What Would Really Happen If We Abolished the Police?

Right now, there are a lot of people who are advocating for police departments to be reformed or defunded, but there is another idea that a very small number of people have begun advocating, which is the idea that the entire police force should be just permanently abolished altogether.

This idea seems shocking at first. Most people assume that, if the police force were completely abolished, the result would be complete chaos and people would go out murdering other people in the streets with no one to stop them and it would be like The Purge. This is, however, extraordinarily unlikely.

The fact of the matter is that we can actually have a pretty good idea of what society would be like if we abolished the police, since—believe it or not—for most of human history, there was no police force. In fact, the idea of having a police force is actually fairly modern. Nonetheless, as I will discuss in this article, permanently abolishing the police is still probably not a good idea—just not for the reasons most people think.

People who want to abolish the police

First, let me note that, as unbelievably as it may seem, calls to abolish the police are very much a real thing. For instance, in early June, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, there was a mural in Minneapolis with the words “Abolish the police.” There are also photographs of protesters holding signs with this slogan on them and articles on the internet defending it.

When people use this slogan, however, they can mean all kinds of different things. Many of the people who use those slogan don’t actually want to literally abolish the police, but rather want to reform or greatly reshape the role of the police in society. For these people, the slogan “Abolish the police” isn’t a serious policy proposal, but rather a cry of frustration—a way of signaling to the world that they want drastic reform and they want it now.

Other people who use the slogan do want to literally abolish the police, but only as a temporary or partial measure as part of the process of creating a new and fundamentally different police force. For these people, the idea is to get rid of the police force we have now and create something better to replace it.

For this article, though, I’m going to be primarily responding to the most extreme group of people who are using the slogan “Abolish the police”: people who really want to literally, permanently abolish the police force altogether.

So far, this is an extremely fringe view that is held only by a very small number of activists and that no elected official has ever endorsed. Nonetheless, because there are a few people out there promoting this idea as a serious policy proposal, it is worth considering for a moment whether it is a good idea. The best place to start looking for answers to this question is in the historical past.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from Vox of a woman holding a sign with the slogan “Abolish the police”

The case study of ancient Athens

The reason I’m interested in this question of what would happen if we actually did permanently abolish the police is because my main area of study is ancient Greece. The best documented of all the ancient Greek city-states is the city-state of Athens.

As I discuss in this article I originally published in October 2019, Athens did not have anything resembling a modern police department. The closest thing they had was a group of publicly-owned slaves who had been captured from the Skythian lands north of the Black Sea. These slaves were equipped with bows and arrows and were tasked with maintaining public order.

The Skythian archers did not conduct any kind of investigations into criminal activity and they generally did not apprehend criminals. Instead, their purpose was basically to prevent people from rioting and engaging in public disorderly conduct.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix depicting a Skythian archer, painted by Epiktetos, dating to c. 520 – c. 500 BC

Despite this, ancient Athens wasn’t anything at all like the world portrayed in The Purge. People didn’t go around raping, murdering, and cannibalizing whomever they pleased. This is because, even though Athens didn’t have a professional police force, it still had laws and the Athenian public was still interested in obeying and enforcing those laws. There was a whole judicial system in place, with law courts and legal procedures.

Here’s how the system worked: Any adult male Athenian citizen could accuse any resident of Athens or resident of one of Athens’ colonies of any crime at any time. The case would then go to court, where it would be heard before a jury composed of adult male citizens. Athenian juries were were absolutely massive because it was believed that having a large jury would prevent people from influencing the verdict through bribery or coercion. A typical jury probably had well over a hundred people on it. On account of this, verdicts were by majority rather than by unanimous consensus.

Women were not allowed to speak in court, meaning that, if a woman wanted to bring a case to court, she had to convince her husband or one of her male relatives to do it for her. Likewise, if a woman was accused of a crime, her husband or one of her male relatives would have to defend her.

People didn’t run around committing crimes because, for one thing, most people had a sense of morality and they understood that things like murdering their fellow citizens were morally wrong, but also because they knew that, if they committed a crime, they could be brought to court, put on trial, and—if they were convicted—punished accordingly.

