Maybe what we need is a gendarmerie - a military force policing in peacetime - because a lot of policing isn’t really a function of delivering someone to the justice system so much as preventing some particular outcome.

It’s kind of counterintuitive to think a force that siezed and held people on the basis of no particular law might improve things, but the situation we’ve hit upon here - passing enough laws that one can be used as pretext at any given time, arresting and holding people then eventually releasing them without charges, or for the longer-term, holding them until a trial the outcome of which is beside the point - doesn’t really seem to differ that much in effect. Worse, even, because there’s the chance that prosecutors and judges might actually take the law and the trial seriously, and attempt to impose punishments superfluous to the actual purpose of destabilizing an unwanted situation. Plus the whole need to create and promulgate ideologies to justify these pretextural laws is kind of warping, whereas people can generally recognize “yeah, okay, the gendarmerie won that fight” unaided.

I can see concerns about militarizing the police but for one wow has that ship sailed. And as before, largely because we don’t have an honest raison d'etat mechanism. We arrived at current state of exception, at Guantanamo Bay, backward from there, a legification of military force, taking the desire for that guy *there* to be *not-there*, and the prerogative of force to make it so, and married it to a farce of a guilt/innocence paradigm, creating a dynamic with the worst of both worlds - “stuck on a remote island, without recourse” AND “penal dehumanization justified by a purpose-built governmentality”.