You haven’t seen the difference between HK police and US police, that’s all I can say lol.

No indeed, i’ve never been to either of these places. Although i’ve had plenty of occasions over the years to talk with people who had first-hand bad experiences with the institutions in both regions.

What makes you think your “community police” will not harass homeless people?

Because homelessness does not exist at all in the zapatistas caracoles (communes). And because their police does not have any form of monopoly on violence: they derive their power from the community, not from a centralized authority. If for some reason (which i’ve never heard of since the 1994 insurrection) their police committed crimes against the population, there would instantly be a response from the population and the situation would be fixed.

What about an anarchist commune makes it Inherently good, impervious to gentrifying and petit bourgeois elements?

We stay critical of power structures and domination scheme. Emancipation is not a theoretical milestone but an everyday struggle. Having a popular background does not make you inherently good/empathetic (cops aren’t exactly bourgeois to say the least) like having a bourgeois background does not make you inherently bad/sociopathic (Kropotkin is a good example of that: he chose to live in misery according to his ideals rather than bow to the bolshevik State). What matters is structures: if you take a Nation State and replace its government/parliament with workers, you still have a Nation State with the same factories and prisons.

So first, by abolishing money and private property as part of free communes, we’re developing some relative immunity to gentrification. Of course people still have personal possessions (it’s my house/room because i live in it, not because a piece of paper says so), and as long as we have to deal with capitalist society we need some money to trade with the outside world. But you won’t ever see someone billing someone else for goods and services in a free commune (or with another free commune), so wealth accumulation becomes almost impossible which makes the project really unappealing to capitalist/gentrifying types.

the class character of the state

That’s a pretty lie. Were Lenin and Trotsky proles? No, they were elites who used proletarian rhetoric to rebuild the same structures of oppression (wage slavery, police, prison) which the soviet movement was aiming (and starting) to abolish. For the workers, is there much difference between stakhanovism and neoliberal managerialism? (no) Is there much difference between a goulag and a capitalist prison? (no) You have to analyze the situation materially to understand what a society is about: in so-called “communist” States, power and resources were not distributed equally: the bolsheviks actively slaughtered the actual communists (whether anarchists or libertarian marxists) the people who advocated for distributing power and resources.

In the PRC police does not intervene when workers kidnap their bosses due to unpaid wages. They don’t intervene to break up strikes

I agree with your sentiment that the western media portrayal of chinese society as docile is strongly biased. Of course there’s popular uprisings in China and there is room for direct action. That doesn’t do away with the question of political repression which is very much of a problem in China as in the western world.

all of history has had prisons and police in some capacity

That is provably false. Many societies throughout history (and some to this day) don’t have either prisons or police. I recommend you read some anthropology like Graeber’s or Kropotkin’s works.

Where is that the case?

That is definitely the case in France (3116000, source INSEE) and USA (17019726, source Census Bureau 2018) : empty dwellings outnumber homeless people >5 to 1). I don’t know about stats for UK but i believe the situation is the same. In the Netherlands i don’t know about officially-recognized dwellings, but there were some official studies of the squat ban that found that vacant office space significantly increased, unsurprisingly. Of course these studies do not account for office/industrial space, rarely-used secondary housing or for anti-squat practices (letting someone live here so they guard the place for free, but have no right to do what they want), so the actual number is much much higher.

Abolishing police won’t do jack sh*t to fix that issue, but building more homes where they are most severely needed will.

I believe exactly the opposite. In France and USA we have been giving billions of euros to decades to the construction mafia to build more housing, yet prices keep rising as fast as the number of homeless people. I mean considering that the laws of supply and demand apply to some extent, it makes sense: if millions of landowners voluntarily withdraw their property from the market, you create a speculative bubble where prices cannot go down despite new constructions. If you add to this the fact that any social policies our respective governments had after WWII are actively being dismantled, and social housing in France is now managed like a mafia (where in many places you either pay up under the desk, or wait ~5y on a list) and prioritizing luxury “social” housing in new construction for middle classes, we’re in deep shit. Who profits from “build more”? Big companies and corrupt officials, as always. It will just damage the environment and keep making more people homeless, if those constructions are not tied to an actual social policy.

However, what prevents us from housing people right now? The fucking cops. Because by law in France since 1945, the city and/or the préfet (regional police overlord) can requisition unused dwellings to apply the constitutional right to housing. This was very common right after WWII when many owners went missing and couldn’t be asked for permission: it’s mostly no longer applied today. So that’s how the squatting scene was born: why wait for permission when we the people can organize and take what we need from those who stole it from us?! So when you crack a squat, you have two enemies who want to evict you: the owners and the cops. Both may or may not (depending on local context and circumstances) attack you, beat you up, evict you. The police additionally may detain you under bullshit reasons [0] and get you sent to prison for trying to find a home, applying by yourself the spirit of the law they, as agents of the bourgeois Nation-State, are refusing to apply because it does not suit their interests.

It’s important to note that as always, the cops are an armed militia for the powerful, not a neutral and just armed band applying the law. For example, the law in France explicitly says if there is no proof of breaking in, and you reside there for >48h, then it’s your primary housing and you should benefit all protections related to this such as the right to a trial before being evicted. However, cops will almost systematically ignore proof that you’ve been residing there for a while (sometimes for months) and just kick you out pretending they saw you just break in. Some times, they will themselves break the windows, electricity/pipes so that they make it unlikely to be squatted again, and can tell the landlord it’s a shame that such punks are allowed to breathe at all.

How would it work without police? If we didn’t have a police, we could just find justice without obstacles. Without an armed militia of psychopaths to enforce injustice, private property would be a pipe dream. We would only have to defend ourselves against owners, and we’re up to that. The issue we face today is if we defend ourselves against an owner attacking us, they will claim we attacked them and we will be condemned by the class justice to prison sentences or fines, despite being the victims (just like victims of police abuse are condemned for “violence” and “insults” against the cops despite being the only ones suffering physical injuries). The police having a monopoly on “legitimate” violence is the reason why the elites and their police get to decide the fate of everyone without suffering any kind of consequences.

As a conclusion, i think it’s important to note that squatting is widespread and part of human history. It’s probably as old as “oooh, i just found a nice abandoned cavern with a fire pit”) and these issues for land reclamation by the people are worldwide (and not, as some misinformed marxist-leninists imply, a privileged european punk fun park). From South African squatted slums evicted by cops and for-profit militias, to indigenous peoples of Mexico/Columbia reclaiming the land that was stolen from them, it’s an issue that should matter to all. Housing belongs to those who inhabit it; the land belongs to whoever works it. Such is an old anarchist principle by which we should, in my humble opinion, strive to live a better live.

[0] “Cambriolage” or “violation de domicile” are often invoked, although they should in theory only apply to non-vacant housing being squatted or robbed.