Inspired by a report I saw at work and it had me wondering. Presumably drunk teenagers are always going to be a problem, even in utopia.
Friday challenge: A teenagers house party with 80 guests gets gate crashed by another 20 teenagers and turns into a riot, how would this be handled in a solarpunk society with no police?
DiscussionAt the root of the hypothetical issue is culture.
Why are these kids organized into pseudo-gangs? Why are they fighting? Why has the culture they live in allowed this to happen or how is it structured so that it develops this way? Who are the primary instigators in this and why have they not already been through therapy? There are events and actions that lead up to something on this scale, and they should be recognized and dealt with before they even get to this point.
Many here have already elaborated on how the concept of "police" is different than what we are used to: More evolved, and more focused on solving these problems than escalating existing force with greater force. "Peace keeping" is handled by those trained to best de-escalate a situation, preferably before it gets this out of hand. There is follow up with proper rehabilitation which gets to the root of why it happened and works on that.
It's difficult for a lot of us to envision a world where this scenario simply does not happen in the first place, because we didn't grow up with a more mature culture. It's even more difficult to perceive how we get a society from where we are now, to transition to that more mature culture.
rather than sticking the kids in a jail or fining them money, they’re held accountable by their community by fixing the damage that was done / replacing items as best they can.
if there wasn’t that much damage to repair, it probably wasn’t much of a riot, and these sorts of making amends should always stay proportionate to what happened in the first place.
a bit of volunteering / community service might give these teens something a bit more fulfilling to do, too. were they partying because their area has nowhere else for underage people to go to, for example? genuine justice aims to solve the real causes, not punish people for showing symptoms of social problems.
Held accountable by whom?
Their parents and the owners? Supported by some kind of peer pressure
The not-police of the community who are fulfilling an ironically similar if not identical job of the police, but totally not the police because uToPiA good police bad.
/s
How are they being forced to do this labor?
What are the consequences when they decide not to, or do a poor job?
they’re not, forced labour is authoritarian.
if they do a poor job, there is a reason for it, so the next step is to find out why and address the cause.
do they have a disability (including invisible disabilities which can be missed)? do they not know how to do necessary repairs to any damage done because they lack the experience because they’re kids? are they struggling with their education or personal life and lashing out because they’re children who don’t have emotional regulation yet?
generally, the “punishment” is being socially ostracised. solarpunk generally aims for a post-capitalist society, and post-capitalism and post-degrowth, social currency is the main “capital” people hold.
but focussing on being punitive rather than rehabilitative is just due to western society focusing more on exacting revenge than on improving a situation. we currently have overwhelming punishments and imprisonment, but that doesn’t stop crime or prevent it, while things like housing first initiatives to prevent houselessness are proving time and time again that when people’s needs are provided for, crime rates plummet.
One reason they might do a poor job is that they are shitty people who want to cause harm. It's not the case that all people have good intentions. Not all people can be fixed, either.
but why not find out what the reason for those ill intentions? it may just be something that comes from a real or perceived loss, which is entirely fixable.
this hypothetical situation was about teenagers at a party. it’s not the hugest of deals and ultimately, they are children still learning about the world. treating children as “shitty people who want to cause harm” without any attempt to understand the situation isn’t helpful to a community.
A lot of people will lie about their intentions and reasons - I'm not seeing how it's fruitful or productive. As a former teacher, I saw many students commit acts of violence against teachers. Regardless of why they did it, the teacher was still physically assaulted and harmed. How helpful is it to know "why" the student is a violent shithead, if it's not fixable?
how on earth will you know if a situation is fixable if you don’t find out what the situation is?
a solarpunk society wouldn’t have the same tendencies towards violence that you seem to be expecting. when people have all the resources they need, it’s very rare to be violent. this was shown p recently in the US prison system. when prisoners were getting govt money during covid, violence rates sank drastically.
people aren’t violent for no reason, they are violent under our current systems based on violence and oppression.
We do not agree on human nature. I think aggression, and violence, are intrinsic things that cannot be gotten rid of. Even if not from internal threats, then from external ones. Preparation for violence and managing violence is then necessary. There will be murder in a solar punk society, and asking people why they did that is not going to be sufficient to address those situations.
