Some preliminary thoughts and questions about policing. All thoughts welcome, but especially thoughts from professional police officers, criminologists, sociologists, and people who've studied policing around the world:

I take as given that we need the police and will need them so long as the human species remains recognizably human. For any population x, some percentage will be dangerous predators, and without the police, we'll all be the prey.

We need the police. In principle, everyone should feel grateful to the men and women who do the difficult and dangerous work of finding and apprehending predators and bringing them before a court of law.

Yet in practice, it seems there's an immense public uneasiness with the police that it by no means confined to the US. The attacks on the police yesterday in France shocked and disgusted me. There's no possible justification for it.

Yet it's important to understand what the perpetrators were telling themselves about why they sought to kill the men who in principle protect them. The scenes represented a breakdown of some kind in both public trust and public discipline.