Have you SEEN people? The answer's not a challenge.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
12 points (66.7% liked)
Ask Lemmy
38120 readers
1016 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I absolutely promise you if law enforcement ceased to exist tomorrow our society would collapse.
There are a SHIT TON of criminals out there and WAY MORE people who are currently law abiding citizens that would become criminals if there were no police around.
This isn't really debatable. Law enforcement is necessary. Always has been. We just have horrible standards for law enforcement in the U.S. and have a culture that promotes bad behavior from them. And those standards can vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You can have a law enforcement agency that's generally solid at their jobs with little to no corruption, and right next door in the next county you can have a shitstain agency that fucks everything up and is awful at their jobs.
The question isn't whether or not we should have law enforcement. It's how do we hold them to higher standards and punish them approprietly for their crimes?
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.
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.
load more comments
(11 replies)
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.
You might want to back down off that position. Just take a look at jim crow laws
I guess I meant the idea of laws, and not every single law ever, but still, sometimes the assholes are put in charge of making the laws, and society either decides to make a law about not making those kind of laws anymore, or they agree to uphold them.
Something being against the law is a pretty big deal. Its one reason I find juneteenth kind of silly. Passing the amendment that made the previous activity illegal is a very big deal and certainly slavery has not disapeared with the passege of it but now folks can't do it out in the open in that particular way. Its like what ice is doing now. Did police do stuff like this before. Eyup. but it was recognized as illegal and there was recourse that could take effect as quickly as deparmental procedures. Now the "question" of its legality is open. Thats not good.
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.
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?
And how often is that angry mob going to get the right person?
And that's the obvious issue (just remember how many times the reddit geniuses "cracked the case" only to be completely wrong about everything).
Who does the work of tracking them down to arrest them - they are super rich, they have the ability to go to any number of locations and live comfortably indefinitely. You need people to find and question associates, perform wiretaps and search known residences and properties, trace bank accounts, and file extradition paperwork. And in any reasonable society, we don't want mobs to be able to do this on a whim to anyone they feel like, so at the very least we need a legal system to assess and issue warrants for these things.
Then suppose you track them down, and they are living in a mansion in some remote part of Jamaica. Who goes to arrest them? A Jamaican angry mob? Or is an American angry mob going to book a bunch of plane tickets? When they get to the front door, how are they going to handle the concrete walls, iron gates, and private security guards - possibly armed with military-grade firearms?
Suppose the suspect gives chase in an automobile - do you now have the mob jump in their personal cars to chase after them, trying to coordinate via cheap walmart walkie talkies and performing pit maneuvers like they saw on TV?
And then suppose the mob somehow manages to catch them. But maybe we decided we don't want to be quite so barbaric as beating people to death on the streets - if for no other reason than the fact that we are often wrong about the guilt of particular people. So we arrest them and they are awaiting trial. Great. Where? Some random person's house? In the stocks in the town square?
Our current law enforcement system exists because it solves problems that we have faced in the past. That doesn't mean that it is perfect or that no parts of it should be questioned - but if your solution to problems in the law enforcement system is "end all law enforcement", then you are, quite frankly, living in a childish fantasy land. You may as well say that the solution to law enforcement problems is to mount all cops on unicorns and have them shoot everyone with love-and-friendship rays.
They don't consider that at all. Because they'd have to consider that maybe they are one of the problematic people...
Anyone of an extremist position typically never considers the possibility of themselves being the victim of themselves. Because if you agree with them you are automatically good person...
Which is precisely how cult leaders get away with their horrific abuses of their members. The narrative becomes 'anything I do is justified because I am good and all things I do are good'.
load more comments
(2 replies)
The police in Australia here don't really spend there time watching people and forcing them to do the right thing.
A lot of their resources are invested in regulating traffic. Issuing fines for speeding, playing with phones, not wearing a seatbelt. If you don't punish people for being dickheads on the road it will be a shit show. If there's an accident they show up in a moment, manage traffic, get the wrecks off the road, et cetera.
Another important function is domestic violence and other related domestic disputes. If someone is getting beaten by their spouse, a neighbor might call the police. They will show up and take the appropriate actions to resolve. Whether that's just informal counseling or charging one or other combatant.
They also deal with mental health and substance abuse issues. I remember 20 years ago I woke up one morning and there was some teenager in my back yard. He was ranting about the robots attacking or something. I called the police and they showed up and took him to the emergency ward at the hospital.
They also manage petty or minor theft. I remember someone stole a (very nice) pair of shoes from my front door. I had some pretty good footage of them, and it's a complicated story but they'd actually left a beer bottle with their prints on it earlier in the day. The police showed up and used the video to get the authorisation to search a couple of houses and found a bunch of stolen stuff.
If you didn't have "police", you'd need some other organisation to do these things.
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.
There’s a balance between physically punitive surveillance state and consequences for your action.
I used to play indoor soccer. The best games we ever had were when for one reason or another, there were no refs.
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/
Depends on the values of the society, but there will always be a need for at least some security (because some people are just maniacs).
Really? What kind of take away are you looking for asking anonymous individuals to provide their own opinions based on their own experiences to formulate a blanketed conclusion for how they think every single person will act unanimously in an ungoverned society?
This would only work if the information you are looking for was to see how an individual thinks the hivemind would operate if everyone was like the show Pluribus.
Im sure this thread will get pumped full of anti-cop rhetoric, that im not saying is wrong, but the fact of the matter is, every real world scenario is am exclusive pccurance between the parties involved and every single enviromental variable in play at the time of the occurance.
Its like asking if ypu need bouncer at the bar or if everyone at the bar always gets along. WHO THE FUCK KNOWS?!?! LOL
Who determines what that right thing is?
Not the police. Which is essentially what has gone wrong with police in the uSA>
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.
The institution of slavery never ended in the USA, it evolved.
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.
Assume a high-quality rightness
That bloke over there.
load more comments
(3 replies)
"And gee, well, you know, you've got to have the police. Because if there were no police, look at what you'd be doing to yourselves. You'd be killing each other if there were no police!” But the reality is the police become necessary in human society only at that junction in human society Where it is split between those who have and those who ain't got.
Apparently they stuck together multiple speeches from Omali Yeshitela to get the into to the song so I’m not sure which speech(es?) this is originally from.
The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder
- Louis C.K
So yeah, we definitely need a police force to exist.
I like his work but I do not consider Louis CK to be an authority on these things.
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?
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
A little bit of each but be careful, some people will take it as police doing what they want, that's not good.
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".
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).
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.
view more: next ›