Police serve the state, so one one hand, once we have a proletarian state, it will be taken over to oppress the bourgeoisie. This seems fine, at least initially.
However, I can’t help but feel that the way the current police/prison system is organized is not the best way to tackle the actual issue of crime.
Putting prisons aside for just a second, are there better alternatives to the “police”? How do they look like? Do we just have small local “crisis response task forces” for major crimes and patrols for petty ones? Is that any different from the current response/patrol cops necessarily?
And while yes, we can of course improve people’s conditions so they don’t need to e.g. steal, I’d like to focus on the fact that crime will likely occasionally still happen, from the potential jealous art thievery to a murder - and how we should address those once they happen/as they are happening.
Two great answers so far.
I might also add that police currently deal with a lot of ‘problems’ and a ‘crime’ is only an act that is criminalised in law. So we could minimise the need for the police, beyond addressing the issues that cause ‘street crimes’, with a different system of classification. The problems still happen, but they are no longer police matters.
Evgeny Pashukanis, an early Soviet legal theorist, argued that most of the crimes that still happen after we have dealt with e.g. poverty, are mainly educational and health issues.
For example (Pashukanis doesn’t give much detail on this, at least in his translated General Theory) , any ‘crimes’ related to mental health could be resolved by a trained medic rather than a police officer.