Unfortunately, the ancient Athenian system was still deeply flawed. Since there was no police force, the plaintiff had to gather any evidence he needed against the defendant and bring the case to court on his own. Naturally, this meant that wealthy people had a huge advantage over poorer people, since they had more resources that they could use for gathering evidence and they could pay the best and most experienced logographers (i.e. speechwriters) to write speeches for them that would be convincing to the jury.

Furthermore, there were no rules governing how a plaintiff was allowed to collect evidence, meaning they could resort to all sorts of nefarious tactics. One particularly shocking tactic was buying up slaves and torturing them to get them to incriminate people. (As I note in this article I published last week, contrary to what some modern authors have tried to claim, ancient Greek slavery was an extremely brutal institution.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the site of the Heliaia, the primary democratic court of ancient Athens

Antiphon’s On the Murder of Herodes

To give you a sense of some of the flaws of the ancient Athenian criminal justice system, let’s talk about one case in particular: the case of Helos, a young man from the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, who, in around 419 BC or thereabouts, was put on trial for the alleged murder of a young Athenian man named Herodes. We know about Helos’s case because he hired the famed Athenian logographer Antiphon (lived c. 480 – 411 BC) to write a speech for him. This speech has survived to the present day under the title On the Murder of Herodes.

The speech is effectively divided into two parts. The first part of the speech pertains to legal procedure. The Athenians had two different courts: the regular court, which was used for most trials, and the Areios Pagos, which was reserved almost exclusively for murder trials.

In the speech, Helos complains that he is being tried in the regular court for the crime of being a “malefactor,” but he should, in fact, be being tried in the Areios Pagos for the crime of murder. This breach of procedure put Helos at a considerable disadvantage because it meant that, even if he was acquitted, he could be tried again on the Areios Pagos for murder in the usual way.

The second part of the speech deals with Helos’s actual defense. Helos reports that he went on a ship with Herodes to the port of Ainos in Thrake. Helos was going there to visit his father and Herodes was going there to release some Thrakian slaves. By chance, as they were passing along the north end of the island of Lesbos, they encountered a terrible storm, which forced them to dock at the site of Methymna and change ships.

According to Helos in his speech, he and Herodes spent the evening on the deck of the ship drinking. Herodes drank far too much wine and, well after dark, in a state of drunken stupor, he left the ship without anyone to accompany him and wandered off onto the shore. He was never seen again. The next morning, Helos and the other members of the crew set out a search party to look for him. They found no sign of him.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Molivos Harbor at Methymna, taken in 2003

When the weather cleared, Helos continued on his journey. Herodes’s family, however, became convinced that he had been murdered. When the ship that Herodes had been on returned to Mytilene, his family had it searched and discovered bloodstains. These, however, turned out to be sheep’s blood from a sacrifice.

Herodes’s family purchased two of the slaves who had been worked on the ship as members of the crew and tortured them to get them to confess that Helos had murdered Herodes. The first slave refused to confess and said that Helos was innocent. The second slave, whom the family had kept as a prisoner for many days on end, finally confessed—after having been brutally tortured—that he had helped Helos to murder Herodes.

The slave claimed that Helos had gone ashore after Herodes and murdered him with a rock, that he and Helos had loaded Herodes’s body onto a boat, and that he had rowed the boat out to sea and dumped the body overboard. Upon having extracted this confession, Herodes’s family promptly decided to kill the slave who had confessed. Just before they killed him, the slave recanted his confession and declared that he had only made it to get them to stop torturing him. This recantation benefitted him in no way, since his torturers killed him nonetheless.

As is the case with virtually all ancient Athenian court cases, no one knows what the outcome of Helos’s trial was, since all that has survived is the speech that he delivered as his defense.

The ancient Athenian system and our own

Permanently abolishing the police and adopting a system like that one that existed in ancient Athens would be a bad idea because it would only make the problems we have right now even worse. It would take power away from the government—which is ultimately supposed to be answerable to the people—and put greater power in the hands of non-government elites.

Furthermore, because crimes would have to be investigated by private citizens (like the members of Herodes’s family), rather than government professionals, the government would have less control over what investigators would be allowed to do. There would be effectively no oversight whatsoever. Right now, our country already has very serious problems with lack of police oversight and with individuals who are not members of law enforcement trying to take justice into their own hands.

