Can society (under state rule) function without police?

Question

Minneapolis has voted to disband its police department. This is in response to the BLM protests.

Every developed society in the world has police forces. The police are one of the state's institutions tasked with enforcing the state’s laws. Are there any examples of states (as opposed to anarchic societies) functioning without a police force? What form did law enforcement take in those states?

Answer 1

The Minneapolis police department was founded in 1867 (and is still the second-oldest department in Minnesota).

More generally, police in its modern form was only invented in the early 1800s and mid-1800s in the US.

As with the Minneapolis police, most police forces were not respected by citizens and acted more like organized crime syndicates (eg extorting protection money, a trend that can still be seen today, where police take more money from citizens than burglars do).

On the other hand, the Minneapolis police only solved 50% of murder cases in 2016 and has hundreds of untested rape kits, with a clearance rate of 22% for rape. At the same time, the MPD arrests black people for low-level offenses ten times more often than white people.

Minneapolis would not be the first city to disband a department in response to rampant misconduct, though generally other departments then take over.

More broadly, the demand to defund the police is most often not for the immediate disbanding of police, but about re-allocating funds from the police to services which serve the community and suffered under defunding themselves (like schools, hospitals, housing).

In general, there are alternatives to a heavily armed and oppressive police force though, like mediation and intervention teams, decriminalization of low-level crimes, community courts & patrols. See also the ACLU, which recommends raising the threshold for the use of lethal force, civilian-led crisis intervention teams (esp. for non-violent offenses), more teachers instead of police & diverting funds from the police to the communities.

Answer 2

Of course, it can (because it did before police was a thing) but much less efficiently

A dedicated police force is basically division of labor. Enforcing order and investigating crimes is a skill, and like with any other skill, it requires specific knowledge, experience and equipment to do it well and some people are naturally better at it than others.

Before dedicated police was a thing -- and in remote and sparsely populated places that don't warrant a dedicated person -- people did and do their job themselves.

• In traditional villages, there were so few people and almost no travel that everyone knew everyone around personally and had a more or less accurate picture of what everyone had and did.
  • So if you e.g. stole something, this would immediately become known because a thing just like what disappeared from someone suddenly appeared at you with no other explanation of where you could get it from.
  • Whenever a new person was introduced into a community, they had to be especially careful since until everyone gets to know them well, they would be the prime suspect for any kind of trouble.
  • As you can imagine, for crimes that left no conclusive evidence, people had to guess around based on random stuff and "his word against mine", and most of the time, no-one ever got to know what actually happened. Books are rife with tales of mutual suspicions and ensuing feuds that could last for generations.
• In urban areas, people naturally reused the above practice by splitting a city into close-knit "areas" where everyone (more or less) knew one another. Outside trespassers were typically unwelcome there without a good escort from locals (good = able to keep them under control and not give them any means to potentially cause trouble now or in the future) and were in for trouble if anyone noticed an unfamiliar person around (a practice that survived well into the industial age).
  • Wealthier people who had more to lose and were a natural target for crimes typically split these areas even more, each having a protected close-knit area of their property where even fewer people were allowed in -- by erecting strong fences, gates and locks and using guard dogs and night watchers and such.
• Law enforcement was likewise in the hands of whoever was in power and boiled down to how much effort they could and wished to put into it. A ruler's job was more like a negotiator between influential parties to try and keep them from cutting each others' throats than any kind of objective justice. As such, they typically didn't interfere in district-local matters and only required locals to bring up serious stuff to them that could destabilize the entire settlement if left unchecked. They usually judged cases themselves, with likewise sketchy evidence and "his word against mine" testimony.
  • As settlements grew, that kind of law enforcement was increasingly proving inadequte (by not being able to keep a settlement stable), and ruling bodies had to increasingly hire their own trustees and guards independent from local cliques to keep order on settlement scale on an ongoing basis and investigate and judge at least that "serious stuff", being in a position to make a better resolution due to being independent from the locals.
    • E.g. by one of the hypotheses, in the summoning of the Varyagians, Riurik was actually hired by the Novgorod's ruling cliques to work as a policeman and/or independent arbiter.
• In some areas, citizens organized citizen patrols which most of the able people were required to take turns participating in. Naturally, they only reacted to whatever they spotted during their patrols so they couldn't catch anything besides the most obvious stuff.

