The latest call to action from some criminal-justice activists: "Abolish the police." From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists are building a case not just to reform policing--viewed as an oppressive, violent, and racist institution--but to do away with it altogether. When I first heard this slogan, I assumed that it was a figure of speech, used to legitimize more expansive criminal-justice reform. But after reading the academic and activist literature, I realized that "abolish the police" is a concrete policy goal. The abolitionists want to dismantle municipal police departments and see "police officers disappearing from the streets."

One might dismiss such proclamations as part of a fringe movement, but advocates of these radical views are gaining political momentum in numerous cities. In Seattle, socialist city council candidate Shaun Scott, who ran on a "police abolition" platform, came within 1,386 votes of winning elected office. During his campaign, he argued that the city must "[disinvest] from the police state" and "build towards a world where nobody is criminalized for being poor." At a debate hosted by the Seattle Police Officers Guild, Scott blasted "so-called officers" for their "deep and entrenched institutional ties to racism" that produced an "apparatus of overaggressive and racist policing that has emerged to steer many black and brown bodies back into, in essence, a form of slavery." Another Seattle police abolitionist, Kirsten Harris-Talley, served briefly in as an appointed city councilwoman. Both Scott and Harris-Talley enjoy broad support from the city's progressive establishment.

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Police abolitionists believe that they stand at the vanguard of a new idea, but this strain of thought dates to the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that stripping away the corruptions of civilization would liberate the goodness of man. What police abolitionists fail to acknowledge is the problem of evil. No matter how many "restorative" programs it administers, even a benevolent centralized state cannot extinguish the risks of illness, violence, and disorder. Contrary to the utopian vision of Rousseau and his intellectual descendants, chaos is not freedom; order is not slavery. In the modern world, civilization cannot be rolled back without dire consequences.

This movement, then, is merely an extreme version of the fundamental problem that underlies so many of the soft-on-crime movement's misguided ideas. They wear ideological blinders that prevent them from seeing the primary cause of crime and pretend that secondary factors are the sole cause. The primary problem is culture. The combined influences on youth lead too many to grow up internalizing the ideas that rules are for suckers and success means taking what you want from those who have it. See this post.

Until people take off their blinders and see the primary problem, there is little hope for real solutions.