A member of this newsgroup has expressed his *ahem* dissatisfaction with the way the police are performing their duties. Since that person includes this fact in most of the arguments he makes, I will attempt to reply to them collectively, rather than to each individual topic.
A word of history first. I am a 19 year old Chinese male, American born, living in Hawaii but fortunate enough to get accepted to the University of Southern California. My parents were born in Taiwan, and emigrated to the United States as students. My grandparents fled from China to Taiwan with the Nationalists, and my Great-grandparents were actively fighting first the Japanese invasion, and later the Communists. Therefore, neither I, nor my parents, nor my grandparents, nor my great-grandparents can be guilty of racism as it exists in America.
Of course, I really can't offer any proof of the above. You'll just have to trust me and frankly, we have to start trusting sometime.
As for political ideology, I range from moderate on some subjects (gun control) to very liberal (religion and gay rights, don't get me started on those). My personal morals ans ethics are based on the conservative Chinese ethics, though they have been altered to deal with the American.
All this may seem superfluous, but I simply wanted you to understand by background, so you can see where my arguments are coming from and hopefully, understand my point of view. I'll see if I can understand yours.
There is no doubt that the police are a perfect organization, or almost perfect for that matter. In the police, as in any organization, will have those which will abuse their power. That has generally been the fall of empires, not by forces from without, but from corruption within. The police are no different than any organization, and the fact that the individual members wield tremendous power leads to many cases when this power can be abused, often with tragic results.
However, when the writers of the Constitution wrote it, they had just escaped from what they believed was a tyrannical government. They did put safeguards in the Constitution to protect their citizens from such abuses. Now though they technically protected everyone, they were not available to everyone for quite some time, and still not very available now. Why?
The answer, of course, is society. This government is made of nothing more than a collection of individuals. The individuals in power are the ones who make the government run. Back then, only white males were in charge, and it was the general consensus of society at the time that ONLY white males would run things, and that's how things were. However, society has more or less been shifting in a liberal direction, as suffrage, recognition, and civil rights were slowly granted to minorities. They're not perfect, I know. The point is, society now is a LOT different than it was just 20 years ago.
Well, one might say "So what? Police still commit outrages against minorities. Nothing's changed." Well, society HAS changed, a lot. The important thing is that these outrages are treated AS outrages, ant not ignored by the press or it's citizens. The police, and the entire department, were smashed by the fist of public scrutiny. Now during the "jim crow" era you were talking about, everyone would have looked the other way. Plus there are more people like me than there were in societies past (you have the support of a Chinese Computer Nerd. Isn't that nice :D ).
Now let's look at the police, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? To answer that question, one must compare the good it does, to the harm it does, and see which one is greater, since you are talking about the ABOLITION (as opposed to the re-organization) of the police. The main duty of the police is deterrence, not actually arresting people. Many of the people out there would commit petty (or not-so petty) crimes, but don't do so because they are afraid of being caught by the police. Certainly people do commit crimes, but they are a cumbersome process, since they inevitably include safeguards which prevent them from getting caught (at least with relatively smart criminals). Without police, the crime rate WOULD skyrocket, including quite a few assaults, murders, and hate crimes.
Taking all that into account, I think that the police should be reformed, but not abolished.