Hey, very interesting question. Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless saga actually has a similar concept to Murder in the Tool Library. Also an anarchist community, a string of small towns made up of multi-family households that opt in to following certain rules in order to benefit from collective resource sharing. A key stipulation is that they respect the authority of an independent body of professional investigators, who can be called in to investigate a crime. The investigators arrive in pairs, they decide fault and consequences, and their judgement has to be followed, or face banishment.
I like both authors’ works a lot, but I struggle with this level of punitive authority placed in only certain individuals within a society. I think AE Marling tries to decentralize that power more by having a whole network of investigators chiming in on a live-streamed case, the crowdsourcing aspect you mentioned. Still, I think both rely too much on another point you mentioned, the strict qualification process, and that’s a kind of “merit”-based power system that can be easily coopted and controlled by whoever is able to manipulate the selection process.
Thinking about these models, two thoughts come to mind. First, I don’t think investigative (and judgement) authority needs to be (or should be) coupled with the authority to use force. Both sets of books do so, and it does seem convenient, if the people going out to investigate a potentially dangerous situation are allowed to be armed and are authorized to enforce the resulting punishments. But I think these things can be decoupled, and to some extent are in our society already. (Detectives are often cops, but prosecutors, judges, and juries are not.)
Second, for roles that involve the authority to coercively affect others’ lives (through physical force or legally binding judgements), I’d really like to see those be temporary rotational assignments, not career professions. The city I grew up in is far from ideal, but its police force operates differently from most in the U.S. It has a consolidated Public Safety Department, combining police, fire, and emergency medical services. Officers are required to rotate every few years between those three services. So the cops were all recently fire fighters and/or EMTs, and that produces a relationship with and approach toward the local population. I think it also changes recruitment motivations too.
I think it would be preferable for the people who can use force against others (e.g. restrain a person when necessary, take them into custody, escort them to some required treatment or community service, etc) only get to do that for a short term, say a year or two. Then they have to go back to being regular members of the community who don’t have the authority to exert force over others. Ideally they’re randomly selected from a pool of qualified volunteers (or from all community members who haven’t been exempt for various medical/physical reasons), like jury duty.
Also, ideally those individuals also aren’t the ones who play a decisive role in investigating crimes or wrong-doing, determining fault or punishments. They’re the enforcers who accompany the detective, who are sent to collect and escort the individual after the multi-stakeholder mediation or consensus board determines the appropriate restorative justice measures, etc. And if some individuals need to play key roles in negotiating the decisions about fault and restitution, those could be rotational positions too.
The enforcers would still have to exercise some discretion in when to restrain a person, how much force to use, so they’d still need to be well trained and held accountable for their actions. But I think avoiding combining too much authority over others’ lives, and making any such authority very temporary, could go a long way to reducing entrenched hierarchical power and abuses of it. Sorry for the long response, been puzzling over this. I’d be interested in how this relates to your thinking too!
All really great points. They sparked one more thought. I really like overlapping authorities, so people have options. I think that’s important in a non-hierarchical/non-coercive society. At first, it seems easier to imagine overlapping investigative organizations, since different interested parties could request their own investigations and reports/evidence from each could be presented to a consensus-based decision-making body.
So then I wondered, how would overlapping use-of-force groups work? Groups could have different methods, maybe some but not all rotate their force-using agents, have different rules of engagement, etc. But I’m also wary of the idea of multiple independent militias, since if groups can decide for themselves to use violence, that could descend into problematic vigilantism. I think there are ways to make it work more accountably, though. I remember that FA has multiple overlapping civil defense groups, but I forget the details of how they’re called to action, so the thoughts below might be exactly what’s already envisioned in the FA world (apologies if so!)
I think the key issue is, if we want people to have different options, who has the choice? It can’t just be whoever has a complaint against someone else, of course. That part is important in determining whether some response is necessary, in a specific incident. But in general when we think about multiple options for authority in an anarchist society, I think what’s really important is that people agree to be subject to them. And with violence, I think that means that the potential target of the violence needs to be able to choose who can use force against them.
Now, that wouldn’t work if a person can say in the moment, for any given act of violence, no I don’t agree to this person restraining me right now. But I wonder if we could have a system in which all community members are able to register their preferences ahead of time, pre-specify which civil defense group(s) or enforcement agency(ies) they consent to be handled by if needed.
They can’t say no to all available groups (that’s the same as not registering any preference), and their wishes are most likely to be followed if they specify one or more large-enough, respected and responsive groups in their local area who can be called in when needed. If a person hasn’t specified any groups, then by default any group can be called in. Also groups might be called in to respond to an incident when at first the parties involved aren’t identified.
If a person is then identified, and they have registered opposition to being policed/enforced by the group on scene (and their preferred group is also available), then (to maintain the group’s reputation) the on-scene responders would have an obligation to make every effort to remain physically disengaged from the non-consenting person as they can, perhaps just maintaining a perimeter and clearly warning the persons that they may have to engage if the person does not remain within the perimeter, until the person’s preferred response agents arrive on scene.
The on-scene responders could still talk to the present parties, seek to de-escalate the situation without physical force, and might be able to gain a target’s consent to bring them in, if their preferred response group is delayed. Groups that don’t maintain enough registered community members voluntarily submitting to their enforcement practices could have their license to use force revoked (so they couldn’t respond even to the open calls for civil defense).
Anyway, as I write this, I am thinking this might already be how the system works in FA. If so, I’m glad! Helps to think it through, to get on board with it :).