I think there is inherent risk in rehabilitation. Namely, that more victims may arise if a person is not rehabilitated. I generally prefer to remove violent criminals from society than to put more people at risk.
if your version of a solarpunk society involves the same policing and violence as this one, it’s not solarpunk. maybe not anything -punk tbh.
editing for clarification: i’m not claiming to own the term solarpunk, just helping to clarify. like how i don’t own goth music or country music, but if you confuse one for the other, i might explain the confusion. 👍
we’re just going around in circles because you believe humans are naturally violent and i believe people are violent when society trains them to be, so this’ll be my last contribution. ✌️
Do you live in a country that experiences like ten crimes a year?
I don't think you get to claim ownership of the term "solar punk". Have a good one.
With no police, the teens will give you the bird and do it again next Friday. It's a non-starter.
Now if you suggest putting a team together of community members to enforce the rules of a community, congrats that's just police with extra steps.
It’s not that simple. While I’m an anarchist with no desire to recreate the police, there is a difference between community protection from the community, and a body of patrols that are not emergent from the community. Police are an arm of the State, and not a community mutual defense organization.
So a well regulated militia? Because that's now sounding pretty 2nd ammendment friendly. I'll happily pop off some home invaders if there's no police to complicate my home defense choices.
I mean there are overlaps between libertarianism and classical liberalism so sure! Militias were some revolutionary republicans answer to standing armies which devolved into tyranny and tax oppression. Socialists advocated the armed workers into worker’s militias. The Black Panthers were advocates of 2nd amendment rights and pressed that right to open carry and protect the community from cops. But of course that ended when Ronald Reagan as governor made it illegal.
https://www.youtube.com/live/GQwbxFg7Vp0?si=0VZgF8QZ51Fa5Rty
https://www.youtube.com/live/5jw6Ync-WMw?si=-ZR_S06OpB6CLnk5
it’s not exactly police with extra steps, because there’d be no guns, no violence, and the rules being enforced would come from the people in a community and not from a state.
and also, so what if teens give me the bird and do it again? the scenario mentioned teenagers at a party (not a crime) and a “riot” but no damage was mentioned. was it actually a riot, as in some sort of politically motivated uproar? because that’s a social need to be addressed, not just something to punish without investigation.
punishing people for actions without even finding out why the action is being done is authoritarianism, not solarpunk.
There might not be a police force like today, with heavy corruption, systemic racism and common use of police brutality, but there would still be social workers that act as peace keepers and mediators, that would not have as a main goal to shoot up as many kids as possible, but try to resolve the conflict in the best way possible. Punishement for those who commited something illegal would probably be rehabilitative rather than punitive, and in this case there is no need for jail/prison, simply community work.
The teenagers are at their local designated teenage building where such behavior is generally expected. When the riot breaks out transportation en masse arrives to take the ones home that want to leave. There's local adults who often arrange stuff for teens and are thus know to most of the ones present, and the ones that are comfortable with the wilder side of their common lack of impulse control are called and arrive pretty quickly. At this point there's only ~30 teens, the rest were happy to take a ride home, but they're going nuts, and are smashing things, presumably.
When the trusted adults arrive, who are good at handling these guys, a good 20 of them respond within minutes and start sobering up. Obviously they're all getting maintenance duty but they all know that the quicker they listen the more of their friendly relationship to these dudes that find the teenage wrangling challenge cool they're going to keep. Think about a really engaged sports coach from your youth. Or that one teacher that could always reign in the class.
So those 20 are sheepishly apologizing and another five are probably being made to do drunken pushups because they respond well to that one guy who seems to think he's in the army. He's yelling something about scrubbing toilets at the nursing homes and everybody knows he means it. Another few stragglers join him and a couple of them start throwing up while he yells about getting up at sunrise
The last few teens still going nuts are the ones that have actual shit going on. The muscle division of the peace keepers get them subdued and take them to the social work building where they have rooms for situations like this with beds and bathrooms and doors that lock from the outside. They're going to be fed something substantial in the morning and then spend the whole day talking to trained mental health care personnel and conflict resolution specialists (they're usually dealing with local domestic conflict and stuff like grief counselling, so this is an exciting day for them), and they're each going to be assigned the proper help. Several of their families get counselling too, turns out there's an asshole stepdad and a drunk mom, they get an all expenses paid trip to a pretty mediocre facility out in nature where phycologists and addiction specialists talk to them about their childhoods abs make them cry a lot. They break up amicably. The teen spends that time with his friend's families and with some of the local teen wranglers (that is such a stupid name, but I'm not a naming expert) and gets a lot of extra help the next three years. He and his mom end up on much better terms and he's never a problem child again.
