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How much do we need the police?

• Ididntdothis 6y ago
  I agree that police is being pushed into policing things they aren’t suited for. For example, cops just shouldn’t be in schools. I think the biggest crime is the drug war. Most aggravations come from drug related arrests.
  • mjevans 6y ago
    I don't do drugs (aside from caffeine) myself, not even the legal ones. I'd also prefer smoking were banned (please, please, buy edibles). Yet I'd still generally legalize, and regulate (nearly) everything. The "drug" war is entirely caused by society being crummy and having incomplete social safety nets. Those things should ALSO be fixed, but take far longer than a moderately sized reply to even begin to discuss. Staying on topic for just 'the drug war' and related arrests. It would be trivial to make all of the criminals in the drug war vanish nearly instantly: just make getting a drug fix legal, cheap, and easy. (General reference, compare the Prohibition of Alcohol to booze today vs other drugs.) Yes, some drugs are really bad, but making them not-legally-obtainable just means some criminal's going to fill the gap.
• js2 6y ago
  I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested. > So when we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved. > Political protests are a threat to the order of this system. And so policing has always been the primary tool for managing those threats to the public order. Just as we understand the use of police to deal with homelessness as a political failure, every time we turn a political order problem over to the police to manage, that's also a political failure.
  • clairity 6y ago
    we should convert 80% of cops with guns to investigators, and civics officers who teach civics and encourage civility in the communities in which they live. we don’t need that many cops with guns on the street, as there’s very little violent crime relatively speaking.
    • AmericanChopper 6y ago
      If you believed such a role was appropriate to establish in society, why on earth would you want the police doing it?
      • usrusr 6y ago
        You do need some people to be in charge of violence. If you make that their only job you'll be in a situation of hammers seeing nails wherever they look. You'll be much better off assigning that unavoidable violence duty to people whose main responsibilities and qualifications lie elsewhere.
        • AmericanChopper 6y ago
          > If you make that their only job you'll be in a situation of hammers seeing nails wherever they look. That depends entirely on how much power you give them, and how much accountability you impose upon their use of it. The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Trying to give them duties that conflict with those objectives is simply always going to fail. Personally I wouldn’t want my children receiving civics instruction from somebody who has to hedge against the possibility that one day they’ll be trying to put them in jail.
          • usrusr 6y ago
            No amount of power removal and accountability will change the "nails" perception if the only job they have is hammering. > The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Only if your idea of a perfect society is one where everybody is incarcerated. I'd rather have one where as few people as possible need to be incarcerated to keep order.
• biolurker1 6y ago
  Useless thinking. Just think of what would happen to your siste rif she was raped and her only family was her grandma and she did not have any friends. Oh it would be the neighborhood crew saving her? That's police.
  • Ididntdothis 6y ago
    Did you read the article? I think not.
  • js2 6y ago
    "I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them."
  • tehwebguy 6y ago
    Do you think police stop rapes from happening? Rapes happen in peoples' homes where there are no police. Then, if the victim chooses to report it, they are often blown off by the police entirely unless the circumstances make it impossible to ignore.
    • oh_sigh 6y ago
      Police try to find and arrest rapists, who would probably go on to rape other people if they weren't in prison.
      • tehwebguy 6y ago
        One would think that
      • groby_b 6y ago
        That is a lovely idea, but alas not matched by reality. https://www.startribune.com/ignoring-rape-complaints-when-police-fail-to-protect-and-serve/489385841/ https://www.startribune.com/ignoring-rape-complaints-when-po... https://www.focusforhealth.org/women-across-the-us-suing-police-for-refusing-to-investigate-their-rape-kits/ https://www.focusforhealth.org/women-across-the-us-suing-pol... https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/investigates/police-destroyed-rapekits/springfield.html https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/investigates/police-... https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/how-to-lie-with-rape-statistics-americas-hidden-rape-crisis/ https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/how-to-lie... And that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
• seph-reed 6y ago
  I prefer the idea of peace officers. The more peace oriented the position, the less toxic people will be attracted to it. At the same time, there should also be health/toughness standards lest we want to go full Demolition man.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • julianeon 6y ago
    I think what is looking more like a solution I'd like to see tried, is: 1) Replace 90% of police with community officers (unarmed) and social workers. Have them working their 'beats' regularly, pro-actively monitoring their areas and checking in with their charges. Again, unarmed. 2) Keep 10% for old style police work, that are only escalated to when specific conditions are met: approved by a municipal authority, wear bodycams, and have the permission of the caller to appear (within reason). Make it a real pain in the neck to bring them out, so they only show up for truly dangerous situations, not like some guy reselling cigarettes that ends in death. A lawyer recently made an observation that really stuck with me: Only call the police when you're okay with the person you're calling about possibly dying. Sounds pretty strong when you put it that way - but it's just making explicit the implicit idea that the police will show up, the police are authorized (expected, even) to use force, and if there's disobedience or even just misunderstanding, the person could end up dead. See for example this story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond If peace officers did most of the work, that could be a game-changing improvement.