For instance, the idea of a “citizen’s arrest” has recently been used to justify atrocities. Following the tragic killing of Ahmad Arbery on 22 February 2020, the Waycross Judicial Circuit District Attorney George Barnhill recommended that no arrests be made, claiming that Arbery’s killing was simply a “citizen’s arrest” gone wrong. Unfortunately, in a world where there is no police force or analogous institution but there is still a judicial system like the one we have now or the one that existed in ancient Athens, a “citizen’s arrest” would become the only kind of arrest. This would clearly not be a step in the right direction.

Moreover, in the wake of the ongoing nationwide protests and public outrage over police brutality against black people, many right-wing extremists have declared that, if police departments are disbanded, they will step in and enforce justice their own way (i.e. outside the confines of the law and in accordance with their own flawed, personal judgement).

There is strong evidence that they are serious about this. On 25 August, a seventeen-year-old vigilante, police-idolizer, and avid Trump supporter from Antioch, Illinois, named Kyle Rittenhouse showed up to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and gunned down three protesters with an AR-15 (which he was probably not legally allowed to carry to begin with since he was minor). He did all this in the apparent belief that he was somehow protecting public order.

Two of the people he shot—a twenty-six-year-old man named Anthony Huber and a thirty-six-year-old man named Joseph Rosenbaum—later died. The third person, a twenty-six-year-old man named Gaige Grosskreutz, was injured. People have pointed out that all three of these men had violent criminal backgrounds, but that doesn’t really matter as far as my argument here is concerned; just because they had committed crimes in the past doesn’t mean Rittenhouse had a right to shoot them.

If the police force were abolished without the justice system being drastically altered in advance in order to accommodate such a change, we can only expect people like the Kenosha shooter to effectively take over the role of the police, which would be a very bad thing.

The real problem with the idea of abolishing the police altogether without creating other institutions to fulfill or eliminate the role currently fulfilled by police, then, isn’t that this would result in people going out and sadistically murdering each other for no reason like in the movies, but rather that it would effectively place the responsibility for enforcing the law into the hands of dangerous vigilantes without even the pretense of accountability.

ABOVE: Photograph of Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old vigilante who gunned down three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them

What supporters of radical police abolition are calling for

So far, I’ve mostly been talking about a society without police in terms of the ancient Athenian system, but this isn’t a very accurate way of talking about the modern police abolition movement, since most supporters of radical police abolition are not calling for the United States to adopt a system like the one that existed in ancient Athens.

Instead of calling for the role of police to be fulfilled by private citizens, they are calling for the role of police to be eliminated altogether. The idea is that most of the things police are currently tasked with doing don’t really need to be done, and the things police do right now that do need to be done can be done better by non-police.

Radical police abolitionists actually have some good ideas for how we can reduce the role of police in society, some of which I will talk about in a moment, but I can’t find any realistic plans by which the role of the police could be eliminated entirely. Notably, I can’t find any workable ideas for dealing with violent crime that don’t involve having some kind of at least rudimentary police force.

This article by Alec Karakatsanis published on 10 August 2020 in the left-wing magazine Current Affairs argues that the police themselves are a far greater threat to ordinary people’s livelihoods than anything that they might classify as “violent crime.” Essentially, he seems to argue that people we call “criminals” might murder, assault, or kidnap other people occasionally, but murdering, assaulting, and kidnapping people is police officers’ full-time job and it’s not worth having an entire force of professional murderers, assaulters, and kidnappers just to deter some other people from murdering, assaulting, and kidnapping. He writes the following in response to a study that claims to show that police are effective at reducing crime:

“Second, as with the other studies, this one does not include violence by police or prison guards. Using the study’s own numbers, if there are 1,000 deaths from police shootings every year and 95,000 yearly sexual assaults against people arrested by police, that would be more than an additional $20 billion in social costs—reversing the finding of the study.”

“More broadly, the study does not include the costs of other police harm: millions of stops, searches, arrests, beatings, chokeholds, and taserings; interference with community-based efforts to combat violence; lost jobs, homes, and separated families; interrupted medical and mental health care; spreading of infectious disease in jails; deportations; and harder-to-quantify effects of things like widespread surveillance on human relationships and privacy. Presenting the supposed benefits of something without counting its harms is not objective science.”

Perhaps he has a point here. Perhaps the police as they currently exist do do more harm than good. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean it would be impossible to change the police force into something that does more good than harm.

