Defunding My Mistake

For real world examples of law enforcement without government police you might want to look at my book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. A late draft is webbed:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm

I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals

BLM's policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they're at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:

• defund the police
• No On Prop 25
• voting-rights legislation
• support for the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing Act (COUP Act)
• Medicare for All
• the police not using stuff made for the military
• opposing Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court
• DC statehood
• ending the filibuster
• "climate justice"

(emphasis added)

Keep clicking on "Next Pillar" at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they've countered Amazon's attempts to keep a union from forming.

I'm not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don't spend weekend nights alone?

Just my opinions.

1. How an anarchist society can work without police. To me the example of Makhno's movement shows that it can work if most people are armed and willing to keep order, without delegating that task to anyone. (In this case they were armed because they were coming out of a world war.) Once people start saying "eh, I'm peaceful, I'll delegate the task of keeping order to someone else", you eventually end up with police.

2. Is police inherently bad. I think no, it depends mostly on what kind of laws it's enforcing and how fairly. Traffic laws, alright. Drug laws, worse. Laws against political dissent, oh no. So it makes more sense to focus on improving the laws and courts.

3. Prisons. I think prisons should be abolished, because keeping someone locked up is a long psychological torture. The best alternative is probably exile to designated "penal" territories (but without forced labor). Either overseas, or designated territories within the country itself.

Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.

20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.

I'm unconvinced that's still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they'll keep getting invited to dinner parties.

I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.

You've identified a very powerful bias. If you're looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?

I'd just like to say that I appreciate you writing about this, and congratulations on making your beliefs a little more self-consistent.

Unfortunately the reason people are reluctant to admit their mistake is that the potential return is usually negative. If you admit that you were the kind of person to espouse and defend an idea you suspect to be false even though you claim to have changed, that's mostly what people are going to conclude about you, especially if you add that espousing this idea gained you status. They may even conclude that you simply shifted course because it was no longer tenable, and not because you were convinced to be sincere.

Yes. So much love for this post, you're a better writer than me and you're an actual public defender but otherwise I feel super connected with you haha.

It's incredibly bizarre being at least a little "early adopter" about massive 2020 memes -- '09 tumblr account activation and Brown/Garner/Grey -era BLM gave me a healthy dose of "before it was cool" hipster sneering at the people who only got into it once it was popular. This matters on lesswrong, because Musk's fox news interview referenced the "isn't it speciesist to a priori assume human's are better than paperclips" family of thought experiments -- if you're on lesswrong, you are not safe from becoming an early adopter of something that becomes very salient and popular!

Due to this (helping rats prep for their "go mainstream" moment) as well as other things (one paragraph further down), I meant to write something kinda similar to your piece actually, cuz Ben Pace pointed me at this acx commenter:

I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?

Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are "safe" to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn't previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.

Super underrated topic of discussion on here! Thanks again for writing!

Let's steelman the position a bit, because I believe you're putting "defund" and "abolish" into the same bucket.

I don't like the cops. But I think --- pessimistically --- as long as civilization exists, they will have their niche. Humans alive today are neither Homo economicus nor hunter-gatherers (with very few exceptions.) There is a subset of things humans are capable of doing that perhaps cannot be solved any other way without abandoning society as we know it. The hardline abolitionists I know either are okay with abandoning society or believe that that subset is empty. I cannot abandon society without forgoing modern medicine which I need to live, and I doubt the latter position.

Compare veganism, a topic perhaps more grokked by this audience. The analogous, comparative strawman is "abolish animal exploitation entirely." Yeah, that sure would be nice, and I think that actually defending this view as a bulwark against moderation is laudable, because it represents an ideal utopia --- but I don't see a path to it without first ending scarcity. The position that is actually held in my experience is "fight to minimize animal exploitation as much as possible." The former goal is acknowledged to be more or less impossible, but it represents a world for us to dream of.