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  Unfortunately police fill in for a lot of our broken social safety net in the US. They're put in situations they should never be put in. Instead of an addict finding help, or a poorer community member getting assistance, or a troubled kid accessing mental health services - they inevitably instead end up interacting with the police. It's both shortsighted priorities and not the thing police are supposed to deal with.
  • mc32 6y ago
    Police violence doesn’t happen only in the US. There a few mild places where the police are normally hands off, unless they have to get rough. But those are an exception. Unless people become tame and “just get along” police have to confront violence, like it or not. Of course, we can improve policing. They can get trained better, they can learn to deescalate first. But they also need coöperation from the people they police... and that can take time.
    • softwaredoug 6y ago
      Yes I only mean to comment on what I know from US cops I personally know.
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  We certainly need a police force to maintain a level of civilization in a large enough society. But of course, the problem is different: what KIND of policing we need, and how do we provide accountability. Quis custodiet custodes? [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%... edit: note that the "ipsos" part of the sentence in the wikipedia link is correct, but can be largely omitted. I studied Latin at school (loved it) and this happens frequently with Latin quotations.
  • IggleSniggle 6y ago
    I'm a little bit confused by your statement that the ipsos is both a correct quotation but can also be omitted. Is there some translation issue wherein the "ipsos" might or might not be part of the original poem?
    • sharkjacobs 6y ago
      As I understand, it is part of the original Juvenal quotation, but its omission does not substantially change the meaning of the sentnce. Compare > Who will guard the guards themselves? with > Who will guard the guards?
    • tcell2020 6y ago
      "Quis custodiet custodes" means "Who will watch (the) watchers?" With the "ipsos" - "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes", it means "Who will watch the watchers themselves?" - i.e. it puts emphasis on "the watchers". Basic meaning for both is the same, but I think the original version used "ipsos"
• PaulKeeble 6y ago
  The American police force seems to be a catch-all for the vast amount of social problems caused by unequal access to healthcare, limited social security and a host of puritan laws that ignore peoples needs. Making drug users criminals despite the massive numbers of them drives up prices and decreases access causing large amounts of crime out of social problems caused by missing social systems. The drug war has also caused a lot of organised crime on an impressive scale and packed out prisons that treat its prisoners appalling badly, falling very much into the punishing end of the spectrum and addressing very little rehabilitation which reduces reoffence. Combine all that lacking social programs and support with the culture around guns, which a lot of the populace owns, and you have by necessity a very militant police force. America has a lot of social issues which much of the populace does not want to address and the police end up arresting it all and putting them in prison. It impacts the middle classes a lot less and they don't want to pay for it so as a populace they suffer the consequences of those choices in their schools and criminal gangs and subsequently military-like police. There are other ways to do this but I highly doubt America will choose any of them in the coming decade.
  • Avicebron 6y ago
    I find it surprising that these relatively well known issues aren't even considered topics for public discussion. I understand that the solutions are hard, but plenty of hard problems have been solved by determined societies. The police are symptoms of a problem in how wealth and services are distributed within our society. Fix this and we won't need para military police suppressing the proletariat.
    • krapp 6y ago
      >I find it surprising that these relatively well known issues aren't even considered topics for public discussion. Because they're all considered "leftist" if not "socialist" politics now, and the Overton window of acceptable discussion in the US has moved very far to the right over the last four years.
      • Avicebron 6y ago
• themagician 6y ago
  How much you need the police depends on how much capital you have. If you don’t have any the police don’t do much for you. In a world of increasing inequality fewer people need the police.
  • julienb_sea 6y ago
    This is nonsensical. Someone with less capital is at far greater risk of crime or personal harm than someone with more capital. A reduction in police presence makes life easier for criminals, which disproportionally will affect people with lower capital and less safe living environments.
  • 01100011 6y ago
    It's this sort of insulting, absolutist bullshit that drags down the debate. Do you really think police do nothing for, say, abused poor women? Sure, the cops have serious issues we need to address, but the issue is more nuanced than 'all cops are evil'.
    • themagician 6y ago
      It’s not absolutist at all. I didn’t say they do nothing. I didn’t say all cops are evil. Those are your words mate.