Every teen who was at the party gets a six month alcohol probation, and the ones who are caught breaking it get sent to counselling. They get community service and are planting embarrassingly cute little flower gardens for weeks. A lot of them secretly love the excuse to hang out. The ones that were in real trouble are sent to counselling either way and are advised to stay sober for longer. A handful of them never drink again and are happier for it.
There's 1500 dollars damage in raw materials, most of it is covered by the teen centers internal damage budget (something all young people's activity centres have by default), a lot of the rest is paid by donations from the community and the purchase of a new gaming device is put on hold until next quarter (but some local less adventurous teens throw a bake sale and they end up getting it anyway). The work of fixing the damages is mainly done by the rowdy 30 who were part of the riot itself under supervision of local non-teen-hating craftspeople (there's a budget for teaching that pays them for this service) and several of the affected teens end up volunteering on the trades-learning circuit because it turns out they really like using their brawn to build things.
The local teen community is closer knit now than before, several families have found out they needed help (and got it, because that stuff is freely available and highly encouraged) and apart from a couple of them being embarrassed there's no damage.
It probably still costs less than bucketloads of armed police.
The muscle division of the peace keepers get them subdued and take them to the social work building where they have rooms for situations like this with beds and bathrooms and doors that lock from the outside.
I think it's this bit that generally makes people get skeptical of police abolitionism in discussions like this. it just looks like reinventing the police and jails but refusing to acknowledge it. and i think they very obviously do need this kind of dramatic reform, none of what you're saying is wrong, but it's frustrating to find out that in the end abolition actually meant we call it something different
I don't disagree at all! But I think the purpose matters a lot. Are you giving them weapons or are you training them in disarming others. Do they have judicial power or are they only there to take people into the places where actual specialists will give actual help. The teens in my story spend a night in a lie end hotel room and are then provided with every service they need to get better. Not punished. Not kept locked up.
I grew up in poverty and violence and I know people can get violent in ways that they don't mean to. And I think there always needs to be a last resort of someone who knows how to get a knife out of a raging person's hands and put off each of whomever they were willing to harm.
But in my utopia, they're only really in use for a generation or two. Violence is a cycle and once it gets broken it isn't a given.
✊✊✊
"We keep us safe"
This is a well thought out and imaginative answer!
Who ever said there would be no police? Society might get to a point where they no longer carry guns (sooner the better) but there will always be a need to have mediators and peace keepers to otherwise keep people honest. Basically what I'm getting at is the job might evolve but it will still exist.
Also, your presumption that "drunk teenagers are always going to be a problem" is ludicrous. Alcohol abuse is largely a symptom of other issues. If teens are engaged and interested they need less distractions. A healthy education and responsible relationship with alcohol means abuse / excess is less likely. I think a lot of Teen drinking is a lot like Pot use, "it's forbidden so it must be cool". If we as a society were a bit less prudish about it and allowed our kids to try this or that (in appropriate portions for their age obviously) if they ask their parents / caretakers then the overall enthusiasm to get hammered for fun will be less likely to exist in the first place.
If we as a society were a bit less prudish about it and allowed our kids to try this or that (in appropriate portions for their age obviously) if they ask their parents / caretakers then the overall enthusiasm to get hammered for fun will be less likely to exist in the first place.
I agree we should be less restrictive about such things, but I think it's observably false that this actually makes people so much less likely to drink that teens won't be doing it. Countries like France that have drinking cultures like this still have alcholism. I also think it's a bit slippery to be conflating "abuse" and "excess" here. someone can have an abusive relationship long after they have given up excess, and can indulge to excess without it being abuse.
I've seen posts where there's just no police or prisons in a solarpunk society which always intrigued me. I can't imagine how it would work so thankyou for clarifying.
