"We Have Better Alternatives"

"And while we're not using police to manage slavery or colonialism today, we are using police to manage the problems that our very unequal system has produced. We're invested in this kind of austerity politics that says the government can't afford to really do anything to lift people up. We have to put all our resources into subsidizing the already most successful parts of the economy. But those parts of the economy are producing this huge group of people who are homeless, unemployed, have untreated mental health and substance abuse problems. And then we ask the police to put a lid on those problems—to manage them so they don't interfere with the 'order' that we're supposedly all benefiting from.
"But if you're one of those poor people, one of those folks with a mental health problem, someone who's involved in black market activities to survive, then you experience this as constant criminalization."

Leah Donnella at NPR interviews Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing.

Anna North at Vox interviews Khalil Muhammad, author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

And Ryan Cooper at The Week writes about "[w]hat America can learn from Nordic police."

"This Isn't About Big Government, It's About Smart Government"

"The United States is its own country, and no one expects it to become a Nordic utopia. But Nordic countries aren't utopias either. What they've done has little to do with culture, size, or homogeneity, and everything to do with figuring out how to flourish and compete in the 21st century. In the U.S., supporters of not only Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but also of Donald Trump, are worried about exactly the kinds of problems that universal social policies can help solve: worsening income inequality, shrinking opportunity, the decline of the middle class, and the survival of the ordinary family in the face of globalization. What America needs right now, desperately, isn't to keep fighting the socialist bogeymen of the past, but to see the future—at least one presidential candidate should show them that."

Anu Partanen in The Atlantic explains how Scandinavian social policies are driven by enlightened self-interest.

And Marian Tupy connects Sanders to social democracy..