• Pfhreak 6y ago
  I'm heartened by city council members Tammy Morales in Seattle, Nury Martinez in LA, and Steve Fletcher in Minneapolis who are all seriously discussing significantly defunding or disbanding their police departments. While we've had protests like this in the past, I don't think I've ever seen so many places seriously asking how much we need our police, and how equipped they should be. Clearly, the answer is that police departments are filling roles they do not need to fill, and have expensive, military style equipment they do not need to have. I hope we see more cities bringing these ideas to the table.
  • baggy_trough 6y ago
    Since there will always be sociopaths, we will always need at least some police. Seriously considering disbanding the police, if it means more than renaming and adjusting their responsibilities, is madness.
  • missedthecue 6y ago
    Is there any proof that police having a Humvee makes them more violent or is that an emotional reaction?
    • ciarannolan 6y ago
      >Is there any proof that police having a Humvee makes them more violent or is that an emotional reaction? The former [1]. >1033 receipts are associated with both an increase in the number of observed police killings in a given year as well as the change in the number of police killings from year to year, controlling for a battery of possible confounding variables including county wealth, racial makeup, civilian drug use, and violent crime. [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/militarization-makes-police-more-violent https://www.cato.org/blog/militarization-makes-police-more-v...
      • tathougies 6y ago
        Yes but were not asking the most important question... Is there less crime? If police departments that didnt receive these weapons are too afraid to enforce laws then perhaps they should be getting some.
• nigzzz 6y ago
  We need one cop for every nigger, to achieve the critical 2:1 nigger-to-knee ratio.
• bluedays 6y ago
  > Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put you into this situation to begin with. So using the police as a tool against protesters only proves them right. A protest should never be met with violence, unless you want to encourage more action from protestors. In other words the police are the wrong tool for the job. The police absolutely should not be involved in protests. This is a great job for social workers. Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP. The whole philosophy behind protests is really easy to understand. Spend a bit of time reading Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, a little Ghandi and then you start with a lot of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to understand the philosophies behind American protests.
  • chongli 6y ago
    Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP. Not necessarily. Riots can begin when bad actors take advantage of the cover of numbers provided by a peaceful protest. If there are enough bad actors, usually masquerading as peaceful protesters, to reach critical mass, then a riot can start. All it takes is for one person to break a window to signal to the other bad actors that the riot is about to begin. This piece by Tanner Greer [1] examines the phenomenon in way more detail than I do here. [1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disorder.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...
    • bluedays 6y ago
      I can see your point. However, I don't think that the full force of violence for the entire crowd is necessary. What if we saw a bad actor at a rally for a politician, and then bring the full force of the state upon the entire crowd because of that bad actor. It would be absurd to use that opportunity to mace and teargas and shoot rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. It is equally absurd to do the same here in political protests.
• evan_ 6y ago
  In Eugene, OR, where I live, there is a program called CAHOOTS ("Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets") which is more or less the mental health equivalent of an ambulance. They're dispatched by non-emergency operators to situations such as mental health crises, public intoxication, and welfare checks- things where police officers would be asked to serve as a social worker, as the article puts it. My understanding is that the program has been quite successful, and other cities have begun implementing their own similar programs using it as a model. https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots-faq/ https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots-faq/
  • linuxftw 6y ago
    Where I'm from, the ambulances wouldn't respond to 911 calls without a police escort. Once the CAHOOTS people start getting attacked and killed, the program will end.
    • evan_ 6y ago
      What is your ideal outcome from posting this?
  • hedora 6y ago
    California used to have programs like this in the 80’s. They were outlawed as part of Regan’s war on mental illness (or whatever he called it). A friend of mine went through this, so I went through all the options with the a few emergency psychiatric wards. These days, even if the person has medical insurance or someone wants to pay out of pocket, the mental health professionals aren’t allowed to do anything without getting the person in need of emergency care to sign an emergency consent form under their own free will, and while capable of making legal decisions (which is by-definition impossible). Pre signing the form “just in case” doesn’t count. My friend did this, in fact. Other than waiting for the situation to escalate to violence (and getting the person incarcerated without care) the only option is to have a police officer (with no medical credentials) come out and make a diagnosis. The officer almost always (and in this case, did) overrides any doctors and loved ones involved in the case, and finds that the person does not need care. The triage nurse at one of the care centers told me that most residents of the many waterfront encampments in the city were people her office had previously turned away.
• remmargorp64 6y ago
  If you defund the police but keep them around (after all, they are necessary), won't that just force them to self-fund by seeking funding from corrupt sources such as civil asset forfeiture and drug busts? Isn't this already a solved problem in other parts of the world, such as Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand, where most officers are unarmed when they are on patrol? Why can't we learn from other countries?
