What happens when the police disappear? In Montreal in 1969, a police strike resulted in 16 hours of chaos in which bank robberies, arson, looting and violence were so savage the army and Mounties were called in. More recently, in 2017, a police strike in the Brazilian city of Vitoria resulted in such brutal anarchy that 1,200 soldiers were sent in to restore order.
Closer to my home, after our nearest town got rid of its police station, the result was a wave of burglaries. The nearest police station is now 15 miles away, so even if you spot thieves actually robbing your garage it’ll take a minimum of 30 minutes for Plod to reach you, by which time they’re long gone.
Resident after resident posted furiously in our local Facebook group about the thefts. Eventually it was our turn: despite security measures our garage was cleaned out, with the burglars taking bikes, tools — even a spare set of alloy wheels.
The recent protests following the death of George Floyd have seen a growing chorus of voices calling for US cities to ‘defund’ or even to ‘abolish’ the police. Though ‘defund’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘do away with altogether’, in the light of our own garage-robbery my first reaction was to raise an eyebrow. The reflexive conservative argument against getting rid of the police boils down to “it’s a stupid idea, because only force can keep human wickedness in check”. As happened in Vitoria, and Montreal, and my small town, conservatives argue, reducing a society’s ability to enforce the common good results in more crime.
Without the police, the argument goes, you’ll end up with vigilantes and private armies. Thomas Hobbes, one of the first political theorists to envisage society as a contract, argued in Leviathan (1651) that the only way to stop societies degenerating into a “war of all against all” was for the state to have a monopoly on violence. The state, he suggested, should have an absolute right to enforce what’s best for everyone, rather than one person’s particular interest. So to avoid general anarchy, we cede our personal desire to enforce our will, exact revenge (or retrieve our bikes) to officials charged with doing so in a fair and even-handed way.
In a small town, the criminal element is usually well-known, and sure enough, neighbours had seen the usual suspects loitering by our back gate in the small hours on the night it happened. Other eyewitnesses saw one of them passing one of our bikes over a fence into a vacant lot about 24 hours later. We even saw one of them riding my husband’s bike in the market square.
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