Moreover, even if we accept the premise that the police can’t be reformed and they will always do more harm than good, I don’t think that the general public will ever be prevailed upon to accept this, because it means accepting that murderers should be allowed to run free because the cost of apprehending them is too great. Since the public isn’t going to accept this idea in a million years, I don’t see it as particularly worth debating.

Ultimately, I think that, while our current police system may be deeply flawed, having a police force in the first place is better than the alternatives. In my opinion, the solution to police brutality isn’t to abolish the police force altogether, but rather to reform it.

Below are some ideas (in no particular order) that have been proposed that are much less extreme than the idea of permanently abolishing the police that I think could at least have some effect at reducing police violence.

Proposal #1: Dramatically reduce the role of the police in society.

Police officers are trained in violence. An inevitable consequence of this is that they tend to bring violence wherever they go. Short of abolishing the police, it would be a very good idea to scale back the role that police currently have in our society. We are currently using police for a lot of functions that they probably aren’t the best people to handle.

For instance, police officers are often deployed in public schools, where they are often used to handle discipline. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), there is no evidence that having police in schools keeps students safe and, in fact, having police in schools can actually be very harmful to students. Since police are trained for dealing with criminals, they tend to treat disobedient children as criminals. This results in what has been called the “school-to-prison pipeline,” wherein students who misbehave in school wind up going to prison, often for very minor offenses.

To make matters worse, many schools across America have full-time resource officers but not guidance counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers. According to the ACLU, roughly 1.7 million students are in schools with police but no counselors, roughly 3 million students are in schools with police but no nurse, roughly 6 millions students are in schools with police but no school psychologist, and roughly 10 million students are in schools with police but no social worker. It would be a great idea for us to take police out of schools and replace them with counselors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers.

There are tons of other things police are used for that they probably shouldn’t be. For instance, police are often sent to deal with people with mental health issues. Most of these kinds of situations would be better handled by unarmed mental health professionals. Police are also usually deployed in cases of suspected drug overdoses, when it would be a much better system to only send in emergency medical services.

If we reduce the jobs that police are called for, we will also reduce the opportunities for police violence to occur.

Proposal #2: Legalize certain activities that are currently classified as “crimes”

An extension of this principle is that we should reduce the need for police officers in certain areas of public life by eliminating crimes that really shouldn’t be crimes. Police officers spend the vast majority of their time enforcing laws against activities that are either harmless or that are harmful exclusively to the person engaging in those activities.

I’m the last person in the world who would ever think of doing drugs. I have never smoked, vaped, or drank alcohol at any point in my life and I have no intention to ever do any of these things. I don’t even drink carbonated beverages. Nonetheless, I think that the way drugs are being handled in our current criminal justice system is completely backwards and wrong.

I don’t think anyone should ever be sent to jail just for using drugs. People who use drugs need help. Throwing them in jail not only does not help them, but actually harms them. I therefore think that possession and use of drugs should be decriminalized and the money that we currently put towards punishing drug users should instead be directed towards helping them to break free from harmful addictions.

Naturally, this means that people who are in prison for non-violent drug offenses should be released as soon as possible. They don’t belong in prison and it is wrong of us as a society to keep them there.

There are a lot of other unjust laws that should also be gotten rid of. For instance, many jurisdictions have laws that are specifically designed to target homeless people, including laws against panhandling, against sleeping on the sidewalks, against sleeping in parked cars, against sleeping on park benches, and against other activities commonly engaged in by homeless people.

These laws are clearly unjust and deplorable. For non-homeless people, homeless people living on sidewalks and engaging in panhandling is at worst a minor nuisance. Moreover, homeless people don’t do these things because they want to; they do these things because they have no other choice. No one ever wants to sleep on a park bench or beg for food (well, except maybe Diogenes of Sinope). What cities are doing is effectively making it illegal to be poor.

ABOVE: Diogenes Sitting in His Tub, painted in 1860 by Jean-Léon Gérôme. If Diogenes tried to live in a pot on the street in the United States today, he’d probably get thrown in jail.

Proposal #3: Place restrictions on what police unions are allowed to include in collective bargaining agreements, or abolish police unions altogether.

Police unions work tirelessly to shield officers who are accused of misconduct from facing any kind of consequences for their actions. They make collective bargaining agreements that often include terms that give officers who engage in violent misconduct enormously unfair advantages.