  • macintux 6y ago
    You’re reversing the sequence Mr. Vitale seems to be suggesting. He’s saying let’s analyze the work they do, find alternatives for those roles, and _then_ reduce the scope of the police force. Defunding seems much less important and farther down the road than making their jobs achievable, and the rest of us safer.
    • jakelazaroff 6y ago
      > Defunding seems much less important and farther down the road than making their jobs achievable, and the rest of us safer. There are secondary effects too, though. The police force competes for funds with other public infrastructure like schools. Defunding the police means we can allocate that money to more productive and less violent causes.
  • gruez 6y ago
    >won't that just force them to self-fund by seeking funding from corrupt sources such as civil asset forfeiture and drug busts? Does the police force operate like an autonomous organization or something? Is there a reason why the city can't institute a policy like "all civil forfeitures" go toward social outreach programs only?
• always_left 6y ago
  Does anyone ever take justice into their own hands? Not recommending it, but my neighbor's car was stolen so I went out and found it for them that day. It was reported missing but I had a feeling it wasn't going to be actively looked for due to the severity of the crime.
  • billme 6y ago
    How exactly did you find the car?
    • always_left 6y ago
      Honestly sheer luck. I drove around areas that generally have more crime looking for a blue crossover car. Around 1AM, when I was headed home, I spotted it on the left side of the road behind a camper, then I sat a good distance from it until the perpetrators started driving it then I called 911.
  • hedora 6y ago
    The penalties for taking the law into your own hands are generally highly asymmetric and in favor of the original perpetrator. For example, if you forced the car thieves out of the car, or parked it in place by blocking the road, you might be looking at assault charges. Similar arguments can be said for most other common crimes. Consider noise ordinances (harassing / threatening your neighbor until they shut up), trespassers (Threats? Forcibly move them?), burglaries (rob them back?), domestic violence (victims that kill the assailant are often charged with premeditated murder), etc.
    • vulcan01 6y ago
      Some good legal arguments on whether it is legal to steal something back or not... https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/15869 https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/15869
    • always_left 6y ago
      Yeah definitely, I didn't want to get hurt over a car, I actually waited in my car until I saw them get into the car then I called the police. Otherwise they told me I can just take it back if no one is in it.
• jorblumesea 6y ago
  One of my current frustrations with American politics is how radical everything has become. The debate is now, either we don't have any police and defund them, or, we allow them to continue being completely unaccountable. Neither of those situations sound ideal. It feels like Europe and other places have a much more reasonable and nuanced view. Police get funded, and well funded, but the job requirements are strict, and the emphasis is more about public good and safety. If there's a crime the police do exist and do show up but they also don't shoot people dead in their house at 3am.
  • gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    Yea I'm kind of besides myself about how "abolishing police" is treated as a serious proposal, when the most deaths and violence occur in profoundly vulnerable communities where disbanding police would almost certainly result in innocent people having no protection against criminals. It's pretty clear that police unions allow for a lot of this institutional rot and inability to address abuse. I fear that the left doesn't want to recognize that unions are capable of becoming institutional agents of oppression and injustice. Yet reforming public sector unions is perhaps one of the most practical and effective steps to correcting the malfeasance of police as we know them today without fundamentally changing how they operate.
    • electricviolet 6y ago
      Most of the left leaders I follow and trust are specifically opposed to police unions due to the fact that they protect violent officers. Let's not lump other public sector unions in with police unions; the teacher's union has nothing to do with police brutality.
      • gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
        I don't follow socialist stuff too much but I thought there'd be some interesting work from Jacobin to see how they perceive it. Turns out there is: > However, in most cities and states, police unions are treated as members in good standing of local labor councils and federations. They often work closely with other municipal unions, from firefighters to teachers, to protect labor rights and municipal budgets. Given their size and power, most other city unions are wary of alienating them. > This is an enormous political problem. If the police are to be defunded and reined in, their unions need to be split off and isolated from the rest of organized labor. If police unions are able to maintain a common front with other city unions, they will almost certainly be able to resist any meaningful efforts to restrain them. So basically, yea other unions are complicit and unable to reign in the abuse of police unions. It's not the way I'd try to solve it but that's how Jacobin seems to be posing the issue - other unions in the locality should be reforming neighboring unions. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/police-labor-union-organizing-cops-racism https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/police-labor-union-organi...
• pnw_hazor 6y ago
  It is reasonable to consider taking away some responsibilities from sworn peace officers (armed police). Many US cities have unarmed units for traffic tickets and some other things. But a problem arises when community outreach or community contacts by non-police have a risk of violence associated with them. Especially contacts with people with a history of mental health related violence. Or, domestic violence intervention. These two examples is probably where a lot of unwanted or unexpected police violence occurs. I don't know if sending in social workers would work well in such contexts. Sending out social workers with police escorts probably doesn't change outcomes very much. But is could help depending if the armed police do not have to lead the encounter.
