Crime and punishment fills the media people consume and especially the extraordinary hearings cases captivates the public mind, promoting fear of crime and ultimately legitimising the bourgeois police state.
In such an ideological environment leftist positions such as prison and police abolition, rehabilitation and conflict resolution ends up feeling weak and out of touch to most people, despite being the correct responses.
Telling people how fears over crime are most often not rooted in reality comes off as arrogant and as avoiding the issue. Nobody likes to be told that their emotions are invalid and when you're afraid that the new Boston strangler is coming for you, you're not interested in hearing about how unlikely you are to get killed, you're interested in being reassured that you will be kept safe and that the monster will be stopped.
Leftist responses to crime often lacks the immediate commonsense appeal that reactionary positions has playing on their ideological home turf. Most people thinks cops are here to protect you, most people think that criminals are ontologically evil, most people think that the way to stop crime is by putting criminals throughout the carceral state. In such an environment responding to the latest crime panic with more cops and more violence will feel like the appropriate and effective thing to do while things like abolishing the police will seems outright deranged and divorced from reality.
In a future where the left somehow gains access to loyal mass media coverage of its own things might be different but for now leftist agitation has to deal with the fact that we have to get through many layers of bourgeois ideology before we can make an argument. Crime and punishment has proven very effective vectors for the bourgeoisie state to legitimise itself skiing the proletariat and as such the left should get better at talking with people about it.
When have the police actually prevented a crime? Probably only for called in domestic disputes, and even then, police are usually not the people who should be called in as they just detain one and separate the parties, but usually are unable to prevent further escalation later on. Maybe for drug raids and possession charges.
But 99% of the time policing doesn't prevent crime, and simply can't. We know this because police budgets going up does not cause crime to go down, it is an unrelated metric.
However, the fact of the matter is that people, especially in the U.S., are fundamentally divorced from the reality of systems theory and correlating statistics. And being nerds about it doesn't help. Mostly I just call people scared little babies and move on from there. Their feelings aren't invalid, but their response absolutely is.
Solve your problems with your neighbors yourself stop wasting my tax dollars on policemen
I get the point about tailoring an anti police and anti prison arguments to the general population.
Also, anything can be a crime. All it takes is somebody deciding that "thing" is now a crime and giving police the directive to enforce it. I'd imagine that a decent amount of imprisoned people aren't there for "heinous" acts.
also the police don't arrest rapists but do arrest teenagers for getting high
i appeal to history. the police were not always around, what did we do back then? someone a little knowledgeable can troll about capital punishment & medieval torture but it usually makes people wake up their neurons & capacity to imagine alternatives
:think-mark: fantasy media gets this completely wrong. bandits were generally the local -legal- strongmen, hardly ever career low-born folk. like a community might be drawn to occasional criminality by hardship but all those people had jobs and homes & just took a day off to mug some travelers.
instead of some band of randos living in the woods or a cave, if you went 'adventuring' and encountered bandits irl its literally either some dudes from the village you just left or the lord (or son) of the castle you'd expect to turn a bandit bounty in to in a videogame.
or they were political insurgents fighting a war against the authorities that just got euphemistically described as banditry
Hobsbawm wrote a great book on the history of bandits. yes they were local but they also could be a real problem for an area
I think you've gotta redirect the energy of the conversation.
Why do people turn to crime? Most people understand that the average criminal isn't the fucking Joker, they do it because they're in a bad place, or feel like they don't have an alternative, or whatever else. The best way to combat crime by far is to invest in the social safety net, but in many cities for a long time social programs have been getting their money redirected towards the cops (see: New York police using an expensive helicopter to tell people to get out of the closed city pool), which is undeniably a far less effective way to reduce crime. If you think teens are the ones doing all the crime, then you need after school programs and community centers. If you think the homeless are the ones doing all the crime, then you need housing and job programs. Cops can't prevent crime, all they can ever do is show up after a crime has already been committed and beat/taze/shoot someone.
Like all rational arguments, only expect to be able to make an inroad with a lib, and expect there to be a 99% chance that they completely brain dump what you told them the next time the News Person tells them that there's a Dangerous Black Person in the neighborhood.
Police abolition is an extreme idealist anarchist position and no actually existing socialist project has taken this approach to policing.
