Police do not exist to address interpersonal harms. They exist to enforce the state’s authority and rules. In addition to the outright crimes that police frequently commit, they also commit many interpersonal harms that are perfectly legal: assault, murder, kidnapping, and torture, all of which we are taught to think are not assault, murder, kidnapping, and torture because the state makes them *licit*.
Police spend a bare fraction of their time investigating actual interpersonal harms, the kinds of violence we normally think of when we talk about “crime”: rape, assault, murder, etc. Of those they do investigate, most do not end in the conviction of a perpetrator, and many of those who are legally punished for these crimes turn out to be factually innocent.
When we ask “without the police, what will we do about interpersonal harms,” we are asking the wrong question. Since the police don’t exist to solve “crime” in this colloquial sense, we do not need to discover an alternative.
