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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

You might be interested in this thought experiment:

Suppose whichever police force(s) you're talking about shall be disbanded. In this experiment, you can choose some amount of delay between that announcement and the actual disbanding; whatever seems most reasonable to you.

How would that play out in the following days / weeks / years?

How do you think individuals, companies, insurers, etc. would adapt? What aspects of life would be better, or worse?

(Personally, I think society would be for worse off. But of course I'm only guessing, and could be wrong.)

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No one is arguing for just disbanding the police and making no other changes to compensate — that's a strawman.

He didn't suggest that - he suggested in part that you think about what changes would be needed to compensate

Are you sure? I can't see how to get that impression from what he wrote. The fact that his own opinion is that society would be "far worse off" also indicates he's not coming at this from a Socratic position of unbiased truthfinding.

Exactly. Maybe start by disarming the police. Then, start recruiting police from social worker training programs.

As part of this thought experiment, what policing are being disbanded and what is being done by other policing and government groups to enforce other regulations?

For example, if a town's police system disbanded, but the state police still enforced laws against members of the town preventing them from engaging in their own policing, that creates a different scenario than if the state police didn't enforce any laws against the members of the town acting like the previous police force did. If even the military refuses to touch the area, given a threat that would normally allow the military to act like a foreign invasion, then it is a different situation compared to when you have a lawless area that's still protected from external threats.

I once saw in a developing country with no reliable police this sign: "Thief found, thief hanged". I asked the person driving me around and he said "yeah, they mean it". So I think in your experiment the people who would suffer most would be the real criminals. I don't think there would be much more crime, perhaps even less. Justice and Police systems are there not to prevent crime, but to prevent the people to turn into lynch mobs, which tend to be very unreliable.

Oh, because angry individuals are more likely to carefully prosecute crime? I have not got such confidence in the mob.

> I once saw in a developing country with no reliable police this sign: "Thief found, thief hanged". I asked the person driving me around and he said "yeah, they mean it". So I think in your experiment the people who would suffer most would be the real criminals.

And then you have lynchings like with Ahmaud Arbery. Not a thief, still shot and killed. Vigilante "justice" is often not just.

Though you may be right, an increase in lynchings may overall reduce crime (as presently defined, and excepting lynchings). It will also probably have a lot more false positives than the existing system, increasing paranoia with respect to outsiders and "others". So crime in a community may go down, safety for outsiders will likely go down, and for insiders may go up.

Good thing nobody is really advocating for disbanding all police departments. The "Defund the police" movement just picked a catchy and attention-getting name (and boy did they ever succeed at that), but even those "extremists" just wanted to reduce the workload on cops by reallocating a portion of their budget towards non-police workers who could take over on issues that don't require armed response.

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