There are many, many problems that lead to crime. At the root of it, I would say we live in a society that functions in a competitive way, where people hoard wealth generation to generation and this exacerbates inflation for those who don’t have access to the kind of wealth. This leads to developmental deficiencies and a drive to do riskier things just due to circumstances.
In an ideal world, we would secure all the basic living necessities for all, hence destroying that drive altogether. A world without inequity is a world where everybody has more time to empathise think about community. It’s hard to imagine a world without competitive drives, but that’s because we live in a society that demands competition.
It’s not all so easy, but this is essentially the end goal of truly communist movements 👀
A world where humans work, but the work is essential, and spread across all people who can do it. Perhaps there might need to be some kind of police, but I think they would look more like counsellors/therapists than the shooty shooty kind we got right now.
I like this take, especially the end line where the nuances are explored about a full spectrum of what it means to truly create public safety. I think a lot of the abolitionist and BLM movements are doing the same in the sense of redefining community wellbeing and safety, and how money could be better allocated to provide for "safety" - less with the shooty shooty kind, and more with a vast spectrum of services to support different use cases.
At Burning Man, there are Law Enforcement Officers (armed), but also there to have issues escalated to around any assaults that may occur. BUT, they also have a suite of services like Zendo to handle psychological issues that may arise, and Rangers (volunteers not LEOs), who are like community risk observers that help people understand risks from different activities (not traveling with water, climbing something very high off the ground that might result in large medical injury, etc) and also have comms on them to be able to route issues to medical teams or escalate as necessary.
For the first part about root causes, I tried to find the source, but I remember reading about indigenous cultures that would help prevent resource exploitation from the commons, and help prevent a culture of excess and wealth hoarding, by using lightweight shaming or community humor to put into place any hunter that came back with too much, or didn't give away enough. In a sense, that's a form of community "policing" on cultural norms and what behaviors and values are permissible.
People who say police (in some form) are not necessary need to study psychology and instinctive behavior. This is particularly necessary once a community reaches a specific size although I couldn't tell you the magic number.
As a psych grad I couldn't agree more :)
So here's a hypothetical based on a situation in real life. A person in the role of community peace keeper gets a call that there are two teenagers walking around with what looks like firearms. For all you know, they could actually have guns, but they're teens so it could just be airsoft guns. What tools can the peace keeper use to defend themselves and the community if they actually have guns, without responding to the potential threat with more guns? Looking for a specific answer here.
Looking for a specific answer here.
Well since you already have an answer you want how about you share with the class
I don't engage in hypotheticals of this nature. Sorry, It's just my personal limits.
All good, I'll give you my answers: Shields. Take their guns away and give them shields. All too often people respond to potential threats with lethal force. The best defense is actual defense, not offense.
also in japan they have these mancatchers. just long poles with big u-shaped things on the end that the police can use to safely press drunk or rowdy people against walls/floors etc. Letting them restrain them without without endangering themselves or the person. Probably wont do anything against a gun but still much better than just a fist or a nightstick.
when you google it make sure you look for the japanese mancatcher, not the medieval mancatcher which was used as an anti-cavalry weapon in the 1500's.
Someone with a shield capable of stopping bullets is basically immobile. They aren't going to apprehend a subject or protect the public.
At best, police shields provide limited protection to give you time to take down a suspect.
I'd be happy to find a lightweight shield on the internet that could stop AR rounds and link it to you. Or we could get people to Innovate out of necessity. But yes, charging the fucker like the one at Uvalde with a shield makes one a bigger and more important target than the people around you who don't have protection. Or would you rather use a firearm and potentially accidentally kill someone behind the target.
I'd be happy to find a lightweight shield on the internet that could stop AR rounds and link it to you.
I would be very interested to see that. Make sure its providing full body protection.
Protection Level Chart: https://www.spartanarmorsystems.com/blog/body-armor-protection-levels-simplified/
The point of a shield isn't full body protection, the point is to protect the vital organs. There's body armor for that albeit at lower levels of protection, but the important thing is staying alive long enough to stop the threat.
Why not? It seems like you cant answer
Hypotheticals always come from someone looking to push an agenda. I’ve learned over time that it’s not worth the hassle.
