A Thought Experiment in the City That Abolished Its Police Department

A note before we begin, so that nobody mistakes this for the evening news: what follows is a thought experiment, a work of satire. The city in it, Brindlewick, does not exist. Its council, its mayor, its security firms and its residents are invented for the purpose of an argument, and nothing here describes a real place or a real event. The method is old and honest. Take an idea, follow it as far as it will go, and see whether it is still standing when you arrive.

The idea in question is the abolition of a city's police department. The experiment asks one question: when the public police disappear, does safety disappear with them, or does it simply change hands?

Let us visit Brindlewick on the morning after.

Day one: the press conference

The mayor of Brindlewick stood on the steps of city hall, in front of a banner that said SAFETY FOR ALL in a typeface chosen by a consultant. The council had voted, nine to four, to dissolve the police department and replace it with a "Community Wellbeing Network." The mayor called it a bold reimagining. The council members applauded themselves in the cheerful way that people do when the consequences are scheduled for someone else.

A reporter asked what would happen if somebody called 911. The mayor said that the call would be "triaged to the appropriate resource." A second reporter asked what the appropriate resource would be on a Friday night. The mayor said that the Network was "in a listening phase." A third reporter asked how long the listening phase would last. The mayor said that was a good question, and took no more.

It is a nice detail of this kind of announcement that it is always delivered in the future tense, and that the future never quite arrives on the same day as the press conference. A department can be abolished by Tuesday. A replacement takes years to build, if it can be built at all. In between lies a gap, and the gap is where people live.

Who answers 911?

On the first Friday night, in our imaginary city, a man named Dale, a shopkeeper invented for this essay, hears glass break in the back of his store. He dials 911. The call goes to the Network's intake line, where a thoughtful operator asks whether Dale feels safe. Dale says that he feels like a man whose window has just been broken. The operator says that a "response specialist" will be dispatched when one becomes available. The word "when" is carrying a great deal of the load.

Let me stop the story and put the question plainly, because it is the whole point. Who answers when a person is afraid and calls for help? In every society, somebody does. If the public does not, the question is whether it is a private party, a neighbor or a criminal. The thing that has been abolished is a particular answer, not the question.

The insurers arrive

Here is the first thing that happens in the experiment. Insurance companies are many things, but they are not sentimental. When Brindlewick's police vanish, the businesses and homeowners who buy coverage find, at renewal, that premiums have moved. A city without a functioning emergency response is a city where claims are likelier and recovery is harder. The insurer does not issue a statement on the philosophy of policing. It reprices the risk, and in some cases it declines to cover certain properties unless the owner installs alarms, cameras and a monitoring contract.

I stress that this is a hypothetical, and I am not claiming that any real insurer has done any real thing. I am saying that it is the natural logic of the market. When a risk rises and a public service falls away, those who can pay for a substitute will be asked to. The market does not create the problem, but it will certainly send an invoice.

The private security firms

On the second Monday, a company called Sentinel Residential Services, invented for the occasion, appears. It offers patrols, a rapid-response line and a smartphone app with a panic button. The brochure features a stock photograph of a smiling family and the phrase "Because someone should answer." That slogan is, I will admit, extremely good.

Sentinel's service is excellent for those who subscribe. Its patrols are prompt and polite and its drivers wear nice jackets. It is also not free. Say the cost is a monthly fee. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a business to charge. But think about what has happened. A service the city once provided to every household, funded out of the taxes everyone paid, is now a product with a price.

And there are legal questions that nobody in Brindlewick thought about at the press conference. A private security guard has, in most places, only the powers of an ordinary citizen. He cannot lawfully do many things a sworn officer can. He answers to the company that employs him, and the company answers to the paying customer, not to the public. If a dispute arises about how a guard treated a passerby, the passerby has no vote on the contract. The accountability that voters have over a police chief, imperfect as it is, does not carry over.

The neighborhoods that cannot afford guards

Now to the part of the experiment that matters most.

Brindlewick has a hill and a flat. On the hill live households that can afford Sentinel. They subscribe, install cameras and congratulate one another on their prudence. On the flat live households that cannot, or can only afford it by giving up something else: a month's groceries, a car repair, a child's school expenses.

Consider the flat in numbered steps, because the logic is orderly.

1. The calls still come, and the answers do not. The residents of the flat call the Network and wait. The wait is long. Some give up and do not call at all, and when residents stop calling, the city's own records show crime falling, which the mayor presents as proof of success. The thing that dropped is reporting, not crime.
2. Informal protection fills the vacuum. Where no lawful authority answers, someone else will. In the flat some residents form a watch, which is reasonable. Others arm themselves, which is their right under the Second Amendment and a strain on everyone's nerves. And in some corners of any neighborhood, the vacuum is filled by people whose idea of protection is a payment schedule. History is not kind to places that have tried this.
3. The costs compound. A shop on the flat that is burgled twice closes. When it closes, the neighborhood loses a store, and with it jobs, a gathering place and a reason for the next business to open. The insurer, which has reassessed the area, declines to renew. The flat gets poorer and less safe at the same time.
4. The ones who can leave, leave. The residents with means move, to the hill or to another town. The ones who stay are those who cannot. The tax base shrinks, and a council that wanted to spend more on "wellbeing" finds that it has less to spend.
5. The privatized city is a two-tier city. The hill has patrols, the flat has a hotline. The council called its program "Safety for All." It has become safety for those who can pay.

