Since we all woke up one morning recently to find that we’d somehow been magically transported to a world where there were people seriously talking about abolishing the police, I suppose we’d better prepare ourselves by figuring out what that world would look like. Helping us out in the this effort is Joshua Rhett Miller at the New York Post. He’s assembled some explanations and opinions from leaders in Black Lives Matter and other anti-cop, socialist coalitions to give them the opportunity to explain how that would work. The answers are… interesting, to say the least.

This is the cop-free world that Black Lives Matter protesters are dreaming about.

Social workers and religious leaders would replace officers on the street — and there would be no crimes such as stealing because the community workers would do such a good job helping everyone, fueled by money redirected from local police departments, advocates claim.

“Right now, cops don’t just respond to violent crimes; they make needless traffic stops, arrest petty drug users, and engage in a wide range of ‘broken windows policing’ behaviors that only serve to keep more people under the thumb of the criminal-justice system,” reads the Web site for the Minneapolis community coalition MPD150.

There’s just so much to unpack in this article that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, if you’re going to send out “social workers and religious leaders” to deal with crime, they’re going to need some sort of way for people to identify them and recognize the role they’re playing. That means they’ll probably need some sort of… uniform? And because there will still be dangerous, armed criminals in the streets, you’ll want to make sure they have some body armor. Unfortunately, they’ll also need weapons in case a worst-case scenario unfolds. And, of course, they’ll need a lot of training in how to use all those things and how to deal with potentially lethal scenarios. And now you’ve turned them into… police officers.

How about all of the “useless” things that police currently do? They list traffic stops and arresting people for “petty crimes” like theft as work that police don’t need to do. So everyone can just drive as fast or unsafely as they like, and stealing is okay now? Sounds like a wonderful society.

Yet another rationalization being put forward is that we got along just fine without cops in America until 1838 so we could obviously do so again. Do they have any idea what things were like back then? The lack of cops is why we had vigilante justice. And they didn’t call it the “wild west” for no reason. If you want to go back to a kill or be killed kind of world, be my guest, but I’m not interested.

A second argument claims that we could simply take all the money we spend on the police and pump it back into the community and then nobody would have a reason or a need to steal things. Apparently someone fell asleep in math class quite a bit. You could distribute that money to everyone in the country and it might save them a few months’ rent, but that’s about it. And people would still be out there taking whatever they please. We’ve already had a great demonstration in recent weeks of what our cities look like when the police are overwhelmed and outnumbered. It turned into The Purge pretty quickly. If you eliminate them entirely it would be a horror show.

And yet this has somehow become a serious topic of political debate in our lifetimes. God have mercy on us all.