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I think the main argument against disbanding the police is that we'd have no mechanism to prevent violence from former cops. I have no expectation that their behavior will improve if we just stop paying them.

"The answer is not to defund the police! It's to fund them! Fund them!!" - Joe Biden

And then he proceeded to give them money to buy more tear gas canisters and armored vehicles and liberals are surprise Pikachu face-ing when statistics like this come out.

In 100 years (if the earth lasts that long) I hope people look back at police abolition the way we look back at the abolition of slavery: as an obvious step towards a more equitable society.

Any examples of thriving modern societies without a law enforcement arm?

The psych part is key too - if they can claim you are mentally ill, not only can they ignore your concerns but they also have a convenient way to dump you in a psych word if you get to annoying.

Friendly reminder that 988 = 911!

I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.

They sent “mental health professionals” to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?

And now you know why red flag laws are a bad idea

The most accurate records of how many people were killed by the police in the US are pretty much from a journalist who counted news pieces or something.

Here's the head of the FBI in a hearing of some sort: "We can't have an informed discussion, because we don't have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the United States, last month, last year, or anything about the demographics."

edit oh yeah the thing I was trying to say in the beginning of the comment comes instantly after that bit: researcher Philip Stinson accumulated over a decades worth of Google alerts on police killings

Police aren't legally accountable for their actions so long as they're acting in the performance of their duties, and lots of departments knowingly have illegal policies on the books to maintain that immunity for their officers.

People try to sue over it, but the cases are thrown out by the local judge because there's no standing to sue unless the illegal policy had impacted you, so a cop basically has to kill someone before the policies are modified in the smallest way possible, but the killer cop still gets off.

Additionally, police are allowed to lie in most of their interactions with the public. They have created a culture that encourages dishonesty, so perjury isn't an ethical problem in their eyes.

The prisons are for profit and the state gets to keep anything it seizes.

ACAB includes European cops, by the way. Just because they're especially bad in the USA doesn't mean yours aren't also trash.

Not sure which country you're in, but how have your cops been handling environmental or climate protests? or protests in support of Palestinians?

Ignoring problems tends to make them rot faster. Hollywood is superficial, it's all we got. None of the basics are taken care of, it's why I left (e.g. wealth before health). No safety nets, desperation is easy to find. Limited opportunities if you can't afford to do anything. It's an unsustainable way to live, if you call that living. It's more like surviving.

It's an issue in many other countries as well and there are a great many contributing factors.

1. Race and "Tough on Crime" politics - Ever since the emancipation of slaves on the basis of race, there have been political figures passing discriminatory policy that allows police to pursue and harass people at their own discretion: black laws, Jim Crow era laws, forced segregation, the 1994 Crime Bill, etc.

“We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican, said during a hearing for an anti-riot bill that was enacted in April.

It's clear that you can convince people to deregulate and militarize the police if you convince those people they have a greater enemy. You can see these stances and policy directions mirrored across Europe as refugees and immigration from poorer countries have increased in the last decade.

2. Lack of Centralization - The FBI is in charge of investigating police departments, and sometimes you see jurisdiction overlaps which allows other agencies like the DEA, State Marshals, Sheriff's Department, etc to investigate each other, but in general a Police Department is held to no standard but their own until things have already escalated past a point of return.

Some federal programs have tried rewarding PDs that behave well and adhere to specific training or standards, but it's far from enforced.