with paramilitary groups in training like counter protesters targeting protests in places like portland and berkely to be running the police departments. Telling the paramilitary groups in training like the proud boys of their movements, of the protesters' locations, etc. Or arresting the people that defend themselves from those groups but not the victims attacked without cause by those groups.

We could go on, but by electing corrupt local politicians, they can be taken down by the police if they tried to reform them. So as always, getting good leadership is where we would need to act.

It doesn't prevent all murders but surely it prevents some murders.

Indeed, lots of cases to consider.

It does prevent that vast majority of murders.

source?

EDIT: would you go out murdering people if no such law exists?

Common sense.

Universal public access surveillance and arming everybody is one non-cop option.

It's not that common.

That would be difficult seeing as how I have yet to offer you an argument.

The police are just the tool of the oligarchy though. This all stems from a group of the rich that cooperated on a long game to take over the country, to undo the gains of the working class, and return the country to what they saw as the glory days of the gilded age. They aren't as smart as they think they are though and will land us in the feudal ages, time travel is tough. And be destroyed by the monster they created.

But in 1971 the business roundtable made the first iteration of a long game to subvert the republic, and project 2025 is basically the newer version of that. They agreed to destroy any opposing forces like unions, infecting them with organized crime and federal investigations and bad media coverage, to take the media, to corrupt the regulators, capture both political parties, corrupt academia and the inflation rate itself, the unreported biggest coup of their, giving us a pay cut every year as 50 plus decades of understated inflation has eroded our buying power and handed that to investors by default, without the sheep suspecting a thing.

Anyway part of that plan was pushing The Fear of the other in the crime waves, which I'm sure they helped make worse, as the CIA certainly didn't help importing cocaine to street gangs in the nicarauga contra, and that's just one of the ones we know about. They gave unqualified support to law enforcement, and rewrote laws broadly enough to give them the discretion to charge anyone with draconian life ending charges if they want to.

It's all by design, of the rich, now super filthy rich.

What do the experts conclude?

Also, Lemmy. How about that context?

To my knowledge it's currently illegal to be a vigilante, but if it were made legal that could be a non-cop solution. There would need to be a lot of thought and guardrails put into that though, more so than what I'm capable of. I'm generally pessimistic and lean slightly misanthropic lol

Yeah, the ACAB people really have a giant, gaping hole in their philosophy if we consider Epstein and his associates. Like, what would they prefer happen to these people in their ideal world...? That an angry mob just shows up at their doorstep and beats them to death?

Depends what kind of society you want to have. People can police each other. You’ll always have bad actors in society, but you may not want to be on the frontlines of policing them. Especially when you’re talking about groups of bad actors vs. an individual. Ideally, you would live in a society where there is economic and social equality and people don’t have a need to commit crimes upon each other, but that’s a fantasy world. You could have a society brainwashed by religion but that’s not one of equality depending on who decides the rules.

Small community, probably less need for police. The larger the population, the more difficult it becomes to manage crime.

You might be asking the “are people inherently good or bad” question and unfortunately the answer is people are human, and humans are animals.

There's a lot of middle ground between those extremes, and as usual that's where the answer lies. But If I have to pick one of these extreme positions, I choose anarchy over tyranny.

Lemmy mods, at least in Lemmy World, often police the will of the community. If there is a user who much of the community disagrees with, whether they are being abusive or not, they will block them just to maintain the echo chamber. If that’s the kind of society you want, then you definitely need mods.

The institution of slavery never ended in the USA, it evolved.

We need them to a certain degree. Depends on the type of police too. We need police who are genuinely doing justice and not injustice (which is uncommon).

Soon they will do end runs (moreso) around the prohibion on debtor's prisons and start locking people up for private debts again I bet, and it will evolve into indentured servitude, and being illegal to quit your job if you owe money on a plan, out on agreement with the lender.

Over ten years ago Utah did this already, sharks would buy distressed debt in the state for pennies on the dollar, unrecoverable debt, company sells 1 for .1 or whatever. They then file suit in the big city, in salt lake even as the defendant may live on the other side of the state. When they don't show up to court they get default judgement, and they get the judge to hold them in contempt, either right then and or later in a collection action. The judge has them held for I forget up to 90 days or something, if they pay they get released, or work out a deal with the claimant. After they are released they can just file another collection action. They get bills for being in jail too but that's another story.

Owing money to the state already gets you locked up, they treat everyone as choosing not to pay not that they don't have the money. But people will claim to be owed money, maybe even medical debt they buy for pennies on the dollar, and use it to enslave people, on the road we are heading.

That is just for starters, before they bind everyone to their jobs after people walk off their jobs en masse as they don't pay for life any longer. Unless something changes here and it sure appears we are trusting the establishment to run the opposition so nothing will change and it's a little late anyway and a hundred times harder now anyway.

Depends. If you want the current social structure to keep existing as it is, police is needed.

Small groups can "police" themselves - you don't need external people inside your gaming group to ensure Charlie Cheater won't cheat this time.

Police tends to be a problem of "since we can't find the actual culprits, we'll treat all of you as potential criminals".

As far as the class has taught, experts can't conclude shit. Some people believe society is a complex machine that will naturally correct errors like crime. Some have decided that society as a whole exists as a means for the select few to oppress the major. Others state that society naturally self governs until it exceeds a critical mass and then must be split with each new form remaining in solitude from one another. Even still some attest that society is simply a consensus value and a need for governance only stems from the problems caused bypeople not getting on board with the culturally accepted ideal.

And how often is that angry mob going to get the right person?

Most "criminal" behavior you see is caused by poverty. The police do not help solve the problem whatsoever. The behavior that should be policed is abuse of power aka white collar crime, as this is the only way to make capitalism sustainable.

I kind of see this in the same vein as Christians saying, "How can you be moral without a belief in God?" I don't believe it's a presence of a deterrent that prevents it but a security in your environment or person that is the cause.

Sure there is always going to be people that take advantage of other: theft, rape, violence, murder. But these things haven't been lost with the presence of police. In fact most studies offer solutions that involve enhancing/improving social and community structures without involving policing or an increase.

https://violenceprevention.tulane.edu/resources/strategies-for-community-based-violence-prevention/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-states-can-lead-on-community-safety-five-recommendations-for-preventing-and-reducing-violence/

I used to play indoor soccer. The best games we ever had were when for one reason or another, there were no refs.