When people say, "abolish the police," I think they dream --- laudably! --- of a post-scarcity utopia in which ethics has been solved, there is functionally infinite care for everyone, etc. I think that's a world worth dreaming about and fighting for, and part of that means holding the idealist bulwark. But --- I am a pessimist --- I do not believe we'll ever get there. But I can still say without self-contradicting that the surface area of things we need the cops for should be aggressively minimized. We don't need to torture and kill one moral patient per human per month, and we don't need to send the cops after people dying deaths of despair.

This, despite its recent usage as a thought-terminating cliche, is what I actually believe is meant by DTP; and it sounds an awful lot to me like the view you're endorsing.

I was raised as a liberal Quaker. I've never accepted the anarchist line of, "it'd all be fine if we just didn't have a coercive state", but I have thought a lot about how we could reduce the ethical toll of enforcing order. Moving away from 'punishment' towards 'prevention and curing' bad behavior. Where possible, using technology-enabled probation (a partial loss of privacy and freedom of movement) rather than imprisonment. Using improved technology and training to reduce need/probability for police violence. Focus on inventing new ways to keep both criminals and police safe, while still allowing police to be effective. What about police dogs with special training and tooth-guards which allowed them to disarm and restrain people without injuring them? This gets around asking a police officer to risk their life to disarm an armed suspect. Enforce traffic violations with traffic cameras which take video recordings based on AI-detection of unsafe driving, which then get flagged for human review. Similarly, lots of AI-monitored CCTV in public spaces, which can trigger police response for ongoing violent incidents.

Could we figure out a way for individuals to be compensated for anonymously identifying as 'at risk' for committing a particular sort of crime, and receiving anonymous preventative treatment? (e.g. a pedophile being able to easily get sexual desire suppressant treatment if they so chose. Or being allowed to sign themselves up for permanent technological probationary monitoring to prevent themselves from giving in to temptation, and in return being granted unlimited access to AI-generated porn catered to their desires...)

Lots of ways the justice system needs reform also. 

For example, juries should be independent samples, each jury member unable to see or interact with the other jury members. Ideally, they should be viewing a recording so that anything 'stricken from the record' literally never gets seen by the jury. They should vote on verdict, with 'majority wins'. They should have to pass a simple nationally approved test about some basic aspects of responsibility of a juror to qualify for jury duty (obviously in my ideal, this test wouldn't be jerry-mandered to discriminate against certain groups). Ideally, they'd also have to pass a test proving they've understood the details of the case they are judging to a sufficient extent, but the juror should be able to fast-forward, 2x speed, and rewind the recording as they wish. Lawyers/plaintiffs shouldn't be allowed to review and dismiss potential jurors or even know anything about the jurors.

Another example: fines should be used less (they're a type of punishment), and when used should be proportional to the wealth of the accused (otherwise you are punishing poor people more than rich). 

There are bad people out there who can be prevented from doing bad things only when they are physically restrained with chains and metal bars. Unless we develop some revolutionary new technology or fundamentally modify the nature of man, this is the reality we’re stuck with.

The second sentence is basically my motivation, that society is missing a trillion-dollar-bill-on-the-ground, in the form of "looking closer at how society treats 'just being an asshole', and probably treating it more like a health issue than a morality issue".

For context, a lot of ACAB-type leftists endorse an idea along the lines of "there are evil sociopaths who inevitably rise to the top of capitalist society, and they should be killed by everyone else". This, of course:

• ...often coexists with more grounded ideas about systemic-incentives-towards-bad-behavior.
• ...sometimes coexists with wanting power structures anyway (!!), like Marxist-Leninist ("tankie") leftists who somehow imagine that sociopaths wouldn't gain power or pose a problem in an Authoritarian-Left society.
• ...fails to even acknowledge the fact that doing this for a long time, or with children, would end up as a form of eugenics, which most leftists claim to hate.
• ...fails to even acknowledge that "being just an asshole" might have some biological roots, and thus should maybe be treated as a normal illness deserving of medical research and new technologies and insurance coverage and public sympathy.

(The eugenics point deserves further remark: I don't know how often this idea has been laid out explicitly, but many leftists seem to have a kind of Anarcho-Primitivist mindset of "if someone misbehaves, we let the tribe / small group sort it out somehow". So if a 10-year-old seems like they are (or would grow up to be) a sociopath, the group would simply kill them.)