  • LeonB 6y ago
    Social workers are very often sent to help people experiencing mental health crises, including those with a history of violence. Particularly in countries other than the US it’s very much the norm. It’s not a theoretical situation. It sounds like you’re speculating but you could read about it or talk to people about it.
    • pnw_hazor 6y ago
      Good, I know it happens and I hope to see more of it.
• BurningFrog 6y ago
  Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police. Steven Pinker describes how that went: > "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."[16]
  • wolfgang42 6y ago
    I’m not convinced that eliminating police altogether is a good idea, but after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot (which cites your Stephen Pinker quote), I don’t think that a situation which also involved “taxi drivers... armed with Molotov cocktails” is representative of what might happen if police departments were disbanded under other circumstances. (Edit: I regret putting snark over substance in this reply. See my response below, and others’ in this subthread, for a more detailed rebuttal.)
    • kyleee 6y ago
      " I don’t think that a situation which also involved “taxi drivers... armed with Molotov cocktails” is representative of what might happen if police departments were disbanded under other circumstances" Why not?
      • 6y ago
• Uhhrrr 6y ago
  It's true that police are asked to be solutions for social problems for which they are unsuited. However, the reason this interview is topical has to do with someone paying for cigarettes with a possibly counterfeit bill and refusing to give them back. That seems to me to be an entirely reasonable reason to call the police.
  • remember_george 6y ago
    Seeing how George Floyd moved to Minneapolis to do ministry work I bet he didn’t even know the bill was counterfeited.
    • Uhhrrr 6y ago
      AFAICT we still don't even know whether the bill was actually counterfeit. It's not a useful fact for either side of the Culture War.
      • jessaustin 6y ago
        Yeah this is the sort of bullshit detail that gets inserted into the narrative for CYA reasons. Pedestrian hit-and-run victims are reported as cyclists because of course drivers can't help but run over cyclists. The scary black man was "menacing" Karen, not telling her to pick up her dog's nasty excrement in the public park. Obvious bullshit.
    • throwwwaway 6y ago
      Once one side starts speculating on things like this, the other side starts speculating on things like what was an intoxicated man doing in the driver's seat on a car. It's not helpful to the issue, which is that he was murdered by police, and that something needs to change to prevent something similar from happening again.
      • Uhhrrr 6y ago
        I'm just pointing out that the change proposed in the OP wouldn't have saved Floyd. The cops would come for anyone accused of passing counterfeit money and not returning the merchandise. Offloading cases to social agencies wouldn't have saved him indirectly, either. Four cops were almost immediately available to subdue and/or arrest him. Heck, it even looks like 5-303.01B here [1[ would have prevented Floyd's murder, had it been followed: > It shall be the duty of every sworn employee present at any scene where physical force is being applied to either stop or attempt to stop another sworn employee when force is being inappropriately applied or is no longer required. The problem has more to do with things that are squishier than policy: enforcement and the culture within the department. 1. http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/police/policy/mpdpolicy_5-300_5-300 http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/police/policy/mpdpolicy_5-30...
• gdubs 6y ago
  To pull from fiction, my idealized vision of the perfect police force would be a “Starfleet”. Someone like Picard who is more than capable of defending themselves and others if it comes to it, but who goes in with phasers on stun, and a primary motivation to diffuse a situation through psychology and diplomacy.
  • shard972 6y ago
    But whenever one of the crew members are hurt? Fuck the prime directive! Couldn't you argue that is what motivates a lot of cops to act more violently when they see their fellow officers injured and killed?
• nchase 6y ago
  I didn’t see it posted here yet and wanted to spread awareness - the book that the article/interview is about is a free download here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
• Animats 6y ago
  Police in the US do now have jobs others used to do. Big cities used to have more social workers to deal with street people and such. There were "the men in the white coats" who hauled crazies off to mental institutions. Political parties had more boots on the ground - in the days of machine politics, you could talk to the block captain about getting a job. All those jobs were dumped on cops, who aren't that good at it. Especially dealing with crazies and druggies, and having no good place to send them. On the other hand, cops are too hard to fire. It's not like they're stack-ranked. The bottom few percent are not fired for underperforming. Bad cops are a minority, but they're not ex-cops soon enough.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >Bad cops are a minority And over represented on street duty because the specialty task force jobs, management and investigator roles are where the high achievers work their way to.
• 25mph 6y ago
  In the corporate setting, if a large org is deemed incompetent, a common solution would be to mark that org as second class and create another similar org with the first class status. The second class org would get funding cut, no raises, no interesting work. The first class org would be the opposite. A transition is possible via an interview that filters out the incompetent types. And one day the second class org is told that there is no more work for them left and they have 1-2 months to find an internal role or move on.
• socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Not hard to see this article is written entirely from an American perspective with zero consideration of what policing looks like in other countries. I found this part in particular egregious: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested. Look at American policing from a Northern European perspective in general and a Norwegian perspective in particular it is pretty clear to me what some of the problems are. American police has VERY SHORT TRAINING which from what I have read is very focused on the use of violence. Even the rule of engagement emphasize shock, terror and control, rather than de-escalation. You become a police in the US in mere weeks in a very military style Academy. In Norway and I believe much of Europe police training is a lot like taking a Bachelor degree running several years. Training emphasize a lot on social work, psychology, human rights, understanding behavior of people with mental problems, the criminal mind etc. What I have seen from US police recruitment videos seems to be that they are essentially recruiting some sort of soldier. In Norway it is much more like recruiting a social worker. For instance far more women work in the police here. And I know from people who have worked in security that a common strategy here is to pair up women with bigger guys because women are often good at defusing situations. They often make people calm down more easily. Big testosterone brutes shouting loudly, don't calm people down. The US has a violent police force because that is how they are trained to be. That is the kind of people they are recruiting and that is how they get equipped. It seems profoundly wrong to just sort of "GIVE UP" on policing all together when there are so many flaws in how it is done. It does not mean I entirely disagree. I do in fact agree that policing in the US covers far too many areas. People call cops for things that would be unthinkable here in Norway. The barrier to calling the police in the US seems exceedingly low. Like you see minor disorder in a class causing police to be called. Police is called to handle situations a teacher should handle. And yes the US does of course use its police and prison system as a compensation for having no functioning welfare state. Because the US does not want to pay money to take care of poor people they instead pay triple to have the police handle problems a much cheaper civilians agency could have handled. But I guess in the US it is much easier to get funding for police than for "soft" government type of jobs. Until Americans stop hating and distrusting government so much I am not sure how you solve that.
• sys_64738 6y ago
  In some states there are many police force (state, university, city, county, town). Every one is armed to the teeth. Mental and physical standards for police are abysmal in the USA. Don't ever try to make a complaint against the police in your local town or they'll start to intimidate you. Police don't have an external and independent investigative procedure. It's all rigged. Police are often the revenue generators for individual towns. That's inherently wrong.
• yters 6y ago
  A lot of the areas the author says police are now dealing with used to be dealt with by religious organizations. Perhaps religious organizations should be encouraged to play a bigger role in the public sphere. To make a tired argument, without any sort of moral guidance, people have no reason to live other than for their immediate needs. On of my friends grew up in the Baltimore inner city, and he says this is how most people are. They just act on their impulses and smash in a friend's face because they owe a few dollars. What turned my friend's life around is his decision to follow God instead of his own desires. I think there is something to that. It doesn't seem that giving people free money and housing solves the problem. There are many much more destituted countries than inner city USA where people have much more functional societies with much less. I spent most of my childhood growing up in such a place. No running water or plumbing. Limited technology. Electricity one hour a week. Everyone walked everywhere. People lived off of what they could gather and fish. There wasn't widespread violence, drug use, sexual abuse, etc. like we see in the inner cities. The difference is these communities were very religious (muslim and animism) and they did not have much exposure to corrupting US substances such as drugs and pornography.
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• zip1234 6y ago
  Traffic enforcement could be massively reduced if roads were designed differently to make people go the posted speed and be safer.
  • mjevans 6y ago
    Crosswalks in the middle (not at intersections) like the UK. (This is an engineering solution.) Make the posted speed limit actually tend to line up for green to green when going straight, and send turns down the road from the sides just before straight (to make going a tiny bit slower hit the green).
• badrabbit 6y ago
  "Police" (Edit:"modern police") is a 19th century invention, well after cities were a thing. If we get past semantics, a service that provides order and security to a community is needed. I imagine it more like social workers that also do criminal investigations for prosecutors instead of a military force for a city. Perhaps an unrelated armed "police" can help when deadly force is needed (gangs, armed criminals,etc...). Disarm and civilize the police but keep their SWAT units as a separate department that only backs up police when requested. This would throwing a lot less people in jail and having police that live in the community. But hey, this is just wishful imagination, politicians and police union would commit sedition if anything like this happened.
  • ben509 6y ago
    The Vigiles were a police force[1] in ancient Rome, so they're not a recent innovation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigiles#Police_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigiles#Police_force
    • badrabbit 6y ago
      That's not "modern police" as in the modern organized structure. Even the wild west had marshalls and sherrifs but they were not police. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police under history, look at the "modern police" section. I find this poster against police in Wales a bit amusing: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/No_Police%21%21_Well_Done_Aberystwyth_Boys_1850.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/No_Polic... Law enforcement is not the synonymous with police.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      You wouldn't go out in ancient Rome after dark, though. Unless you could afford armed bodyguards.
