Why rejecting the idea of abolishing the police is intellectually dishonest

Pointing out the logical gap:  It is not necessarily true that the police need to exist, so people wanting to abolish police forces is not logically inherently worrisome.  It's worrisome based on fears, not reason.

If public safety and services can be more effectively and humanely delivered/ acquired/ designed in other ways (which we don't know yet because alternative solutions have not been tested), why is there a concern -- why logically -- with the police eventually being abolished?  Some version or part of the police might end up being socially necessary.  OR, we as a society, maybe we as a species, have just not asked the question seriously enough before and so have not yet innovated and tested less damaging answers.

We change how we answer social-management questions all the time.  Overall, that change is toward more recognition of individuals' right to manage their own lives, and our shared responsibility to help others when accident and circumstance lands them with need they cannot themselves supply.

Some activists are calling for abolishment.  Acknowledging that I (currently, personally) see a real need to police ourselves as a society, I don't see that a police force is necessarily the best answer for that.  

Abolishment should be on the table, and in some people's minds a goal, or we will never have cause to imagine how deeply we can unwind the authoritarian assumptions that keep us all enslaved to the current power-structure.

Acknowledging the possibility is necessary for most-effective discussion.

Parallel "necessary for the discussion" assertion in a very different arena:

I attended a conference about artificial intelligence development in vehicles in Michigan, with most of the attendees from the Midwest and a significant chunk from the NE.  I was the only West Coast attendee.  I was also one of maybe three people in the room whose impression was that truly autonomous vehicles were possible.  Most of the people I associate with, in related industries or on the streets, on the West Coast, believe that truly autonomous vehicles are at least possible, and lots of us believe they are basically inevitable.

The people at that conference, mostly researchers from academia and vehicle production companies, were seriously considering all sorts of mechanical, security, and social questions about the current situation and the future.  And maybe they were all right, and the West Coast research community is wrong, and cars will never get past level three or mayyyybe level 4.  BUT, because they couldn't seriously admit the possibility, there are reams of really important questions raised by others that they, and therefore all the demographics they each represent, are not really considering, and are not participating in the development of answers to.  And, they are not contributing their concerns by asking questions -- and given their apparent lack of trust in actually-autonomous machines, I can guarantee you that the questions they would ask, if they participated, would be qualitatively and importantly different than the questions *actually being asked* on research teams and in facilities on the West Coast, where generally we are (my quick-take impressions) either more optimistic or more resigned to the coming dystopia.

They have removed themselves from a conversation that might lead to radical social shifts in every aspect of life, because they reject at the start, "instinctively" (but not, since lots of other humans don't) the assertion that the change could ever be that deep.  They therefore risk people whose entire psychological approach to the question accidentally excludes them (optimism and resignation are neither of them deliberate exclusions of skepticism or pessimism) -- they risk that those thinkers, with an essentially foreign cultural-mindset, will make all of the decisions at the cutting edge of testing and implementation, just because those foreign mindset people believe the cutting edge, and the eventual goal, are way further out than the "sensible" people at that conference do.

In a third arena:

I can't get most artists to understand that no matter how cool computer art tools now are, until very recently they were exclusively built by mathematicians and logicians, not artists, and that means they serve a different type of mind and problem-solving process than most artists have/use.  As the computer-native generation comes into its own, that is already changing, but artists should be aware when they step into a computer programmer's best approximation of what they think the artists said they wanted, that that is *not* the same as what the artists wanted, and it limits the questions that can be asked artistically and the answers that can be levied.

I love the new computer tools; they can do really amazing, neat stuff.  But conceptualizing what the questions *look like* in the mind of The Other can teach you a lot about the tool that is proposed or handed to you.

And so: It is necessary to accept that abolishing the police is a legitimate consideration, and might be the best-case end goal, in order to participate honestly (in the mathematical/logical-honesty sense) in the change-discussions that are going on.

*And* rejecting the idea is just intellectually dishonest.  It's not at all apparent that it's impossible. It's definitely massively inconvenient to a lot of people's psyches and understanding of the world, and makes most people in America very, very uncomfortable.  But that doesn't mean keeping the police as such is either necessary or logical.

It might be the best solution.  It might be not the best solution but better than what we have going on.  It might be a very bad solution indeed (in which case I have little doubt that reimplementing a police force will be way less hard than dismantling it was).

It needs to be an honestly accepted part of the discussion.