I've long meant to write a post series called "Cure, Don't Kill, Sociopaths", including a section "Cure, Don't Kill, The Rich", expanding on all this. It's also hard because, between motte-and-bailey and sanewashing and unstated assumptions and my own (inadequate) attempts at steelmanning, many of the things I argue against might not be written down anywhere.

(Also, on the "we should treat asshole-ness more like a normal illness" front, another post idea I have is "If We Treated Leprosy [or BPD or something] Like We Treat Sociopaths/Assholes", basically an intuition pump for a lot of this.)

Back on the main "curing sociopaths" idea, my We can easily imagine bad ways to do this (like genetically modifying all future newborns to be totally conformist/compliant, or classifying normal old disagreeableness as something that needs to be removed). I'm not saying there's a slam-dunk policy written down already that implements all this, or that there's no debate to be had about where to draw lines or how. I'm not even saying I'll agree with all the ideas I write in this comment, in a year.

I'm just saying that the policy "treat assholes as victims of their own scientifically-understandable condition" should be more people's default, and that it ought to be the main area people go into when trying to improve or replace the prison system. Especially when those people are already radical dreamers who believe in rehabilitation and drastic social change.

Was wondering how a criminal defense attorney could have ever believed that police shouldn't exist until I go to the end!

there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else.

I think negative visualization is useful for this. I made a list of implications for my beliefs & actions conditioning on the totally hypothetical case in which a particular political opinion of mine (no, I won't say which one) is wrong.  

I noticed that I had some bucket errors [? · GW] along the lines of "I will have to admit to those nasty outgroup memers that I've been evil+dumb all along, and accept their righteous judgment!" Once I had written it explicitly, the correction pretty much wrote itself: good-vs-evil is oversimplified at best, being wrong doesn't make you dumb, and hateful memers deserve no one's attention, regardless of what faction anyone is in.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

The Police: Protectors of the Rich, Suppressors of the Poor

Introduction:

The police force, often portrayed as the guardian of law and order, has a more complex and controversial role in society. While they do handle crimes like murder, rape, and assault, their primary function has historically been to protect the interests of the wealthy elite. This article aims to shed light on this aspect, drawing from historical evidence, modern-day practices, and international perspectives.

Historical Roots: Slave Patrols and Labor Control:

The history of modern policing in the United States can be traced back to the slave patrols in the South and labor control in the North. According to Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, a professor at Rutgers University, the institution of policing was very much connected to the enactment of violence against strikers and union-breaking. In England and the United States, the police were invented in response to large, defiant crowds, such as strikes in England and riots in the Northern U.S.

Third World Countries: A Clearer Picture:

In third-world countries, the role of the police as suppressors of the masses is glaringly evident. Amnesty International has documented numerous cases where the police have been implicated in torture, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, and the disappearance of political activists.

Modern Societies: Subtle but Significant:

In developed countries like the United States, the police may not resort to such extreme measures, but their tactics are still questionable. They have been involved in suppressing demonstrations demanding equal rights for minorities, women, and other marginalized groups. A few decades ago, they would even resort to torture to extract false confessions.

Racial and Economic Disparities:

The police force in the U.S. has been involved in numerous cases of killing innocent black citizens. They are also more present in affluent neighborhoods and gated communities, serving as protectors of millionaires and billionaires. This aligns with observations made by August Vollmer, considered the father of modern policing, who noted that aggressive interrogation techniques were tolerated when applied against minorities and the poor but not against the middle and upper classes.

The Criminal Justice System and Poverty:

A report by Human Rights Watch and the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School highlights how the criminal justice system in the United States disproportionately punishes the poor. The United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, stated that the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue. This system relies on fines and fees, which place a disproportionate burden on poor communities and communities of color.

The Money Bail System:

The money bail system in the U.S. is another tool that disproportionately affects the poor. Almost half a million presumptively innocent people sit in jail daily because they cannot afford bail. This system creates pressure on the poor to plead guilty, leaving them with a criminal record solely because they could not afford bail.

