@respectthefire@g0v.social I certainly hold a police abolitionist perspective, but the question is genuine: there is tiny-but-not-zero chance that I am overlooking something, and either way it is important to get clear exactly *what* people expect or experience police to do.

A big part of police propaganda is the deliberate conflation of different tasks and purposes, muddying the waters about what the police is actually *for*, and this makes it really difficult to talk about "but what would a better solution for these issues look like?", particularly with people who aren't close to the violence.

So in the end, posing this question to people has multiple different purposes:
- Surveying the problems that police (are believed to) solve
- Making people question whether their assumptions about the purpose of police are actually correct
- Demonstrating that an abolitionist perspective makes sense - if my view that "police don't do anything that cannot be done better in another way" is correct, that should prove itself from the replies