How Scary Would a Country Without Cops Be?
...not because of criminals, but because of dangerous ex-cops
We Are Definitely Screwed Maybe is a newsletter about the things that scare me. You should subscribe, so you’ll always know what to be afraid of.
The Powers That Be (elected officials, and the people who pay for their campaigns) clearly want the current wave of protests to end, so we’re seeing signs that they’re willing to make concessions, both real and symbolic. Republicans are conceding at long last that black lives matter, about six years too late for anyone to care. And meanwhile, in the world of potentially meaningful concessions, (to cite one random example) here’s an alderman in Chicago floating the idea of police budget cutbacks:
It’s not much, but it shows that elected officials have the attention of protesters for once.
But while “Defund the police” certainly has been a popular slogan among protesters, as have “ACAB” “Fuck 12” and a million other things like “throw all cops into a large blender and drink them” (probably), no one is chanting “seriously look at cutting police budgets!” These protests aren’t about to calm down just because a city tweaked its spending plan for the year. The Minneapolis city council realizes that (much more than their mayor does, certainly), and that’s probably why they have informally vowed to disband the Minneapolis Police Department.
So, that being the case, here’s the new Minneapolis:
You have to be really stupid to think something like this is going to be the result of a push to abolish the police, but a lot of people are that stupid. Later, I’ll touch on a phenomenon I find much more interesting than this one—the potential danger of violent ex-cops running wild in post-cop America—but first let me put this whole criminals-run-wild-in-the-streets concept to bed.
I’m not about to make this into another dumbass explainer article designed to make the concept of defunding/abolishing the police as boring as Brexit. The Vox article by Matthew Yglesias, for instance, is so stultifying that by the last paragraph he seems to have lost track of what he was talking about in the first place:
The obvious economic policy solution would be to follow House Democrats’ proposal to send huge sums of money to state and local governments, allowing them to avoid making big cuts at a sensitive time. […] Senate Republicans, however, insist they don’t want to deliver aid on large scale, which is going to force jurisdictions everywhere into sharp cuts to something — likely including police departments along with everything else.
What’s more, it seems to me that many people writing these explainers are saying “Defunding the police actually means [insert whatever reforms author preferred before any of this started].” And that’s not very helpful.
However, Anoka County Sheriff James Stuart—whose deputies patrol Minneapolis in addition to the Minneapolis police—gets it. What we’re talking about is no police. And Stuart doesn’t like it. "If [Minneapolis City Council members] choose to eliminate their police department through defunding operations without a realistic plan, they must also choose to live with the consequences of their decisions,” Stuart said, adding, “we are one of many agencies who have no appetite for going back to their city to restore order again; especially if their decision is to actively compromise the safety of the city."
This sabre-rattling from a cop brings me to an interesting side note: In 2018, Wrightsville, PA disbanded its police department. Instead of being laid off, the three cops in that department had their jobs transferred to the police force of a neighboring town. The cost of the Wrightsville Police to pay a neighboring police department to be their police force, and—paradoxically—they saved $400,000 a year doing this. Since there are still cops in Wrightsville, this may not seem like a good example, but here’s an interesting offhand remark from the president of their city council, “We never really had 24-hour service.”
So there were times when there were no cops on duty in Wrightsville, and yet there was no purge.
First and foremost, that’s because Purges aren’t real, but in part, it might also be because (as our friend Sheriff James Stuart pointed out earlier) law enforcement agencies overlap. Wrightsville sits in York County, Pennsylvania, which has a Sheriff, and deputies.
And there are *a ton* of cases of this sort of overlap.
To illustrate this, let’s say I did something illegal right now like wash my neighbor’s car without permission (it’s illegal here!). The LAPD might have something to say about that, but if they were suddenly gone, the LA County Sheriff, or the gun-toting cops under the aegis of one of my local universities might get that call. If they were gone, I might still get in trouble with California’s state police agency, the California Highway Patrol (particularly if I were washing it on the shoulder of the 5 freeway). And even if all those were gone, depending on my crime I might be visited by the DEA, or cops from ICE. The FBI might investigate my car wash-related serial murders. The US Marshalls might come after me if I busted anyone out of jail. The Secret Service might show up if I were a threat to any elected officials. The ATF might come after me for my stockpiles of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. There are separate cops for if you commit a crime on a plane, via a post office, in a federal building, or in a national park. Even the EPA has an armed police force.
A cop-free country would require the US to abolish about 18,000 agencies.
But, as I said before, no one is talking about a crime-is-legal-now free for all. Having it be no one’s job to deal with, say, roving bands of rapists is not on the table. We’re talking about replacing the police, and having the thing that replaces the police truly not just be more police.