  • birdyrooster 6y ago
    By civilizing the police we also mean affirmative action to bring the demographics of the officers in line with the people they serve. Removing guns wouldn’t have saved Eric Garner or George Floyd.
• carapace 6y ago
  I dunno about no police, but Sir Robert Peel has a thought (I posted this the other day, apologies if you've seen it before.) This seems to me to be pretty sane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles > The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent in the United Kingdom and other countries including Canada, Australia and New Zealand. > In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
  • ChristianBundy 6y ago
    Serious question: how can something be called "consent" if it can't be withdrawn by individuals? That's democracy, not consent.
    • carapace 6y ago
      What do you mean?
      • ChristianBundy 6y ago
        This advertises itself as "policing by consent", but I'm not sure where the "by consent" comes from. I'm surely missing something, but if you can just add "by consent" to violent actions and then say "individuals cannot withdraw consent", then that doesn't seem like consent to me. Example: The US military spreading democracy by consent. Sure, lots of recipients of 'democracy' have expressed that they want us to leave, but individuals cannot withdraw their consent from our democracy.
        • carapace 6y ago
• aSplash0fDerp 6y ago
  With all of the layers of legislation and enforcement, by in large, most citizens hands are clean when it comes to the current round of hot-button issues. (Waiting for someone to post #americashandsareclean and keep the spotlight on policy) This appears to be another diversion (or attempt at despair) gathered from all of the pieces in motion so far in 2020. Sticking to the policy debate, do you/we really need paramilitary prisons on american soil would have made for better rootcause reporting.
• jokit 6y ago
  If free, we don't.
• drummer 6y ago
  I bring the below quotes to your attention: "It would be easy to think that the police officer is a figure who has existed since the beginning of civilization. […] however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered […] on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704." - How the U.S. Got Its Police Force http://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ http://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ "Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property." - A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a... While most people today believe that they are “free” and “independent” the facts are that they’re still living in enslavement. The only difference is that they’ve been indoctrinated from early childhood to accept their slavery. And in the case of the police, they’ve been conditioned to accept the enforcers of their enslavement as something good and beneficial to themselves, when in fact, the police exist to enforce whatever the masters dictate and to protect the masters and their economic interests from the slaves. This fact is proven on a daily basis worldwide; whenever and wherever the slaves rise up against the current system of enslavement, the police rush in to suppress them. And yet, very few of the slaves take note of the obvious and ask themselves the question: who do the police really serve?
  • twyleo123 6y ago
    Modern civilization has its roots in the Enligtenment, duh. And it's been generally a good thing. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-ho... > New data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg, showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47 per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the early 19th century. > Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year. You can thank your local police department, among other institutions, for that dramatic decline in crime rates.
• giardini 6y ago
  Now we absolutely need police. We might have been able to do w/o them for short periods before these riots and demonstrations occurred, but now the police are guaranteed a permanent and prominent position in American politics (until it no longer exists). Or perhaps we should settle the matter now, distribute working firearms and ammo to every non-felon over the age of 16 (or possibly 12). Either things will heat up and cool rapidly or everyone will suddenly acquire good manners. In the long run the USA can begin a renaissance of political equality and good will for all.
• jimkleiber 6y ago
  I love this interview. It seems to say that police are being too violent because their role is to be violent and that their role has been stretched to handle too many situations. While saying we should shrink the police departments, the author seems to say we should do it to help the cops who are being overburdened with things they shouldn’t be asked to do. I like the approach because it’s not saying cops are bad, but rather seems to say their behaviors are hurting people and they may be hurting as well and proposes solutions that may help everyone. Really grateful I read this tonight.
• CalmStorm 6y ago
  Preventive measures may be cheaper than enforcement. UBI could reduce the crime rate and therefore save money on law and order. I think it targets the root cause rather than fixing the symptoms through more policing.
• salutonmundo 6y ago
  also worth reading: https://www.mpd150.com/faq/ https://www.mpd150.com/faq/
• torb-xyz 6y ago
  In Rojava (anarchist autonomous region in Syria) there are been efforts to replace the police with a better institution. More information: http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-lessons-from-rojava/ http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...
  • bubba1236 6y ago
    that's a fantasy, rojava is a one party dictatorship oppressing Arabs
• cheesecracker 6y ago
  This sounds to me like the typical socialist nonsense: "let's just all be nice to each other, then there would be no need for police".
