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Saw this photo of Boston earlier. I believe that parking cone is located close to the spot where George Floyd, I mean, Crispus Attucks died. Huh.

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https://cjrc.osu.edu/research/interdisciplinary/hvd/homicide-rates-american-west

Was the “Old West” violent? Scholars have established that it was not as violent as most movies and novels would suggest. Murder was not a daily, weekly, or even monthly occurrence in most small towns or farming, ranching, or mining communities. Still, homicide rates in the West were extraordinarily high by today’s standards and by the standards of the rest of the United States and the Western world in the nineteenth century, except for parts of the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

To appreciate how violent the West was, we need to consider not only the annual homicide rate, but the risk of being murdered over time. For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year, meaning that 0.165 percent of the population was murdered each year—between a fifth and a tenth of a percent. That may sound small, but it is large to a criminologist or epidemiologist, because it means that an adult who lived in Dodge City from 1876 to 1885 faced at least a 1 in 61 chance of being murdered—1.65 percent of the population was murdered in those 10 years. An adult who lived in San Francisco, 1850-1865, faced at least a 1 in 203 chance of being murdered, and in the eight other counties in California that have been studied to date, at least a 1 in 72 chance. Even in Oregon, 1850-1865, which had the lowest minimum rate yet discovered in the American West (30 per 100,000 adults per year), an adult faced at least a 1 in 208 chance of being murdered.

If we assume the towns and counties that have been studied to date were representative of similar towns and counties, and that their inhabitants were a fair sample of the inhabitants of similar towns or counties, we can also be confident (because of the laws of probability) that homicide rates were high in towns and counties that have not yet been studied. For instance, we can estimate that there is only a 1-in-200 chance that the homicide rate for all Western cattle towns was less than 97 per 100,000 adults per year, if the five cattle towns studied to date were typical (as there is every reason to believe). The chance that the rate in all cattle towns was low or moderate by the standards of the most of the rest of the United States and other Western nations—10 per 100,000 adults per year or less—is vanishingly small.

So the homicide rate was probably around 10x that of modern America.

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I’m pretty sure that violent crime has been declining for decades in the US. However, I highly doubt it’s because of police. Standard of living improvements are probably most responsible.

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Sure, but law enforcement will always be a necessary function in society.

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Actually, I meant to reply to @KevinC and not you. Clicked the wrong reply. I don’t disagree though but favor radical police reformation rather than total abolishment.

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It makes you wonder how they categorized lynchings, or if they accounted for them at all. When the local law enforcement murders someone, does that count for or against the argument about the safety law enforcement provides?

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I suspect so as well.

I suspect that police killing people is far more common now as well, but that isn’t tracked as homicide for the most part. Of any stranger you encounter a police officer is the one most likely to kill you. And not by a small margin.

Breona Taylor wasn’t a “homicide” after all.

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One of Bill Gate’s many recommended books was Steve Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He shows how dramatically violence decline in civilization over the decades despite the perception that the opposite is true. He devotes a chapter to the wild west.

In the American Wild West, annual homicide rates were fifty to several hundred times higher than those of eastern cities and midwestern farming regions: 50 per 100,000 in Abilene, Kansas, 100 in Dodge City, 229 in Fort Griffin, Texas, and 1,500 in Ellsworth, Kansas.96 The causes were right out of Hobbes. The criminal justice system was underfunded, inept, and often corrupt. “In 1877,” notes Courtwright, “some five thousand men were on the wanted list in Texas alone, not a very encouraging sign of efficiency in law enforcement.”97 Self-help justice was the only way to deter horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and other brigands. The guarantor of its deterrent threat was a reputation for resolve that had to be defended at all costs, epitomized by the epitaph on a Colorado grave marker: “He Called Bill Smith a Liar.”98
…
Courtwright cites an average annual homicide rate at the time of 83 per 100,000 and points to “an abundance of other evidence that Gold Rush California was a brutal and unforgiving place. Camp Names were mimetic: Gouge Eye, Murderers Bar, Cut-Throat Gulch, Graveyard Flat. There was a Hangtown, a Helltown, a Whiskeytown, and a Gomorrah, though, interestingly, no Sodom.”101 Mining boom towns elsewhere in the West also had annual homicide rates in the upper gallery: 87 per 100,000 in Aurora, Nevada; 105 in Leadville, Colorado; 116 in Bodie, California; and a whopping 24,000 (almost one in four) in Benton, Wyoming.

Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (p. 103). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

By comparison the current homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000, and compared to 10 or so for most of the well policed large cities back in the late 1800s.

I’d like to recommend Mr. Pinkers book but it was really tough read. I classify it in the dull but important category.

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Nah, they said they don’t want the Minneapolis Police Department. Their roles could be taken over by the county sheriff and other emergency responders. Sort of like various unincorporated regions of America that lack municipal police departments.

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The higher end of their estimates are that 1,240 people in America are killed by the police each year. Based on the numbers cited in Pinker’s research, returning to Old West levels of homicide would produce at least 147,707 additional homicides per year nationally.

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I sincerely can’t tell that from the article, nor from the use of the word “disbanding.” If that’s not the intent, what are they voting to do?

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This seems like sensible discussion of what defunding the police means.

I still contend it is awful phrase and the use of it hurts rather than helps BLM’s cause.

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I believe in this particular instance (and we will hopefully see this elsewhere) they are dissolving the force completely with the intent of establishing a new one in its place to circumvent the unions. They are unable to weed out bad cops because of the unions, so nuking it from orbit is the solution.

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We had discussions here that Black Lives Matter was an awful phrase and then some people use that excuses to I guess just ignore that black lives matter. No matter how someone says it, someone else is going to not like it and then use it as an excuse to keep the same ole.

I’m sure someone would say fire the police or hold them accountable or sue them but, you know, the unions make that almost impossible it seems.