Even though I agree with all of this, it seems like this speaks more to an american perspective than to any other given country, and all your citations are from an american perspective as well. Though I think you could maybe make an argument on how the police are conventionally leveraged to protect private property, and private property is bad, and how if you were to take away the “protecting private property” element of their job description, you’d basically be abolishing the police. You could make that argument, along more universal lines, but that’s kind of contingent on people agreeing that both private property is bad, and that police are exclusively the protectors of private property, and nothing else.

In any case, I wouldn’t really be willing to make so certain of a statement on the police departments of other countries. I’ve never really heard anyone say anything bad about, say, finnish police, for example. British cops, they wear funny hats, they go “oy”, and shit, I’ve not really heard anything good about them, but finnish cops? Never heard bad about them. I also think a lot of what makes the police in america bastards, is because the prison system here is so fucked up and so punitive, and so particularly bad, compared to a lot of other countries.

I also kind of like, as an aside point. What do we do about park rangers? They’re technically cops, but you wouldn’t really hear anyone thinking that we shouldn’t have them, or that they should be actively abolished. I say this to mean, you know, as with the first paragraph, what do we really mean by “police”? You’ve given a pretty good description of the fact that the police suck, but not really why, or how they could be fixed.