ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

This discussion probably aught to be moved to the WRPS thread.

I never said all police are enemies, but policing as a whole is harmful in its current form. It harms our freedom, because police are poorly trained in law and often infringe on our rights. It harms individuals because some cops are poorly trained or poorly emotionally suited to de-escalating and thus often fail at 2. And it harms society in general because they use the excuse of the danger involved with 2 and to justify siphoning off most of the available tax dollars in society for their own use.

Ignoring the rest of the post, I think you may want to clarify here: When you say policing is harmful in its current form, do you mean to say you believe it's a net negative? As in, if the police vanished tomorrow society would be better off for it? That the manner and degree that they infringe on our freedoms is worse than the effect that bad actors have on our freedom? That the public financial burden of police is worse than the economic impact and personal financial burden of not having police?

Or do you believe that it's a net positive, but that the underlying pluses and minuses don't add up as ideally as you would like? Possibly trending towards net negative, but not there yet?

I think those are two very different positions to hold, and probably drastically changes how or if someone wants to respond.

I don't think the "net value" makes sense in the context you are discussing. If tomorrow all police forces in Canada were disbanded with no replacement that would obviously be worse than the current situation. But that doesn't mean that the police are a net positive. It simply means that the disruption caused by such a sudden and significant change to society would be substantial. Even leaving aside the question of policing that would leave hundreds of thousands of people suddenly unemployed which alone would be a huge social problem.

The other problem with "net positive" is that it implies a world where police don't exist. But that isn't the alternative to policing. If police didn't exist, what would exist instead. Even fiscally, what would we do with that ~100 million dollars a year. Surely we are not simply burning it. What are we funding with it instead? Is it returned to the taxpayer, does it fund alternative agencies which do more good. This is why the "net negative" question is almost impossible to answer in our complex world. I can construct a fantasy universe where that money is spent on academic pursuits and unlimited power and matter conversion is invented and now we live in a post scarcity world...obviously in that fantasy world, police are a net negative. But it's just a fantasy, but it's no more fantastical than a world where we take ~100 million dollars per year of tax money and put it in a big furnace and burn it without doing anything with it. So obviously that money must do something else.

But lets ignore all that, and consider hypothetical worlds that are at least reasonably logical and not fantastical:

1. Our world.

2. An ideal world with police funding largely transferred to non-police agencies handling mental health and road enforcement; and with the remaining (much smaller) policing budget split between frontline officers handling crowd control and dispute de-escalation, and investigative/office staff taking crime reports.

3. A world that eliminates one or both of the remaining police duties (crowd control officers, and investigative staff) and returns that money to taxpayers (but remember, this is far far less than the amount currently spent, because we are still funding non-policing agencies from 2).

I think 2 would clearly be better than today.

It's also possible that variations of 3 could still be better than today, but that to me is less clear--but not impossible.

That being said while all 3 options are consistent and non-fantastical hypothetical universes, I really only find 2 plausible at all...I don't believe 3 would ever exist, nor do I actually think anyone is asking for it, so I think asking about is is kind of moot anyway.