I have been posting abolitionist content for literally thirteen years and this week out of nowhere my father was like hold on this is hard to think about, no police at all? Who will keep the peace? Who will step in if there's a fight?

And I said who stepped into the fights you witnessed?

And my father admitted somewhat sheepishly that even though he was a bartender and night-owl (and is almost eighty years old and has lived mostly in major and understood-to-be-scary cities including on military installations) he's pretty sure he hasn't witnessed a fight since eighth grade, and it was intervened in by a nun.

Which like, incredible answer. Imposing and kind of mean women is also the solution the queer community came up with for dealing with community safety. One time I was out and a guy was roughing up the lady he was with and my girlfriend was like HEY STOP TOUCHING HER LIKE THAT in her most booming voice and then everyone in the street STARED at him until he calmed his shit down and did that solve their entire abusive relationship no but it did stop him in his fucking tracks.

Disarm Cops Arm Nuns

(I am receiving a sticky note from my Irish ancestors, something about unwed mothers and laundry related problems?)

So I said to my father,

Imagining that a fight breaks out right now, in front of me on my street and the SECOND it starts I call 911, I might be able to have a police officer dispatched within five or ten minutes, which is significantly longer than the average person can sustain an active fight. A trained boxer does a three minute round. A fistfight lasts on average about 45 seconds and a knife fight maybe ten. I witnessed a particularly long knife fight that was maybe two minutes, and that was mostly because the combatants both knew they were in a knife fight and were really hesitant to get in stabbing range of each other. Even if you have your phone in hand and know in advance that a fight is about to break out, it is over before you have given the dispatcher your address. So what would happen is that five to ten minutes after the fight, a police officer would come round and take statements and arrest people, but the actual course of the fight would be determined by whoever was already on the scene and knew a fight was happening. There's no way to organize policing that would make it possible to reactively deploy police to stop a fight in progress. Even if you had an eager and watchful cop on every block in the world, the cop would still not get there in time to stop a ten-second event.

But that also assumes that police would intervene in an ongoing violent situation if they had the opportunity, which SEEMS true because they point to that when they shoot people, but this almost never happens and surprisingly, courts have affirmed that they do not have any legal duty to do so even when others are in immediate peril. Courts often affirm that police have the RIGHT to intervene violently when their lives or others' lives are in danger but they are not OBLIGATED to do so, only empowered to if they choose. Warren v. District of Columbia (1981), Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), and other cases have established that police have no specific legal duty to intervene in ongoing violent actions.

In Warren v. District of Columbia, women sued DC police after calling the police multiple times during a violent break-in. The women were beaten and raped for fourteen hours, and the court ruled that the police exist to protect society at large but have no duty to protect any particular individuals.

In Castle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sought help with her estranged ex, against whom she had a restraining order. Ultimately he killed all of her children, and she sued. SCOTUS ruled that the police have no particular duty to enforce a restraining order and police enforcement is entirely discretionary. Citizens are not entitled to having the law enforced, even in the case of a restraining order that says police "shall" enforce it.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had an armed guard, which were placed in schools specifically on the basis that they would protect children from school shootings. During the shooting the resource officer evacuated and stood outside the school with victims, and students sued, saying that the sheriff and deputies had violated their rights by not attempting to intervene in the shooting. Courts affirmed in criminal and civil proceedings that there was no wrongdoing, affirming that although armed resource officers hypothetically exist only to intervene in school shootings there is no reasonable expectation for them to actually do that.

The people who usually stop school shootings are bystanders. Bystanders are successful in ending a shooting in 85% of cases where they attempt to do so, which is higher than the success rate of authorities. Bystanders are especially successful when they act in groups, even when unarmed.

The abolitionist model basically starts with recognition that the thing we imagine police doing (intervening to protect people, competently investigating crimes, enacting reasonable accountability for harm) are not actually happening and that we need a new strategy for producing community safety. It is frightening to lose the thing we imagine police are, but they aren't actually like that. It's not a situation of a devil's bargain where we are getting something we really need at a terrible price. We are also not getting the thing we really need, and in many cases the policing system is what's stopping us from getting it.