> If the future of cars is autonomous to save lives, then the future of police could be the same for the same reasons.

The presumption that there is such a thing as "the future of police" is worrisome. The now nearly 200-year experiment of designating a tiny subset of the population as exclusively responsible for public safety and law enforcement goes very poorly. The abolitionist movement is as strong today as any time since the conclusion of the American Civil War.

When do we start getting serious about visualizing a future without police?

Policing is far superior to what it replaced.

Previously it was the army, mob rule, or mafia rule (sometimes legally sanctioned like a Lord of an area).

Is the American model of policing better? Not really, they are instutionalized slavecatchers put in place when the south lost reconstruction to the KKK.

The British model has a chance, they at least have a moral foundation to work from. https://lawenforcementactionpartnership.org/peel-policing-pr...

It's 2021 - well into the age of the internet.

What relevance has the practices which police ostensibly supplanted to the matter of how we handle public safety post-abolition?

Compared to where we were it is an amazing success. There is a high standard for replacing it with something else.

Those who say they want a future without police are often told to "move to Somalia," or some such place where local warlords provide the only semblance of law.

Those who say they want to increase authoritarian influence are told the same thing.

This makes me think we are probably close to the optimum solution. The police just need to be held accountable for their actions. Right now, that seems to be the biggest weakness in the system. It's unrealistic to expect perfection from the police or from members of any other profession, but when things do go wrong, it takes negative feedback to correct it, and the police unions have proven exceptionally skilled at breaking the corrective feedback loop in multiple places.

> The police just need to be held accountable for their actions. Right now, that seems to be the biggest weakness in the system.

I worry that the lack of accountability might be fundamental to the current system, and the "just" in "just need to be held accountable" is not even remotely as trivial as it sounds.

Agreed. That's usually true when anyone including me uses "just" in a sentence like that.

> When do we start getting serious about visualizing a future without police?

There will always be rules, people will always break them and some group of specialists will always be trusted with extra responsibility to deal with those people.

But that doesn't have to look anything like what we have now. Arguably, courts meet your description.

When a man comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man whom he then murders, how will the courts find that man and bring them to justice?

This has never been the job of police, but of the much older institution of the sheriff (though today, there's hardly a distinction).

I'm clearly talking about today and the future.

Right. So, the most obvious answer is to simply restore the institution of the Sheriff while abolishing police.

An even better answer is to reimagine decentralized community security with all of the capabilities of an information age society - cameras, drones, etc.

What problems are you trying to solve? I think there were a lot more very serious issues with law enforcement the further in the past you go.

> An even better answer is to reimagine decentralized community security with all of the capabilities of an information age society - cameras, drones, etc.

You're going to have to be a _lot_ more detailed when you're proposing something so radical if you want me to at all understand how that would actually work and work better than what we've got now. What you just described sounds to me like my entire community invading my privacy.

The police abolitionism is much stronger in the US, where you can trace lineage of police to slavers and union-busting hit squads, than in the rest of the civilized world.

This is accurate. From Time's "How the U.S. Got Its Police Force"[1]:

> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”

> In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system.*

Police were union-busting, as well:

> For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests.

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/