For instance, officers accused of violent misconduct are often required to be given “cooling off periods” after incidents, during which they are not allowed to be interviewed, which gives them time to get their stories straightened out. These agreements sometimes also include stipulations that anonymous complaints against police officers not be investigated.

Police unions are also fiercely opposed to any kind of meaningful reform and will fight tooth-and-nail to keep things the way they are. In order to push through reforms, state legislatures will, at the very least, need to severely restrict police unions from using collective bargaining to protect officers accused of misconduct.

Unfortunately, police unions have so much power that restricting them may not be enough to break the control they have over the police force and public policy. It may be necessary for state legislatures to ban police unions and collective bargaining agreements for police officers altogether.

This would be an extremely radical and potentially dangerous step, since it might set a precedent for abolishing other types of labor unions as well—but police unions are very different from other types of labor unions in that they use their power to oppress the vulnerable rather than to protect.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from NBC News of members of the boss of the Minneapolis Police Union, Bob Kroll, giving an address on “Safety in Our Cities”

Proposal #4: Place more regulations on what kinds of force police officers are allowed to use and when.

Back in June, a group known as Campaign Zero was pushing a campaign called “8 Can’t Wait,” which centers around eight policy proposals that the group claimed could “decrease police violence by 72%.” These eight proposals are as follows:

• “Ban chokeholds & strangleholds”
• “Require de-escalation”
• “Require warning before shooting”
• “Exhaust all other means before shooting”
• “Duty to intervene” (i.e. require officers to intervene if they see other officers engaging in misconduct or unnecessary force)
• “”Ban shooting at moving vehicles”
• “Require use of force continuum” (i.e. a standard for how much force is permissible under certain kinds of circumstances)
• “Require comprehensive reporting”

Unfortunately, Campaign Zero’s assertion that its recommended policies “can decrease police violence by 72%” is not based on reliable evidence and the campaign has repeatedly exaggerated the effectiveness of its recommended policies.

It has also been pointed out that many police departments have already adopted at least some of the policies recommended by the campaign and these departments still have huge problems with police brutality. The problem is that, even when there are rules regarding use of force in place, police officers routinely break them.

Nonetheless, I’m a pragmatist and I think that any step towards potentially reducing police brutality is a good thing. These eight proposals certainly won’t solve police brutality on their own, but they are some fairly simple precautions that it might be possible to get even some conservatives on board with and I think that having restrictions is better than not having them.

ABOVE: Graphic produced by Campaign Zero for their “8 Can’t Wait” campaign. The claim being made here about these measures reducing “police violence by 72%” is extremely dubious, but they’re still good ideas.

Proposal #5: Ban police from attacking peaceful protesters.

Speaking of limiting police officers’ use of force, over the course of the past few months, police have repeatedly used tear gas and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters. The most notorious incident of this happened on 1 June 2020, when President Donald Trump ordered police to clear out a crowd of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square using tear gas and rubber bullets fifteen minutes before curfew—all just so that he could have a photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

This is disgraceful and it shouldn’t be allowed. Police should never be allowed to attack peaceful protesters, let alone do it so the president can have a photo op.

ABOVE: Photograph of police in riot gear using tear gas and rubber bullets to clear away peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square on 1 June 2020

Proposal #6: Require all police to wear body cameras at all times.

Many police departments still don’t require their officers to wear body cameras or, if they do, they don’t require them to keep those cameras on at all times. Many supporters of body cameras argue that police will be less likely to commit acts of brutality if they know everything they do is being recorded.

Personally, I am skeptical of this argument, since many of the acts of police brutality that we have seen in the past few months have been committed by officers who knew they were being recorded. I doubt that a body camera would have in any way deterred Derek Chauvin from killing George Floyd.

There is still a very strong argument in favor of body cameras, though, which is that, right now, when police misconduct does occur, it often goes unrecorded. Body cameras would allow misconduct to be more consistently recorded, which is an important step in the right direction if we are serious about making sure that officers who engage in misconduct are punished.

Proposal #7: Make all records pertaining to police misconduct permanently publicly available.

Right now, records pertaining to police misconduct are generally kept secret or even destroyed after a certain amount of time due to provisions in police union collective bargaining agreements. Making these records available to the public may not do anything to reduce police brutality, but it would at least allow scholars and journalists to study police brutality and give us a better idea of how common it is, when it occurs, and what more can be done to prevent it.

