It’s strange but there has never been an instance where police have made me feel safer.
Overall I don’t think the issue is with police as a concept but instead with the current implementation of our police.
Well sure, “police” is just a label. You can call an ad-hoc community-defense group in a stateless society “police” if you want. People aren’t opposed to the word itself, they’re opposed to what modern-day police as an institution are (enforcers of state authority against the populace).
The whole reason that US law forbids the US military from being deployed internally without congressional approval is because it was assumed that local police would be made up of members of the community they police, and not treat the community as an adversary, whereas a national military member would probably be from somewhere else.
Without getting into the slave-catching origins of police in general, the militarization of the police (as well as the large areas which they cover beyond just their local neighborhoods) has effectively turned our police into the very thing the Posse Comitatus Act was trying to prevent; an occupier force to impose government authority and the threat of violence in peoples’ everyday lives.
