If you were to ask a liberal or a conservative, "what is the purpose of the police?", I imagine they would answer with something resembling, "they arrest the bad guys and keep society safe from criminals." If you ask a marxist the same question, you'll probably get a respones along the lines of, "They exist to protect private property and the interests of the bourgeosie". I however, am in the unique possition of believing that neither of these are completely correct. It is true that the police do sometimes arrest rapists murderers, and other nasty types, and it is also true that they seem to serve the interests of the ruling class much more than the working class. I'm assuming that my readers here are probably skewed towards the marxist understanding. I ask you then, if the police are ultimately there to protect private property, why are they so bad at it? In 2023, 82% of burglaries went unsolved by the met police in London. And you can find similar statistics all over the world. In fact, that 82% figure is fairly good in comparison. And it's not just that these burglaries affect only the lower classes and that's why. Over 90% of criminal damage and arson offences were also unsolved in the uk in 2023, 77% of car theft, 30,000 muggings, you can look at similar stats from wherever you live, the police are, as a rule, bad at solving crimes related to property. They're also bad at solving crimes in general. Only 5.7% of crimes reported reasulted in a charge or summons . If the private property theory were correct, you would expect the police to show higher competancy in solving property related crimes compared to other sorts of crimes, but if that is the case, it seems to be only marginal. Instead, the police display general incompetance accross the board, despite ever increasing surveilance. If the police exist to protect private property, why aren't they doing it?
Now of course, just to clarify, I'm not in any way arguing that the police need higher budgets or further powers or anything of the sort. I hope to point out that the police, rather than being a hyper skilled team of experts like you see in copaganda shows on tv, is in fact an institution comprised primarily of idiots. This is dangerous in it's own way. But my goal here is to provide an alternative understanding of the purpose of the police, and then suggest that similar frameworks can be applied to many systems within society as a whole.
I propose that the primary goal of the police, just like any other system, is the upholding of the categorisation upon which it is predicated, via autopoeisis. That was quite a dense sentence so I will try to elaborate. The first order of business for any system must be upholding it's own existence. If that were not the case, the system would dissolve. This is true of anything from a colony of microbes, to a labour union, to a transit system. Once a system forgoes this primary goal, it can no longer exist. This is what i'm reffering to as "autopoiesis", self creation. A system is a zone of reduced complexity. In the case of social systems, reduction of complexity is achieved through the process of social categorisation (in the case of the police, the categories of the police, innocent, and criminal). The existence of the policing system is predicated on the production and reproduction of these social categories. A system can only opperate within it's own "code", it can't see anything outside of itself. If you constructed a camera, and took a picture of a music concert, the camera is only aware of changes to it's internal photo sensors. It can feed off of it's environment, but it can only opperate based on internal changes. The policing system cannot see society in the same way a camera cannot hear the concert, but also in the same way the camera cannot really see the concert, only the changes to its own sensors. This applies to all systems. The policing system can only "see" the series of social categories it produces. It sees those categories in order to reproduce those categories, in order to continue it's existence, in order to see those categories, in order to produce them, etc. In other words, the purpose of the police is to maintain the categories of police, criminal and innocent.
In this understanding, it becomes clear why the police are so bad at their "job". It can't see any of it's supposed "jobs", insofar as they don't exist within the policing system. The policing system is actually very good at it's job of maintaining certain social categories, and as such those categories have become so entrenched that it becomes hard to imagine a world without them, or something analogous to them. Even when the policing system fails in the way it's generally imagined, as we saw with the murder of george floyd, public outcry still comes in the form of calls to recategorise derek chauvin from police to criminal, and george floyd from criminal to innocent. Because the system never really failed at all. When property related crimes go unsolved, it doesn't matter, because solving crimes isn't in the pervue of the policing system. The absurd and cruel behaviours of the policing system are artifacts of our perspective on the process of the reduction of complexity via social categorisation to conform to the system's limited internal communications apparatus.
You may notice something in my analysis. Firstly, I've been trying to understand wtf Niklas Luhmann was talking about. Secondly, that at no point does the policing system have some "possition within society", a role in which it is interconnected and enmeshed within broader social systems like capitalism or race. Other systems are only relevant in so far as they are affect change in the code of the policing system. The police cannot even see "private property", or "the interests of the boureoisie". That is not to say that the environment can't effect a system. Returning to my example of a camera, the opperations of the camera will be effected by whatever it is pointed at, but that doesn't make it part of the camera system.
A few closing notes. The 3 categories I've presented here might be narrowed down to just 2, criminal and police, if you assume that an "innocent" can be defined as "someone with the potential to become a criminal". I chose not to use this framework, but I consider it valid. It could be argued that the "justice system" deals with issues of innocence and guilt, not the policing system. In fact, this is probably a better way of thinking about it and I probably should have done it from the start. I would like to clarify that my mentioning of the treatment of derek chauvin is meant to state that you cannot fix a broken system by dealing with individuals while still enabling that system's autopoeises. Of course, chauvin deserves to rot in hell, I just find it hard to see his imprisonment as a real victory.