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The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening. They are public servants, but not "our servants" - suc

The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening. They are public servants, but not "our servants" - such a possessive pronoun implies the police are obligated to protecting individuals comprising a populace. They are not (Castle Rock v. Gonzales). Rather, they exist to enforce some relative order as defined by a state entity in the jurisdiction the police is beholden to. As a result, they enforce policies favorable to a state, not to a community. If the latter was the goal, then policing would be a decentralized per-neighborhood activity with rules of conduct set by the neighborhood or community. In practice, this means police forces fundamentally must operate through a system of fear, intimidation and coercion in their enforcing of standards that are non-negotiable by the subordinate community. It should then come as no surprise they are increasingly militarized, since their structure lends itself to paramilitary. Police forces then are optimized precisely for people who are not "the best of us", since there is no particular requirement for anything but systematized and mechanical use of intimidation to control populations and curtail protests.

javajosh 11y ago
I refuse to accept this as a forgone conclusion. Clearly there is a place for a healthy, helpful police force in modern society. It's probably not even that far from what we have - the key being the "broken windows" policy applied to the police themselves, and some critical changes in policy (making it illegal to lie about the law, or to coerce behavior based on a misrepresentation of the law). And of course, reforming the justice system to give citizens the kind of justice our founding fathers intended to give them. Technologies ability to record interactions and play them back later has already had a (positive) impact on police behavior, and I can only see that getting better. I also think that technology will revolutionize the justice system - I've been thinking a lot about what a distributed, remote jury trial system would look like, especially when there is excellent sensor data surrounding any contentious event.

javajosh 11y ago

I refuse to accept this as a forgone conclusion. Clearly there is a place for a healthy, helpful police force in modern society. It's probably not even that far from what we have - the key being the "broken windows" policy applied to the police themselves, and some critical changes in policy (making it illegal to lie about the law, or to coerce behavior based on a misrepresentation of the law). And of course, reforming the justice system to give citizens the kind of justice our founding fathers intended to give them. Technologies ability to record interactions and play them back later has already had a (positive) impact on police behavior, and I can only see that getting better. I also think that technology will revolutionize the justice system - I've been thinking a lot about what a distributed, remote jury trial system would look like, especially when there is excellent sensor data surrounding any contentious event.