Answer 3

The real question is: Can 2020 society function without police?

A good way to look for an answer is to observe situations where the police have been withdrawn from regular appearances. Specifically the south side of Chicago.

This 2016 article covers the aftermath of Chicago PD withdrawing from regular patrols on the south side, in mid 2015, following an unjustified police shooting of a knife armed suspect, and subsequent riots. Granted, this is the NY Post, so a hyperbole filter is in order, but there are some meaningful facts that can be drawn.

Through the end of May, shooting incidents in Chicago were up 53 percent over the same period in 2015, which already had seen a significant increase over 2014. Compared with the first five months of 2014, shooting incidents in 2016 were up 86 percent. Shootings in May citywide averaged nearly 13 a day, a worrisome portent for summer.

So... not quite the utopian society. Crime and violence appear to have risen substantially since that article was written in 2016. This recent Sun-Times article details the carnage.

From 7 p.m. Friday, May 29, through 11 p.m. Sunday, May 31, 25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

To consider all angles, the more affluent suburban neighborhoods already have almost no regular police presence, because there is very low crime. So, yes, they could get by without police, unless the crime from the impoverished communities comes seeking a wealthier and less prepared prey.

Based on this, I conclude that society can function without police, but it will be in a very different form from what we experience today... especially in the impoverished neighborhoods.

Answer 4

(Answering the title question only)

It depends on what you mean by "function", but if you mean anything like a lawful, orderly society with low rates of crime, the answer is "no".

The Murray-Hill riot (also known as "Montreal's 'night of terror'") was the culmination of 16 hours of unrest in Montreal, Quebec during a strike by the Montreal police on 7 October 1969. Police were motivated to strike because of difficult working conditions caused by disarming FLQ-planted bombs and patrolling frequent protests. Montreal police also wanted higher pay, commensurate with police earnings in Toronto.

...

By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.

Answer 5

This is a good time to reiterate the point that a society is based on institutions not laws. When we state an idea like (pardon the Christian sentiments) "Thou shalt not kill" or "Thou shalt not steal" we are stating institutional principles: the general, socially derived and communally held principles that killing and stealing are morally wrong, and should not be done. Most people in a society incorporate these institutional principles into their daily lives, using their own good judgment and reasonable inference to maintain the principles in their own actions and interactions. Such people are effectively invisible to law, and law is effectively invisible to them, because they are in accordance with the principles that underlie law.

Law only comes into existence when there are:

1. Disagreements about the interpretation of a principle (about when killing someone or taking something is or is not allowable and justified)
2. People who ignore, through ignorance, affect, or malice, the institutional principles that the rest of the community holds.

Disagreements over interpretation lead to the creation of a body of law which prescribes how institutional principles should be applied in specific contexts; refusals to comply lead to the enforcement of laws. Police are only necessary in the second case.

A self-aware and conscientious society would have no real need for laws or police. Socialization would guarantee that all members of the society take institutional principles seriously without adjudication or enforcement. Obviously that's utopian, but it is a central principle of many hyper-individualist philosophies: philosophical anarchism, Marxism proper, Libertarianism, etc. In more realistic cases, some form of legal adjudication and procedural enforcement is required, if only because people are naturally fractious and given to differences of opinion. But the extent of such adjudication and enforcement is a wide-ranging variable, subject to a lot of debate.

In general, the 'Defund the Police' movement isn't meant to eliminate laws and police. The movement begins with the assertion that laws and policing no longer conform to the institutional principles held by the community. As a consequence, the movements hold that the community must take control of the systems of adjudication and enforcement, forcing those systems back into compliance with those institutional principles. The quickest and easiest way to assert such control is through the power of the purse: cutting the funding of law enforcement until law enforcement agrees to stop ignoring institutional principles. In extreme cases (as we saw in Seattle) that may result in the absence of police; but all that absence means is that the community reverts to individually respected institutional principles. When and if those institutional principles start being disputed or ignored, the community will revert to adjustication and enforcement.

Minneapolis is an interesting case. What's happened is that the community has decided that the police force itself ignored the institutional principles of the community. They disbanded that force, and will now try to create a new police force based on different structures, structures that will (hopefully) conform to the institutional principles of the community better than the old police force. The result might not be what we would naturally think of as 'police', but if it serves the institutions of the community effectively, that is of no consequence.