Policing and Racial Injustice:

The New Yorker points out that the victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teenage boys. The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development.

Policing Protests: A Double Standard:

Recent data from a non-profit that monitors political violence globally reveals that police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than right-wing protesters. This disparity is not just limited to violent protests but extends to peaceful demonstrations as well. Law enforcement agencies were more likely to intervene in left-wing versus right-wing protests in general, and more likely to use force when they did intervene.

The Role of Police in Suppressing Free Speech:

An NPR report discusses the challenges police face in maintaining peace during protests, especially when two opposing groups confront each other. The report suggests that police often have to balance their role in protecting free speech and freedom of assembly while keeping violence at bay. However, this balance seems to tilt in favor of suppressing voices that challenge the status quo, further emphasizing the police's role in maintaining existing power structures.

The Ferguson Effect:

Since the Ferguson protests, there has been a narrative that the aggressive nature of law enforcement causes protesters to become more aggressive. This narrative has been criticized as a way to justify the police's use of force against protesters, thereby suppressing dissent and maintaining the existing social hierarchy.

Paramilitary Tactics in Policing Protests:

The use of paramilitary tactics by the police to suppress protests has been a concerning trend. According to an interview in The Big Issue, tactics such as "kettling," where protesters are surrounded in a tight circle for hours, have been used to discourage people from participating in future protests. These tactics are part of a handbook created by the Home Office and police, which was never scrutinized by Parliament. It sanctions the use of dogs, horses, and vehicles against crowds.

The UN's Stance on Police Brutality:

The United Nations has called for wide-ranging reforms to address police brutality and systemic racism in the United States. The experts noted that excessive force had been used in the context of peaceful demonstrations. They also called for the revision of laws and policies regarding the use of lethal force to align with international human rights standards.

Militarization of the Police:

The UN report also noted the increased "militarization" of policing, stating that the use of military equipment by law enforcement cannot be justified. Studies show that military gear and armored vehicles do not reduce crime or increase officers' safety. Instead, they contribute to unnecessary interactions between the police and community members, leading to increased violence and deaths.

The Spark that Ignites Violence: Police Action:

A CNN article by Dan Wang, an associate professor at Columbia Business School, discusses how police action often serves as the catalyst for turning peaceful protests violent. The article cites a study that analyzed over 23,000 protest events in the U.S. between 1960 and 1995. It found that violence escalated in 38% of protests where police were present, compared to less than 7% where they were not. This data strongly suggests that the presence and actions of law enforcement are significant factors in escalating peaceful protests into violent confrontations.

The article also mentions the arrest of Givionne “Gee” Jordan Jr., a Black man who was arrested in Charleston, South Carolina, for peacefully protesting. Despite expressing love for all people and understanding for the police, he was charged with disobeying a lawful order. This incident serves as a microcosm of how police action can escalate situations unnecessarily, further suppressing voices that challenge the status quo. The arrest of Jordan serves as a textbook example of how police action can spark violence in a peaceful demonstration, supporting a body of evidence-based sociological research.

Conclusion:

The primary function of the police, as evidenced by historical and modern practices, is to maintain the social hierarchy that benefits the rich. While they do handle conventional crimes, this seems more like a side function. The role of the police in protecting the rich and suppressing the poor is not just a historical artifact but a present-day reality. This role is evident in both developing and developed countries and is supported by various systems and practices that disproportionately affect the poor and marginalized communities. It's time for a critical reevaluation of the role of the police in society, with an eye toward justice and equality for all.

Their role of protecting the interests of the rich and suppressing the poor is deeply ingrained in the institution's history and current practices. This role is not just limited to how they police neighborhoods but extends to how they police protests and social movements often using paramilitary tactics and excessive force. It's a multifaceted issue that requires a comprehensive reevaluation and reform to ensure that the police serve all communities equitably. The data and real-world examples show that police action often serves as the catalyst for escalating peaceful protests into violent confrontations. This role is not just an isolated incident but a systemic issue that requires comprehensive reevaluation and reform.