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.
There’s nothing wrong with police / law enforcement, just capitalist police ( which is all many of us have interacted with ) / the capitalist form of it.
Police under capitalism are the domestic enforcers of capitalist rule, so their main job is impoverishing people by legal means and protecting capitalist property rights.
Police under socialism can and do protect the people and keep them safe from harm. Poverty is the root cause of most street crime as you mentioned, so socialism attacks crime at its root by focusing on poverty elimination. It also employs detectives, street cops, and all the tactics and things we’ve learned since the birth of the discipline. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, or create new terminology as anarchists tend to do. We need to progressively build on the discipline of criminology, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, applying a scientific materialist outlook just as we would for something like medicine.
If you talk to people that have been to Cuba or China (esp in the past 2 decades), they’ll say they felt safer than almost anywhere else, usually because there are cameras in nearly all public places. Far from being the dystopian nightmare we see them as in capitalism, cameras when employed by socialist states are being put to use keeping the people safe, and making an overbearing police presence on the street unecessary.
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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.