“The question isn't, is there going to be some sort of police entity or another, it’s going to be, how is that going to be different from what we’ve got right now?” philosopher Ben Burgis said on YouTube. In other words, we’re talking about something perhaps more like a squadron of hall monitors whose job it is to keep people safe. More specifically, Burgis suggests something more democratic, and, crucially, “demilitarized”—so cops will have fewer of the tools necessary to mete out capital punishment on sidewalks. Matt Bruenig suggested on Twitter that a better municipal public safety agency might need to hand-pick its members, presumably to prevent violent people on power trips from signing up in the first place. The Wall Street Journal suggests replacing police with social workers.
Are you starting to get what this would look like? There’s no “all cops go home now” lever that anyone can throw. If, over the course of years, we systematically abolished all 18,000 police departments one by one until they were all gone, we would figure out what kind of organizations were needed along the way, and how those organizations would need to work. It would be fine.
Ah, but don’t be too soothed. Former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has some additional concerns:
She’s worried, in short, that out of work cops will turn into ISIS. Will they?
“I'd say that the tweeted quote is not quite factually correct,” Dr. Huseyn Aliyev, a University of Glasgow political scientist focused on militias told me. “The ex-Iraqi military/security personnel joined insurgents not because they were demobilized, but because the political regime that patronized their sectarian group (Sunni) was overthrown and they were left at the mercy of a competing sectarian group.”
I also ran this by Twitter history guy @Trillburne, and he told me this in DMs: “I think we should always consider the possibility of a backlash from the people who lose out in a reform process, but presumably if we fired a large number of police officers, they would still have their pensions, and most would be able to preserve their middle-class lifestyles. So they would have a lot to lose if they effectively declared war on society.”
Some US police do flirt with right-wing militia membership, and police in general aren’t exactly antagonistic toward extant militias, but I still couldn’t find anything to suggest that cops will go rogue like Marianne Williamson worries they will. That might be because the police are a sort of militia as it is, and doing away with that militia is the whole point.
@Trillburne pointed me to the 2000 Police Act in Northern Ireland, which abolished the Royal Ulster Constabulary—the loyalist Northern Irish cops. The RUC was despised by Northern Irish Catholics, and in the interest of fostering peace it was replaced. The new police department had to be half-catholic, in addition to an overall reduction in the force by 4,500. So most of the existing police force was forced into early retirement.
And—judging from the more-or-less positive trends in the Northern Irish peace process—abolishing the RUC does not appear to have fomented terrorism among ex-cops. Here’s a graph of the Northern Irish crime rate from a government report on crime in Northern Ireland, including the transition away from the RUC.
It shows an overall downward trend in crime from the abolition of the RUC until 2015, with a slight but steady increase in “violence against the person, sexual offences & robbery”—a trend that started before the switch. The increase in “other crimes against society” is mostly drug crimes according to the report.
It could be that some Northern Irish ex-cops had militant tendencies, but things were mostly calm all through the decade that followed the disbanding of the RUC. Much in the way US cops seem to have a lot in common with US right-wing militias (as well as having a white supremacist origin story), the Royal Ulster Constabulary probably had some common ground with extremist groups like the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, and some very well could have joined them. But peace prevails for now in Northern Ireland, however tenuous it may be. Sectarian killings aren’t unknown, but the perpetrators tend to be so young that the Royal Ulster Constabulary was defunct by the time they were born. It’s too soon to call the Irish peace process a success story, but getting rid of the RUC was, I’m willing to opine, a step in the right direction.
It’s worth noting that, as @Trillburne hinted, former RUC officers were given “generous” severance packages for their trouble, plus a whole lot of ceremonies, and a visit from Prince Charles to reassure them that they weren’t bad guys.
Here’s Dr. Aliyev again:
[D]emobilized state forces may consider participating in organized violence, including organized crime, if there are no employment opportunities, if there was no reintegration efforts and if no support was provided by the state. One of the examples of that happening is demobilization of Colombian right-wing paramilitaries whose members largely joined cartels simply because there was no other jobs or opportunities. This is a highly unlikely scenario in the US as former police staff would most likely find some other legal employment.
In other words, people tend not to get locked and loaded if there’s food on the table, but all bets are off if the ex-cops are starving.
And people’s simple material needs are—maybe this goes without saying—also something to consider when it comes to the motivations of protesters.
Note for people who read all the way to the bottom: Hi. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please subscribe and spread the word. I’m hoping to post these four days a week instead of two, with a paid tier, and more in-depth reporting, etc. Earning more subscribers is the only way to make that possible. —Mike