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Depends who's suggesting a replacement. Camden literally just created a new police force from the ground up to replace the deeply abusive one they disbanded. It

Depends who's suggesting a replacement. Camden literally just created a new police force from the ground up to replace the deeply abusive one they disbanded. It's hard to disentangle the union-busting function from the culture-changing function, since the two are so closely intertwined in the US.

zdragnar 6y ago
Camden NJ, in 2013? They hired back most of the officers who were fired when the department became a division of the county police. They went through more training, psych profiling, and then put more officers on the streets and implemented a broken windows policy to get the murder rate under control, which later was rolled back after protests. That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead. Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma". This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
- azernik 6y ago
  The OP that all this is in response to is not advocating that, which you can tell by the fact that they don't use the word "abolish": > We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution. About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.

zdragnar 6y ago

Camden NJ, in 2013? They hired back most of the officers who were fired when the department became a division of the county police. They went through more training, psych profiling, and then put more officers on the streets and implemented a broken windows policy to get the murder rate under control, which later was rolled back after protests. That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead. Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma". This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".

azernik 6y ago
The OP that all this is in response to is not advocating that, which you can tell by the fact that they don't use the word "abolish": > We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution. About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.