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    In countries where people are nicer to each other, there is less police brutality. It would take much more time, but I think more Fred Rogers and less GI Joe (or whatever their current equivalents may be) is likelier to provide a more lasting fix than any of these short-term policy proposals. WWJD?
    • cheesecracker 6y ago
      So how do you make people be nicer to each other?
      • 082349872349872 6y ago
        Education (in the french sense of the word)? My only specific recommendation I already gave above, and even that is a hypothesis. If I had an answer, I'd be proposing it, but as it is, I've taken the easier path out, by living in the place where I'd found the nicest people, after having traveled a bit. (I don't think one can make people be nicer to each other. At best, they can experience for themselves that things go more smoothly once nature is not red in tooth and claw, and decide to be nicer. That said, legislating morality does work better than one might think: it allows people who might already go along with the legislation to claim to their in-group that they still don't really like the out-group, but are only going along with the law.)
        • cheesecracker 6y ago
          Why not make people nice to each other first, and then abolish or reduce the police? It seems like that would happen naturally anyway. If huge parts of the police force went idle most of the time for lack of anything to do, the force would presumably reduced after a while.
• rytor718 6y ago
  Please keep in mind that the current protests are only happening because of police. There is a point when they're not the agents of order and safety, but the agents of violence and disorder. And yes, we ought to question the value of any police force that kills citizens so regularly -- so normally -- that it's shocking if someone can even ask whether a cop should be charged with murder after murdering someone on camera. Keep in mind Floyd isn't the only person to be killed by cops this month, or last month or last year. This is very, very normal. We're not better for it or safer for it, so yes it may be true right now that we're more safe without them and less safe with them. And I'm not really arguing either side so much as pointing out that the current disorder and violence is in response to regular police violence. Regular. No place breaks down due simply to an absence of police. But I've heard of police states -- and those aren't something anyone talking about the merits of order and safety should be arguing for.
  • AdrianB1 6y ago
    It is not just because of police, it is because the government or mayor that oversee that police allowed it to become that way and did not immediately take action. 1. Police don't just start one day misbehaving without any warning. It takes years to get there, years where they see there is no consequence for being more and more out of line and years of having immunity for their actions. 2. That event was not handled properly, the cop should have been arrested on the spot or in a couple of hours, not days later. These lack of immediate action was seen as an attempt to cover up or minimize the gravity of the situation and that is a very good reason for public protests. Both #1 and #2 are not the fault of the police, but for people governing over the police force. Quoting from a well known psychologist, the regular policemen has an IQ around 90, the police oversight body should compensate for that.
• teekert 6y ago
  In the Netherlands the police's motto is "waakzaam en dienstbaar" meaning something like "vigilant and at your service". I like it, it means they are servants you can ask things and they are there to help. They are trained to always de-escalate. Tbh they sometimes get a lot of foul language addressed to them by certain individuals, yet they usually remain calm. I have a lot of respect for them.
  • vinay427 6y ago
    I think this is what the "serve" in popular US police mottos like "protect and serve" that some departments use was intended to convey. I suppose the message got lost (in more than a few cases in the US) somewhere between painting it on the car and training and managing officers inside the car. It definitely feels like the police in the US are generally less trained than those in most western European countries (or at least the one I live in), and while this doesn't necessarily make them more violent, it does seem to increase the variance in attitude and behavior I've experienced among cops in the US. There are those I wouldn't trust to use physical force even when necessary, and clearly others I would not trust to use force as a secondary or last-resort option. It's rather concerning when you don't know what you will get. This is definitely not equally true of every department. I've lived in some smaller towns where the police are noticeably more compassionate, as well as some cities like SF where the presiding strategy seems to be avoiding the overuse the police partly because of their inherent unpredictability, an overly punitive justice system, etc.
• lazylizard 6y ago
  Perhaps just take away their guns?
• arijun 6y ago
  This guy makes good points, and then muddles them by taking them too far. In the two examples given is basically "don't have these problems in the first place." Which would be great, if it was that easy. Since no one can snap their fingers and make all burglaries go away (even by decriminalizing drugs as he suggests), there will always be a need for some form of policing/intervention. Now, if you could reduce the amount of need for police while morphing them to look e.g. more like London's police like someone suggested in this thread, you could affect real change. But the way he's implying it will go "just give homeless people housing and you won't need any police for that anymore" indicates to me that he doesn't know just how difficult these problems are.
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• habosa 6y ago
  Would it be possible to unbundle the police? Why are the highway patrol and the narcotics divison even remotely part of the same organization? Having "fight crime" as your mandate is much too broad.
• ygmelnikova 6y ago
  Millennials first real riot. How cute.
• 684102 6y ago
  i think we don't need bad cop, but we still need good cop :)