This was inspired by a post I saw the other day.
In my city, there’s a fast food restaurant where people regularly use the drive through, park in a nearby neighborhood to eat, and when they’re done just toss their trash out the window.
What’s to be done about this in an ideal world? My initial thought is that “police” should stake it out and hand out littering tickets to those doing this.
Of course, these police would be unarmed, properly trained in deescalation, and maybe not even part of a greater police department (supposing such department even exists).
But I’m worried that this is just a super lib response, and wondering what your thoughts are. I’m a bit troubled by handing out these fines - these are potentially hundreds of dollars to people who can’t afford it. And an alternative sentence of community service to clean up trash, while there seems to be a sense of proportionate justice to it, is of course forced labor and would be unconstitutional under the 13th amendment but for that exception that people on this website love to quote and dunk on. Moreover, this is a deterrence-based approach which opens its own can of worms.
I don't know if you're going to be able to have a coherent conversation about that topic here comrade. There are a lot of comrades who haven't really thought through the position of hating police but wanting a community to be able to have laws that might benefit everybody and have them enforced.
Anyways there's nothing really wrong with a bylaw ticket in this case if other reasonable alternatives are provided for people, it's just profoundly immoral to not have the cost of such a ticket scale with the wealth of the offender.
The problem with pigs in general isn't that they enforce laws that a community might pass like an anti-littering bylaw, or an anti-poaching law, or age of consent or whatever. It's that they principally enforce capitalist property relations, that they are militarized, jackbooted thugs with no oversight, and that the laws they enforce are not democratically written. If you are able to address those things there really is no reason a cop has to be an enemy of society.