Of interest is how circular it all is. At various points in history police forces were funded in this way, affluent people paying for security in their neighborhoods. (cynically thought to be intended to "keep the riffraff out")
Over time we moved towards a taxpayer funded police force which theoretically applies equal protection to everyone and forced all the wealthy people to pay in. (taxes) Then we gradually expanded tax burdens downwards so people with lower incomes (at least the middle and working classes) increasingly bear the burden of funding of this police force (radical viewpoint: forcing the poor to pay the salaries of their oppressors)
Leading us to a profession of law enforcement whose implementation is unsatisfactory to many people for ideological reasons (being "forced" to pay for it) and pragmatically unsuitable for others. (because in many cases the practices of law enforcement do not directly reflect community values, i.e. war on drugs)
It is a cool thought experiment to imagine a system where it comes full circle, all local law enforcement is directly answerable to the community, as its employer, and to federal agencies, in cases of alleged civil rights violations, or to help with larger crime networks.
Which is IN THEORY what we currently have, but, clearly if a community feels the need to crowdfund neighborhood security, the government isn't adequately responding to the community's concerns, for structural reasons.
The two other services rah should give pause are education and fire fighting. In many cases insurance companies pay for fire services only for their buyers. One could see this going towards crowd funding. Private school is also crowd funded. The teachers unions seem ok with this since it doesn't pull resources away. (The private garbage model). They do raise hell for charter schools though.
The same encouraged privatization and evaporating public support has been happening for years, especially in my city (Philadelphia).
Last week a young girl died because the city's budget only allows for a nurse at her school two days a week. No one on duty had enough medical knowledge to recognize her asthma attack required professional attention.[1]
A supplement to the devestating education budget (this year began with roughly half the number of operating schools as the last) comes from city-encouraged philanthropic donations.[2] There are already nation-wide crowdfunding efforts, such as Donors Choose.[3] Some schools in Philly need to go this route to get supplies like paper and pencils.[4]
There is a lot of documented experience on how private fire services work and where they fail - for example, New York experience with private firefighting companies is not that old and very interesting.
Over time we moved towards a taxpayer funded police force which theoretically applies equal protection to everyone and forced all the wealthy people to pay in. (taxes) Then we gradually expanded tax burdens downwards so people with lower incomes (at least the middle and working classes) increasingly bear the burden of funding of this police force (radical viewpoint: forcing the poor to pay the salaries of their oppressors)
Leading us to a profession of law enforcement whose implementation is unsatisfactory to many people for ideological reasons (being "forced" to pay for it) and pragmatically unsuitable for others. (because in many cases the practices of law enforcement do not directly reflect community values, i.e. war on drugs)
It is a cool thought experiment to imagine a system where it comes full circle, all local law enforcement is directly answerable to the community, as its employer, and to federal agencies, in cases of alleged civil rights violations, or to help with larger crime networks.
Which is IN THEORY what we currently have, but, clearly if a community feels the need to crowdfund neighborhood security, the government isn't adequately responding to the community's concerns, for structural reasons.