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.
Continue reading “What Would Really Happen If We Abolished the Police?”