Question: Anarchist alternatives to police power

Do you know of any pamphlets, books, or websites that offer anarchist alternatives to police power?

Answer: anarchist criminology

as you might imagine, outlining anarchist visions of policing is a tricky thing. because policing is (according to Websters) "to control, regulate," or "to supervise the operation, execution, or administration of to prevent or detect and prosecute violations of rules and regulations," it inherently seems to violate the values of anti-authoritarianism by granting supervisory power to one individual over others. thus, an anarchist society would likely make the vocabulary of "policing" obsolete:

"In exploring other possibilities, it is instructive at the outset to consider the radical notion that the present law-and-order paradigm ought to be abandoned entirely, as many in anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, and anarchist circles have increasingly argued. Indeed, it is often taken as axiomatic in the anarchist lexicon that 'laws' (as they have come to be understood in modern society) must be wholly rejected."

from Breaking the Law: Anti-authoritarian Visions of Crime and Justice by Randall Amster. it can be accessed at http://www.newformulation.org/4Amster.htm

that being said, i did find a small number of articles, websites, and books dealing with these ethical and practical questions, though i did not find any "how to" instructional pamphlets on establishing an anarchist program for public safety and community accountability. interestingly, there is much more writing on prisons than there is policing. also please note that many of these are more popular governance/ grassroots alternatives to traditional policing, that still rely on the police force but aim to positively change its punitive mission, aggressive approach, and its relationship with residents.


http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers99/mumm.htm

this is a broad outline of popular governance through a case study of one consensus-based community organization in Chicago, incorporates the notion of policing as a community but does not detail any sort of structure for community policing.

http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/comments.php?id=P983_0_9_0_C
a model of community policing, not without its problems and certainly not anarchist, but applying some of its principals.

http://www2.law.columbia.edu/sabel/papers/DDP.html
again, this article offers an institutional, police-controlled alternative to traditional policing, and though the Chicago Alternative Police Strategy (CAPS) that he lauds sounds promising, in fact, such "community-policing" programs tend to attract residents who already look favorably on the police and want to collaborate to keep their neighborhoods free of "loitering" and crime.

http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/mime/open.pdf?Item=293
a chapter on community justice, whose author is mysteriously not noted.
the book: Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets by John P. Kretzmann. John L. McKnight has a chapter on how to view the police as an asset to the community by improving community relationship with the police--a grassroots vision if not anarchist.

more explicitly anarchist:

"In fact, there is an area of study called anarchist criminology, a controversial subfield of critical criminology which celebrates the fact anarchism really has no workable definition (Tifft 1979; Ferrell 1997). Anarchist criminology advocates the abolishment of criminal justice systems. It argues that much harm has been committed in the name of reasonableness, and anarchist criminology is committed to promoting the unthinkable and unreasonable. Like other subfields of critical criminology, anarchist criminology views the state as an inherently oppressive entity, and anarchist justice not only promotes social justice (equal access to all resources), but protects diversity and difference among people (Ferrell 1999)."

From The Criminology of Terrorism: Theories and Models by Jeff Ferrell. accessed at:
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/429/429lect02.htm

more by this author include:

Ferrell, Jeff. (1997). Against the Law: Anarchist Criminology, in Brian D. MacLean and Dragan Milovanovic (eds.) Thinking Critically About Crime.
The full text article can be accessed here:
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SA/en/display/127

Ferrell, Jeff. (1999). Anarchist Criminology and Social Justice, pp. 91-108, in Bruce Arrigo (ed.) Social Justice/Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

also, Tifft is another author focusing on anarchist criminology. see the article:
Tifft, Larry. (1979). The Coming Redefinition of Crime: An Anarchist Perspective. Social Problems 26:
392-402.

and a book by Tifft: The Struggle to be Human: Crime, Criminology, and Anarchism, by Larry Tifft & Dennis Sullivan.