Hypothetically. What if that agenda is to end the killing of black people, or anyone for that matter, by trigger-happy idiots who are supposed to 'protect and serve' the community. Just the other day, another African American man, an airman, was killed in his own home, holding a legally owned firearm for home defense, by a cop who 'went to the wrong apartment'. I've stopped caring about complaining about it, and all I can think of is hypothetical solutions. I apologize.
I'm not a fan of police in their current form either.
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7d
Really? Are you trolling? Crack use is usually a means to an end. What I mean by this is people don't just up and decide to use crack. They get to that point after other substance abuse issues no longer take the edge off and that is typically also an effect of having other issues to begin with. For some it starts off as an injury that a doctor prescribes and an opioid to help with pain while the injury heals. unfortunately some people end up getting addicted and when doctors will no longer give them refills, they start looking for alternatives. Some find pills in other ways but in some cases people look to harder drugs, Meth, crack and so on to take away the perceived pain. The irony is in a lot of cases non opioids would have been enough and Pot also does a great job of screwing with pain receptors without the addiction issues Opioids have but up until recently the US government treated pot the same way as Crack preventing it from being used as prescription alternative to harder more addictive drugs. Another reason people use harder drugs is an escape from poverty and if we're talking about a solar punk society we're also talking about a post scarcity society which means people would be less likely to partake of hard drugs for anything but entertainment and the number of people who would gravitate to crack for entertainment I think is genuinely so small of a percentage of people that it's hard to even predict a statistic.
Another reason people use drugs is when they are celebrities, especially in music, either due to the hard parts of fame or in order to have enough inspiration to make the new album on time. I imagine that this kind of celebrity culture would not exist in a solarpunk society.
Everything you just said is fire. I'm going to ask you to elaborate on some of it, but I'm at work right now.
France definitely has less of a binge drinking culture than the US Also, substance abuse and excess come from a place of pain. Hopefully in a society where we are free to live creatively the need to use substances to escape reality wont be such an issue
I feel like this situation wouldn't even happen in a solarpunk society. Makes sense in a capitalist society though.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that you end up unprepared if it does occur.
How do you figure?
this is handled by police in your area? huh.
You guys send the army?
Generally let it burn out. Kids clearly can't hold their booze and will pass out pretty soon. If local enough, Kids parents come down and bollock them. Hard to look cool with your gran heckling. If in town there's normally enough rugby players out drinking to squash that sort of undisciplined violence.
In certain parts of west Sydney the kids will be running up and down the street causing mayhem and then throw bottles at the police when they arrive. Different culture I guess.
If people are aggressive drunk and you give them a designated enemy, they fight them. That's universal.
Counter: why would this happen in the first place? That is a cultural thing. And what do you mean deal with? Is someone going to call people to beat up and kidnap people. Prolly not.
For starters, in a solarpunk society, kids would have stronger familial bonds and stronger bonds with neighbors. This adds a sort of societal pressure to behave. You don't want to harm people you care about it. Stronger bonds with parents (good bonds, not abusive or unstructured) lead to better behavior as well.
My point being this would happen far less and would be less of an issue. You see this in countries with stronger community bonds.
I would hope we would develop a strong sense of unspoken rules of politeness like Japan, but with less of the doom feel that you'll fail in life if you violate them. A more positive version I guess.
I don't envision a zero police force. I envision a volunteer emergency safety team. Similar to fire fighters and rescue squads. It's community members who are called in to fall with immediate threats with minimal violence. They don't roam the streets, they don't catch people off guard, and they aren't full time. They are trained in de-escalation and have strict rules of engagement
In my mind they would be like the Norwegian police. They don't carry firearms on patrol (though they are locked in a safe in the patrol car). They emphasise community policing and the 'prisons' are defacto rehabilitation centres.
Solar powered robots fly in and DESTROY them
Give them weed, and wait 10 minutes
Has anyone here watched "Moon Haven" (discontinued) on AMC? A very solarpunk-esque world with a society on the moon to solve earth problems. It centers around a "police" force that are mainly detectives, and provides interesting angles to these kinds of challenges.
Public Execution
I don't think a solarpunk world would have death penalty.
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