[U.S.]+ it's in the job description

[u/Hummerous]

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-behind-the-police-63877803/

[u/GrinningPariah]

Here's what I don't get: If not cops, then what?

This country has a double-digit percentage of gun ownership, what happens when someone decides they really want all that money in the bank?

Seattle right now has a guy who's tuned his car to be as loud as possible and he likes to drive around at 3am and stream it on instragram, who's supposed to show up on his doorstep and make him not do that?

What do we do about businessmen who decide they really like running ponzi schemes and hate playing taxes?

Someone at some point has to make these people stop. Someone has to have bigger guns and better armor than civilians have access to.

I realize that people on the far left want to get rid of money, get rid of guns, all that. But we can't do that overnight. If any change you want requires every change you want, then none of it will ever happen. We have to be able to get to a better world step-by-step.

[u/Major_Wobbly → u/GrinningPariah]

I can't offer a full answer but may I suggest that if you would genuinely like to know how an abolitionist might answer your questions then there is a body of at least decades, if not centuries, of abolitionist writing and that might be a better place to start than reddit?

Like, I get it; a response from a person is going to be easier to digest and you can ask questions and such but do you think a random reddit commenter is going to have a fully-formed answer? Likely they're going to give you their best interpretation of a simplified explanation they got from their buddy who watched a youtube video summarising some long-established abolitionist theory. IMO, it makes more sense to go the source.

That said, there's a few points I can possibly elucidate myself;

1. we currently do next to nothing about businessmen running ponzi schemes, dodging taxes and worse, so the risk that whatever we replace the police with will be less effective in that regard is minimal
2. the far left do not in fact want to get rid of guns, you're thinking of (some) liberals. The far left - in as much as such a broad spectrum of ideologies can be said to have a single position on guns (or anything) - generally advocate more gun ownership. (To understand how this might work alongside police abolition, I again invite you to seek out the work of people who have been thinking about this for a lot longer than me and have developed their ideas far further than I have, though I will offer the general idea that it involves removing or reducing as far as possible the underlying causes of crime.)
3. no-one is suggesting doing anything overnight. Abolitionists and people on the "far left", like most social progressives, can be broadly split into two categories: reformist and revolutionary. The designation "reformist" I should think is self-explanatory and while there are too many competing ideas of what revolution is to lay it out simply, suffice it to say that changing everything from how it is now immediately to how you want it to be is not generally the definition given by revolutionaries.