No, Let’s Not Get Rid of the Cops
A man in a cocktail bar told me the police were redundant. Did he have a point?
At Opium, a cocktail bar in London’s Chinatown, I bumped into a couple and we started talking. Soon, we were getting on so famously that cocktails and gyoza were needed, and by the time our food and drink arrived, the conversation had somehow turned to policing. It was at this point that the male half of the couple revealed that he held a fairly radical view: that we should abolish the police.
Now this view strikes me as radical; but it is not that uncommon. You will remember that there were calls to ‘defund the police’ following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Those who believe we should defund the police do not necessarily think we should abolish the lot of them: some are after modest reductions, others are for the eradication of policing entirely. The argument runs that since a wealth of research and data suggest the police disproportionately target Black men, subjecting them to the indignity of stops, searches and arrests, as well as inappropriate use of force, there are clearly deep-rooted problems with the police force. In the United Kingdom, trust in the police took a hit following the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, and the subsequent findings that there was quite a bit of misogyny across the Met, London’s police force. Another argument is that there is something sinister about one group in society having the monopoly on violence.
In the United Kingdom, trust in the police took a hit following the murder of Sarah Everard.
So the police are far from perfect. But it seems to me that the idea of living in a world without police is, to put it politely, utterly bonkers, for it assume the complete self-regulation of society — a frankly utopian degree of cooperation and mutual trust which, quite frankly, does not exist. I do not think human beings are evil. I do not think they are angels, either. I simply think they are fallible. And fallible creatures need, at times, to be protected from one another, as well as themselves. I challenge you, reader, to interrogate your own experience of other people and yourself and tell me otherwise. You may be able to think of a time when the police have got you out of a sticky situation, or saved you from yourself.
I believe I have the evidence on my side that the police help to stop crime from taking place. The University of Chicago’s Crime Lab found that sending additional police officers to high-crime areas significantly decreased the rate of violent crime. The authors of a paper published by the American National Bureau of Economic Research found that every additional police officer prevents 0.06 murders. This is not trivial: I am deeply sympathetic to those whose experiences of the police have been wholly negative. But we must surely recognise that without them, there would be far more suffering in our societies on the whole (I am thinking chiefly about the UK and to some extent the US; sorry to be so particular about that) than otherwise.
The authors of a paper published by the American National Bureau of Economic Research found that every additional police officer prevents 0.06 murders.
What is more, even if we could assume that everyone would look out for everyone else and be able to self-police, which is outlandish enough, the vast majority of us would not have the training or perhaps even the temperament to handle violent confrontations when they arose, let alone carry out complicated investigations. As I told my friend in the cocktail bar, if your child goes missing, who do you call? Do you set off by yourself, à la Liam Neeson’s character in Taken (and of course, he did have a ‘very particular set of skills …’) It is wholly unrealistic in my view to expect people to assume the roles of police officers: they do not have the right skills. They are liable to do more harm than good, just as a gun owner is more likely to shoot someone he knows than an intruder. (Don’t think I am making an anti-gun argument here, Americans: I am not from the US; I know the complexity of that debate is frequently ignored by foreigners.)
Now, there is certainly a conversation to be had around how we are policed. Some have made the interesting observation that in the United Kingdom, there was a time when crime was low, the visible police presence in the street was high but — crucially — the police were not heavily armed with radios and intimidating looking equipment. They wore big hats and stiff tunics and carried truncheons, and they were generally known within the communities they served. They policed ‘by consent’. But to suggest that this would be a more effective form of policing (something we cannot, of course, prove) points to the need for reform, not abolition nor even defunding. But the strongest case for denying the abolitionists their satisfaction and taking a more cautious path is, I think, that if they were wrong, it would take no time at all for things to go very pear-shaped indeed, and restoring order is much harder than keeping it in the first place.
