New idea: privatize the police

since the Repubs like privatization so much and think that universal health care is "socialist" why not privatize police?

Make all citizens buy "crime insurance" and if they get victimized then they have to pay to have the person thrown in jail and kept there. If they can't afford crime insurance or only inadequate crime insurance and this means they go into bankruptcy (say if there was a murder and they had to pay to keep a guy in jail for the rest of his life), then so be it.

It's gotta be better than the "socialist" government police department, right?

I mean except for all the criminals who would get away with crimes.


edit: :sarcasm:

I know maybe we can have Charlie Rangel introduce this awful proposal to "make a point" about universal health care.

We will have no control over private police or military. Keep them owned by the public.

read the post more carefully. :)

stupid thing from traffic tickets to murder investigations. Constitution? Fourth Amendment? What does that have to do with anything?

No thank you.

that would make them pay attention.

Of course, our debt would quadruple, all our taxes would end up in an unnumbered bank account in the Cayman Islands, and the country would go bankrupt, but isn't that what the GOP wants for us anyway?

It's already been done to South America.

Leveraged buy-out and golden parachutes for the caretaker administration included!

a golden shower more.

In this climate, I swore this was going to be a news article. Phew. Thank goodness it's just a bad dream.

If for no other reason but it could be changed every voting cycle, government funded police are not as bad. That's just one of many thoughts that whirl through my foggy head on this subject.

No way!

becuase Repubs DO like privatization but they would HATE this, and it would force them to acknowledge the benefit of universal service provision.

and the rest of us would be too busy fighting like dogs over scraps of their garbage to ever bother them.

remember not all republicans are rich. In fact most of them are not. Many are fundies or libertarians.

They would figure out a way to sell it to the rubes, compare cops to the DMV and say private cops would be as fast as McDonald's drive thru, or like the old Domino's commercial: "cops at your house in 30 minutes or the protection is free."

make all the rules.

was explored in the movie "RoboCop". Didn't turn out too well, as I recall.

I'm positive that they want the police privatized as well.

but its just such a bad idea.

Maybe if rich people had to use the same cops as you and me, we'd have the money for COPS and other preventive security programs.

As someone else noted, the Mafia is a perfect example of the free market in a microcosm. Russia is a great example. It's now run by oligarchs and organized crime (as if there's a difference).

everything is privatized, including the police.

A private cooperation would run the police like say GE
They would first start by protecting there own, the rich and famous in walled communities and the rest would be slaves for the taking.
With a privatized prison system they could use the inmates for free labor so the more they sent to prison the better.
It would matter less what the crime was than whether the criminal was healthy enough to work and young enough to give a good return on the investment.

I'm all for it. Including introducing a bill just for provocation.

There are libertarians who would want to do this. And it's a good public conversation to have to show how far out of step with the average person these "drown the government in the bathtub" types are.

The nazi party members stupidly think "socialized medicine" is terrible, but they really love their socialist police force, socialist fire dept., socialist road repair, socialist military, socialist medicare, etc.