I want to be fair to the council. Brindlewick's leaders, in my imagining, are well-meaning people who thought police were part of the problem and wanted a gentler approach. There is a real debate about how to reform policing and about whether some calls should go to trained non-police responders, and that debate is a serious one. This is not a satire of that conversation. It is a satire of the leap from "improve the police" to "remove the police," and of the notion that safety is a mood, not a service.

The steelman, and the reply

An advocate of the experiment would say: your parable assumes the replacement fails. What if the replacement works? What if community responders, mediators and social workers handle most calls better than armed officers do, and the remaining serious calls are handled by a small specialized unit? In that case, you are describing a reform, not the end of safety.

And that is exactly right, which is the whole point of the reply. A city that carefully builds capacity for non-police responders and then shifts some calls to them, while keeping a trained force for violent crime, has not abolished its police. It has redesigned the work. Many conservatives would support parts of that, as we noted in Defund the Police Was a Slogan Cities Tried and Then Quietly Walked Back. The failure in Brindlewick is not the idea of trained non-police responders. It is the order of operations: abolishing first, planning later, and telling everyone that the future will sort itself out.

The point generalizes. The test of any proposal about public safety is whether a person who dials for help gets an answer. If you cannot name who answers, you do not have a plan, you have a banner.

The historical anchor: 1829 and the common good

The joke at the heart of this experiment is that it is not new. The notion that a free society has a professional, public police force is itself a reform, and a fairly recent one.

Before 1829, London relied on a patchwork of parish constables, night watchmen and private thief-takers, along with rewards for informants. Those who could pay for protection got it, and those who could not made do. In 1829, Parliament passed the Metropolitan Police Act, creating a uniformed force under the direction of Home Secretary Robert Peel for the capital. The idea behind it was later summarized in a list known as the Peelian principles, though historians doubt that Peel himself wrote the list: that the police should be a public body, accountable to the law and the public, and drawn from the people. The officers were nicknamed after Peel, and the name has stuck for two centuries.

American cities followed over the following decades, creating their own professional departments in the nineteenth century. The point to take from this history is not that police are perfect. It is that public policing was adopted because the alternative, protection as a private commodity, was seen as unjust and unreliable. A police department is a way of saying that safety is a common good, a service the whole community funds so that the whole community may have it, regardless of how much any one household earns.

The founders had a version of the same idea. The Preamble of the Constitution lists among its purposes to "insure domestic Tranquility" and to "provide for the common defence." The Declaration says governments are instituted to secure rights. Not to secure the rights of those who can afford a subscription. The idea of a public order, kept for everyone, is baked into the founding.

What the experiment shows

So what did we learn from Brindlewick? Four things, and I will put them as plainly as I can.

1. Safety does not disappear when a public service does. It moves to whoever will provide it, and the price follows.
2. The first people priced out are the ones who most need the service, and the first neighborhoods to lose are the ones with the least.
3. Accountability matters. A public force answers to voters. A private one answers to its customers.
4. Reform and abolition are different things. A city can reform its police without ending them, and the cities that have tried the second path have mostly found their way back to the first. For one description of how a city decides what to fund, see How to Get Your City Council to Fund Police Hiring Instead of Slogans. For the citizen's side of the partnership, see Start a Neighborhood Watch That Works Alongside Your Police Department. And if you want to read the sibling satire about a city that enforces the wrong laws with the wrong zeal, see A Thought Experiment Where Shoplifting Is Enforced Like a Parking Ticket.

A last word in the voice of a skeptic of satire. Some will say that a story like this is unfair, because no serious person proposes literal abolition. Perhaps. But the slogans have been loud, the pledges have been public and the movement from rhetoric to policy has happened before in real cities, which is why the real record is worth reading. The thought experiment is a way of asking what the slogan means, if it means anything. Every parable is an exaggeration, but the good ones exaggerate something true.

The case in brief

1. This was a labelled thought experiment about a fictional city, not a report of any real event.
2. When a public police service is abolished, the demand for safety remains, and it is met by insurers, private security and informal arrangements, all of which charge.
3. Neighborhoods that cannot afford private protection are the ones that lose most, and the result is a two-tier city.
4. Public policing was created in 1829 and afterward on the principle that safety is a common good, and the founders listed domestic tranquility among the purposes of the Constitution.
5. Reform and abolition are different, and the test of any plan is whether someone answers when a person calls for help.

What you can do: ask your city council member who answers an emergency call in your city and how long it takes, and look up your police department's published response times.