Feb 28 JDN 2459274

I read a post on social media not long ago which was remarkably thoughtful and well-written, considering that it contained ideas that would, if consistently followed, probably destroy human civilization as we know it.

It was an argument in favor of the radical view “ACAB” (for “All Cops Are Bastards”), pointing out that police officers swear an oath to uphold all laws, not only just laws, and therefore are willfully participating in a system of oppression.

This isn’t entirely wrong. Police officers do swear such an oath, and it does seem morally problematic. But if you stop and think for a moment, what was the alternative?

Should we have police officers only swear an oath to uphold the laws they believe are just? Then you have just eliminated the entire purpose of having laws. If police officers get to freely choose which laws they want to uphold and which ones they don’t, we don’t have laws; we just have police officers and their own opinions. In place of the republican system of electing representatives to choose laws, we have a system where the only democratic power lies in choosing the governor and the mayor, and from that point on downward everything is appointments that the public has no say in.

Or should we not have police officers at all? Anyone who chants “ACAB” evidently believes so. But without police officers—or at least some kind of law enforcement mechanism, which would almost certainly have to involve something very much like police officers—we once again find that laws no longer have any real power. Government ceases to exist as a meaningful institution. Laws become nothing more than statements of public disapproval. The logical conclusion of “ACAB” is nothing less than anarchism.

Don’t get me wrong; statements of public disapproval can be useful in themselves. Most international law has little if any enforcement mechanism attached to it, yet most countries follow most international laws most of the time. But for one thing, serious violations of international law are frequent—even by countries that are ostensibly “good citizens”; and for another, international politics does have some kind of enforcement mechanism—if your reputation in the international community gets bad enough, you will often face trade sanctions or even find yourself invaded.

Indeed, it is widely recognized by experts in international relations that more international law enforcement would be a very good thing—perhaps one of the very best things that could possibly happen, in fact, given its effect on war, trade, and the catastrophic risks imposed by nuclear weapons and climate change. The problem with international governance is not that it is undesirable, but that it seems infeasible; we can barely seem to get the world’s major power to all agree on international human rights, much less get them to sign onto a pact that would substantially limit their sovereignty against a global government. The UN is toothless precisely because most of the countries that have the power to control UN policy prefer it that way.

At the national and sub-national scale, however, we already have law enforcement; and while it certainly has significant flaws and is in need of various reforms, it does largely succeed at its core mission of reducing crime.

Indeed, the exceptions prove the rule: The one kind of crime that is utterly rampant in the First World, with impacts dwarfing all others, is white-collar crime—the kind that our police almost never seem to care about.

It’s unclear exactly how much worse crime would be if law enforcement did not exist. Most people, I’m sure, would be unlikely to commit rape or murder even if it were legal to do so. Indeed, it’s not clear how effective law enforcement is at actually deterring rape or murder, since rape is so underreported and most murders are one-off crimes of passion. So, a bit ironically, removing law enforcement for the worst crimes might actually have a relatively small effect.

But there are many other crimes that law enforcement clearly does successfully deter, such as aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, burglary, and car theft. Even controlling for the myriad other factors that affect crime, effective policing has been shown to reduce overall crime by at least 10 percent. Policing has the largest effects on so-called “street crime”, crimes like robbery and auto theft that occur in public places where police can be watching.

Moreover, I would contend that these kinds of estimates should be taken as a lower bound. They are comparing the marginal effect of additional policing—not the overall effect of having police at all. If the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns applies, the marginal benefit of the first few police officers would be very high, while beyond a certain point adding more cops might not do much.

At the extremes this is almost certainly correct, in fact: A country where 25% of all citizens were police officers probably wouldn’t actually have zero crime, but it would definitely be wasting enormous amounts of resources on policing. Dropping that all the way down to 5% or even 1% could be done essentially without loss. Meanwhile—and this is really the relevant question for anarchism—a country with no police officers at all would probably be one with vastly more crime.

I can’t be certain, of course. No country has ever really tried going without police.

What there have been are police strikes: And yes, it turns out that most police strikes don’t result in substantially increased crime. But there are some important characteristics of police strikes that make this result less convincing than it might seem. First of all, police can’t really strike the way most workers can—it’s almost always illegal for police to strike. So instead what happens is a lot of them call in sick (“blue flu”), or they do only the bare minimum requirements of their duties (“work-to-rule”). Often slack in the police force is made up by deploying state or federal officers. So the “strike” is more of a moderate reduction in policing, rather than a complete collapse of policing as the word “strike” would seem to imply.

Moreover, police strikes are almost always short—the NYPD strike in the 1970s lasted only a week. A lot can still happen even in that time: The Murray-Hill riot as a result of a police strike in Montreal led to hundreds of thefts, millions of dollars in damage, and several deaths—all in a single night. (In Canada!) But even when things turn out okay after a week of striking, as they did in New York, that doesn’t really tell us what would happen if the police were gone for a month, or a year, or a decade. Most crime investigations last months or years anyway, so police going on strike for a week isn’t really that different from, say, economists going on strike for a week: It doesn’t much matter, because most of the work happens on a much longer timescale than that. Speaking as a graduate student, I’ve definitely had whole weeks where I did literally no useful work and nobody noticed.

There’s another problem as well, which is that we don’t actually know how much crime happens. We mainly know about crime from two sources: Reporting, which is directly endogenous to police activity(if the police are known to be useless, nobody reports to them) and surveys, which are very slow (usually they are conducted annually or so). With reporting, we can’t really trust how the results change when policing changes; with surveys, we don’t actually see the outcome for months or years after the policing change. Indeed, it is a notorious fact in criminology that we can’t even really reliably compare crime rates in different times and places because of differences in reporting and survey methods; the one thing we feel really confident comparing is homicide rates (dead is pretty much dead!), which are known to not be very responsive to policing for reasons I already discussed.

I suppose we could try conducting an actual experiment where we declare publically that there will be no police action whatsoever for some interval of time (wasn’t there a movie about this?), and see what happens. But this seems very dangerous: If indeed the pessimistic predictions of mass crime waves are accurate, the results could be catastrophic.

The more realistic approach would be to experiment by reducing police activity, and see if crime increases. We would probably want to do this slowly and gradually, so that we have time to observe the full effect before going too far. This is something we can—and should—do without ever needing to go all the way to being anarchists who believe in abolishing all policing. Even if you think that police are really important and great at reducing crime, you should be interested in figuring out which police methods are most cost-effective, and experimenting with different policing approaches is the best way to do that.

I understand the temptation of anarchism. Above all, it’s simple. It feels very brave and principled. I even share the temperament behind it: I am skeptical of authority in general and agree that the best world would be one where every person (or at least every adult of sound mind) had the full autonomy to make their own choices. But that world just doesn’t seem to be feasible right now, and perhaps it never will be.

Police reform is absolutely necessary. Reductions in policing should be seriously tried and studied. But anarchy is just too dangerous—and that is why we shouldn’t be getting rid of police any time soon.