11-10-2023, 02:30 AM
(11-09-2023, 07:31 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: This is way too cynical, and implicitly suggests that we could have a society with no police.
Spoiler alert: you cannot have a modern urban society without police. What you can have is a society with police that are more accountable and whose activities promote a better society for everybody.
For example, we’re always talking about how bad drivers are. Now obviously we could have better attitudes so that drivers in general are better, but there will always be somebody who thinks it’s A-OK to get somewhere faster by driving crazily through downtown. There needs to be a group of people whose job it is to deal with those people. Whatever you call that group of people, what they are is the police.
I have watched more videos than I should have of police interactions. They vary, and in some of them I definitely have criticisms of the police response, but in others, they show tremendous patience with extremely poor behaviour from those with whom they are interacting. In the videos I am thinking of, they are clearly putting in a lot of effort to behave in an appropriate manner. To paint all of the police as enemies is inaccurate, and perhaps more importantly, unhelpful. I find myself asking: what should the police do to regain trust? The way some people talk, I can’t imagine what they could do that would even begin to make those people happy. So what incentive do they have even to try?
There are three or four distinct activities the police do in in modern society.
1. Investigating crimes
2. Maintaining order (In crowds or by mediating disputes between individuals)
3. First response to injury/mental health problems
4. Traffic enforcement (maybe).
Combining these four is a very bad idea. People also have a wildly inaccurate idea of the actual activities involved in those items, and how often police do them.
For example, police spend most of their time doing 3, for which they are most ill suited for. People also believe that 1 involves lots of CSI shit, and occasionally it does, for the handful of murders each year. But when their stereo is stolen, they pretty much just do paperwork, it's more of a statistical job.
2 is the thing that police do second most often and something they are also unsuited for.
People also believe that police prevent crime, which is quite clearly not one of the four tasks on the list.
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.
Breaking these items into different roles in society would lead to a far far better division of powers and of training. But that would require bold and significant changes to our society which police strongly oppose (and they wield significant power to do so).
As for regaining the trust of society, it is absolutely mandatory that police do so. The ONLY practical difference between the police and a criminal gang of thugs, is that one is trusted by society at large. If police lose this trust, that's what they become. So they should want to gain that trust, because if they don't, it changes the nature of what they are pretty significantly.
But, it is also possible to do so. Yes, some people are extreme and will never trust police, but most people are on the margins, they can go either way, and every time they hear about a corrupt officer getting protected by the police, every time they see a "blue line" flag. Every time the police act as though the public is the enemy a few people are pushed over that margin into the other side. The same people (or different people anyway) will be pushed back if those situations play out differently, if the department removes corrupt cops, if the department prevents officers from wearing a flag which implies a line between the public and police. Etc.