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Rolling Stone: Replace Cops w/Unarmed Ex-Cons
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On January 3, 2015 @ 3:42 pm In The Point | 24 Comments
Stop sending out your crazy right-wing idea like having open carry. Let’s just replace the police with unarmed ex-cons.
At least that’s Rolling Stone’s bright new idea in “Six Ideas for a Cop-Free World.”
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with “We all know we need police, but…” It’s a familiar refrain to those of us who’ve spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, “But who’ll help you if you get robbed?” We can put a man on the moon, but we’re still lacking creativity down here on Earth.
But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the “disorderly conduct” of the urban poor.
Also the relatively recent rise of non-feudal societies. But let’s get rid of “property”. That should solve the problem. Just like it did in the USSR.
Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns
They’re called neighborhood patrols. They don’t need to be made up of ex-cons, but it certainly helps if they’re armed. And the reason we have police is reliable full time security. People in neighborhood patrols have other jobs.
I don’t know how you’re going to make a neighborhood safer by having ex-cons patrol it, but I recommend that Rolling Stone put as many ex-cons on its security staff as it can.
But they’re not going to do that. Their bad stupid ideas are meant for the little people.
The decriminalization of almost every crime
What is considered criminal is something too often debated only in critical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Violent offenses count for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrests every year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to put a person in chains and a cage.
The majority of offenses are still crimes against people.
Would Rolling Stone like to decriminalize the 1.5 million property crime arrests or the 1 million assaults first? Or mayb the 1.1 million driving under the influence arrests?
But if Rolling Stone is serious about this, then it should fire any security guards that protect its offices. A cop-free society begins with it.
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