To some extent, But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc. And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force.
I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence done by the police (and you could argue that it'd risk increasing it, in fact - George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch leader, not a cop). But it would straightforwardly eliminate a host of excesses from militarized equipment and training to asset forfeiture to the blue wall to qualified immunity to even (relatively) minor things like quotas.
(And to be clear, I'm not saying that "arm the populace and set up civilian watches" is a complete or good replacement for the police - I'm just saying it seems like the minimal possible step to take if you're carving the police out of a society that evolved around having police. If you don't even take that step, the results of a "natural experiment" of a day without police aren't meaningful. But it's not an actual policy proposal; a serious attempt at getting rid of the police would in fact want to be careful about making an even less-accountable shadow police.)
Have you ever lived in a country that has a well functioning, nonviolent Police? E.g. somewhere in Europe?
Have you ever lived in a country where people don’t have weapons? It is like night and day really - I never heard of a shooting in my neighborhood, and when Police shoots someone unarmed by accident, it is nationwide news (in a nation of 40M, I remember one situation happening a few years back).
edit: I found some stats for my country. Every year, for 40M population Poland: 125 uses of guns by Police (warning shots etc), around 25 times shot towards a person, 1-2 people killed.
> Have you ever lived in a country that has a well functioning, nonviolent Police? E.g. somewhere in Europe?
I know for a fact that the police in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Balkan countries is extremely shitty. You do not need an armed police in order for them to be violent.
> And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force.
Imagine an armed and dangerous HOA, functioning as its own "community policy force."
Sure, but imagine a situation where this is a huge step up in fairness and justice from what you currently experience everyday! Many people currently live under tyranny and terror worse than an HOA police force.
HOA Karens are not my idea of a better police force. The response to insufficient oversight shouldn't be tossing out the baby with the bathwater, but better policies. We might start for example, with the top of the funnel.
Police in the US are professionally credentialed faster than a master plumber. After less training, less testing, and less oversight, they're handed lethal discretion and informal qualified immunity latitude, in less time than it takes for someone to hang a shingle out as a one-man plumbing business.
This is the kind of behavior that I expect to see widely across America if we rely on random citizens to patrol instead of police. He was told by 911 to stay in his car, but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".
Agreed that it won't help there. But communities are different; the ones that are proposing community policing are ones where they know that they will get better treatment from their own community members than they will from outsiders.
The same solutions will not be applied universally across the US because the challenges are very different for different communities. Many Black communities that are asking for community policing will benefit; doing community policing in white spaces is not guaranteed to make them any safer for Black people, but I don't know if that's being called for. And honesty I'm not sure it makes them less safe, either, when you look at what happened to Treyvom Martin and Ahmed Aubrey's cases (and all the others that do not get media attention).
> but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".
The wikipedia article says that he was injured and that he got into a conflict with him before shooting. He claims that this was while he was returning to his car and he was attacked by him. If this is true I see no misconduct by him.
> But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc.
So the civilian watch would effectively only have lethal force to stop a threat then? All of those things have a purpose. Armored vehicles for example are most often used to approach armed suspects who have holed themselves up in a defensive position without risking seat or police lives. Stingrays are used to track gang, cartel, weapons dealing, and terrorist activities.
You could argue that only federal entities should have that power, but then the FBI/DEA/ATF would inevitably fill the power vacuum and take over a lot of roles that would otherwise be done by police. The alternative of course if that we simply don't use Stingrays, armored vehicles, riot shields and rubber bullets, but then a lot of crime would go unpunished either from lack of information gathering or simply from fear of death (for example, a civilian with just a gun would have a much higher chance of death trying to free a child from an armed abductor that a swat team with armored vehicles, bulletproof shields, etc.)
No, it's a different institution based on different ways of organising power. For another example of this see Civil Defense Forces in Rojava[0] which are organized democratically.
Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?