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The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/1

• jason-phillips 4y ago
  > The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. I think it's rather naive to consider otherwise. Somewhere along the way we were fed this childish mythology about the importance of the individual, which is definitely captivating, stirring one's imagination with sparks of creativity, but the truth is that institutions and 'the system' are the bedrock of civilization and thus society. Fanciful thoughts of some anarcho-libertarian ideal state are cute, but much farther down the list of priorities than the continued function of the machinery of civilization, on which everything depends. And the enforcement required so that state continues is liberally allotted to almost every government agency.
  • yucky 4y ago
    Except government can't stop growing, so that eventually doesn't end well.
  • ewzimm 4y ago
    In these discussions, there's always an implicit assumption of certain intentions being the "real" ones. Statements like "police were created to..." first imply that there was a creator whose intentions define the police through incarnations, a kind of "god of police," and, more likely, if it was not a single individual, it is a "pantheon of police" composed of its creators and sustainers. And then we have the image of the state as a composite entity which exerts control over the pantheon without being corporeal itself, maybe as the composite will of a class of people. To me, this idea of the personification of state power into an all-powerful driving force seems more mythological than the importance of individual decisions being made by those who carry out the work of the state. An individual officer may have a similar belief in the intentions of the state, but their actions are ultimately their own. It seems ironic that the more we tend to be critical of state power, the more we tend to mythologize it into a kind of personification. You might not fall into this trap, but many do. But why should the intentions of the composite pseudo-entity matter more than the intentions of the real individuals who carry out the work? Isn't each police officer a person who has different goals and ideas about who they are and who they serve? Is this really so insignificant, or is it so overwhelmed by institutional goals that it becomes irellevant? Or could the real people and not their abstractions be the real bedrock of civilization?
    • the-printer 4y ago
      What is to make of the overlap between institutional goals and those of individuals? We live in a time where people are developing institutional abstractions as their civil bedrock. How can we reasonably differentiate institutions that are fundamentally man-made from the men who are the means of the institution’s goals?
      • ewzimm 4y ago
        My answer would be that individual intentions are ultimately the only thing that matters, but they are shaped by cultures which use abstractions to communicate and connect. Social control means learning which abstractions will stick, like finding a catchy tune, but the most memorable ideas aren't always the best. When an internalized abstraction leads to negative consequences, people tend to rebel against it and find another one. The goals of abstract institutions are abstractions of intentions. They exist in both the minds of those who write them down and those who carry them out, and a perfect translation between those two groups will never happen. If we want to get down reality, we have to talk about the intentions of the actual people involved.
        • the-printer 4y ago
          Who decides when the “tune” of an abstraction becomes stale? The people, but which people? And how is it determined that an institution is yielding negative or positive results?
          • ewzimm 4y ago
            Every individual makes this judgment all the time. When people notice a problem with their ideologies, sometimes they will just ignore the issues, and other times they will decide to rebel. When enough people make that choice not to follow the tune, there's a revolution. That's why power is so precarious. It's hard to get people to dance to the same tune forever.
    • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
• hackton 4y ago
  Pretty much like HR in companies
  • yucky 4y ago
    If HR isn't there to protect a company, who would? Or is the argument that it isn't needed?
• indymike 4y ago
  > The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system' If that is the case, why is civil asset forfeiture a thing? It seems to undermine property rights and is a glaring failure in the system.
  • yetihehe 4y ago
    No policing system is perfect, in any complicated enough system there will always be rules that undermine that system slightly. It's like asking "why is cancer a thing, it undermines living organisms".
  • objectivetruth 4y ago
  • Finnucane 4y ago
    Not your property, the aristocracy's property. Cops don't work for peasants.
    • fortuna86 4y ago
      The "aristocracy" has their property seized all the time, for unpaid taxes and a litany of other crimes.
      • HyperSane 4y ago
        Those aren't the true aristocracy.
        • cortesoft 4y ago
          Nor true Scotsman, apparently.
          • CPLX 4y ago
            I mean the definition of aristocracy is basically the people who get to make the rules. It’s the core point.
• mjburgess 4y ago
  The whole "let's turn this into a libertarian political-philosophical discussion" angle is a misdirection. (And an increasingly common one, eg., cf. crypto). The guy installed spyware on laptops in a commercial store and then publicly displayed the data collected. It's an open-and-shut case. Almost any person who went to that store, and any store owner, would be furious. It is these people the law here protects(, and damn right too) -- the interests of the artist aren't "the little guy's" and more than a burglar is the underdog. A burglar claiming the police are corrupt for protecting property owners is as meglomanical as this guy. This isn't some middle-aged academic wishing he were in a mythical past, he's a guy breaking into computers, stealing data, and using it to boost his own career.
  • antihero 4y ago
    It is literal truth that the first police in the US were slave hunters and the first police station in the world was to protect from theft at the Wapping docks
    • williamcotton 4y ago
      There were constables in England in the Middle Ages. There have been local volunteer watchman and paid constables in the United States since the early colonial days. There was also "hue and cry", whereby someone witnessed a crime and then shouted out and all men were supposed to help catch the criminal. This, as can be imagined, was sometimes quite the shit-show.
    • Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
      What will you do if I rob you? Who will you report this to? What stops me from burglary? Also, city guards have existed in Europe and China since before tge US existed. They didn't use the word "police" obviously. I wish "cops = nazis" people would explain what they would have instead.
      • antihero 4y ago
        The idea that you can’t criticise the failings and nature of something you also use are so tiring. Crime happens for so many reasons, some of which force maybe required to stop or hold people accountable, and many of the reasons are endemic to the system we live in. Other things could be prevented by provisioning elsewhere.
• vt85 4y ago
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