A World Without Police

I think there is a kernel of truth in the view of “criminal justice activists” that police forces should be abolished. Not only is there no way to enforce the law with perfect justice, there is a simple-minded syllogism: without law there would be no crime. That’s definitional. It’s not that people would stop doing terrible things; they just wouldn’t be crimes. IIRC there have been times when that was the case. There were no criminal penalties only civil ones. Steal someone’s money—you pay a fine. Kill someone—you pay a fine. That wasn’t just, either. It meant that the rich could do anything with impunity because they could afford to pay the fines.

It’s the view embodied in what is probably Anatole France’s most famous comment:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

But I also agree with Christopher Rufo’s observation at City Journal:

If anything like police abolition ever occurred, it’s easy to predict what would happen next. In the subsequent vacuum of physical power, wealthy neighborhoods would deploy private police forces, and poor neighborhoods would organize around criminal gangs—deepening structural inequalities and harming the very people that the police abolitionists say they want to help. Even Scott, when pressed by a local journalist about how he would respond to a shooting in his district, conceded that “we live in a world where it’s not possible to turn anywhere for help on big questions like this but to the police force.”

In practice it wouldn’t be a world without crime but a world without criminal prosecution.

We’re almost there already. Wealthy individuals already have private police forces. We call them “bodyguards”. Gated communities. The state of nature that already prevails on the South Side of Chicago which the policy have already largely abandoned to the gangs.