Proposal #8: De-militarize the police by taking away all military-grade equipment.

Currently, the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) is a subdivision of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Disposition Services that is responsible for a program known as the 1033 Program or LESO Program, which provides domestic police departments with surplus military equipment either for free or at a cost under the condition that they use the equipment they are given within one year of receiving it.

This creates an incentive for police to use military equipment as much as possible. This makes police officers feel like soldiers, which makes them feel like everyone around them is an enemy, which makes them more likely to attack and kill their fellow American citizens. A study conducted in 2017 found that the most militarized police departments are the ones that are most likely to commit acts of violence against civilians.

LESO should be abolished and police departments should be stripped of all military-grade equipment. There is no good reason for domestic police to be using tanks and machine guns. Police officers may think that having this equipment is cool, but it makes American citizens less safe.

ABOVE: Slide from the brochure of the Defense Logistics Agency showing some of the kinds of military vehicles that are currently provided to law enforcement departments through the 1033 Program

Proposal #9: End fear-based police training and replace it with conflict de-escalation training.

Currently, police officers are essentially taught to fear members of the communities they are supposed to be protecting at all times and to always be ready to shoot. They also generally spend vastly more time training in the use of weapons and firearms than they do in conflict de-escalation. The natural result of this is that police have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

There are also some really disturbing police training seminars out there, such as those organized by the retired lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman, which focus on teaching law enforcement officers how to overcome their psychological inhibitions against killing suspects. Grossman himself has stated that a goal of his seminars is to make it “possible for people to kill without conscious thought.”

This kind of training needs to be gotten rid of and replaced with training that is more focused on conflict de-escalation. Some departments have already started doing this, but this is a trend that needs to continue.

Proposal #10: Abolish qualified immunity.

”Qualified immunity” is a legal principle created by the United States court system that maintains that government officials cannot be sued for violating a person’s rights unless those rights were “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

In practice, this means it is impossible to sue a government official for violating one’s rights unless an appellate court or the Supreme Court has previously ruled that the exact same action taken by the exact same kind of government official under the exact same circumstances violated a person’s clearly established rights. Even if the court agrees that a government official violated someone’s rights, the person can’t sue unless those rights were “clearly established.”

To give you an idea of how strictly this is applied, an inmate in Texas named Prince McCoy, Sr. tried to sue a prison guard for spraying him in the face with pepper spray for no reason while he was locked in his cell. In February 2020, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, even though the court had previously ruled that it was excessive force for prison guards to punch or tase defenseless inmates for no reason, the court had not specifically ruled that they were not allowed to use pepper spray on them for no reason. Therefore, the guard was granted qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity is one of the many things preventing police officers from being held accountable. It needs to be abolished. This is something that some members of Congress are already trying to accomplish; on 4 June 2020, Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley and Libertarian Representative Justin Amash introduced H.R. 7085, which would abolish qualified immunity for all government officials. The bill currently has sixty-three cosponsors, but it has not been voted on.

Proposal #11: Redirect all funds gathered from fines for minor crimes away from police departments and instead direct it towards local school districts.

Currently, when police officers issue fines for traffic violations and other minor crimes, the money from those fines goes straight to the police department itself. This creates a huge incentive for police to fine people as often as possible in order to raise funds for the department. This leads to more traffic stops, many of which are not necessary for public safety, which creates more opportunities for police to potentially engage in acts of violence.

Redirecting the money raised from fines away from police departments and putting it towards something else that benefits the community, like towards local school districts, will eliminate a huge conflict of interest.

Conclusion

I’m certain that hardcore supporters of police abolition will be deeply unsatisfied with the ideas I have recommended here. They will undoubtedly denounce me as a moderate and say that I am recommending comically paltry measures that will never make any difference.

Many of the ideas I have expressed support for here, though, are far more radical than anything that national politicians are supporting or willing to support right now. President Donald Trump is, of course, actively opposed to any kind of police reform whatsoever and Joe Biden, the only viable candidate in the upcoming presidential election other than Trump, has only embraced some of the more moderate reforms that I have supported here.

Fortunately, many of these ideas can be enacted at the state and local levels without any need for the president’s involvement. Most of the ideas I have supported here will probably not come to fruition anytime in the near future, but I think that any step in the right direction is a good thing.