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Why though? Is there not a legitimate role for policing in a civil society? And if there is, don't they need to coordinate and collaborate just like any other o

Why though? Is there not a legitimate role for policing in a civil society? And if there is, don't they need to coordinate and collaborate just like any other organization?

revscat 6y ago
In the abstract police are necessary. In today’s America, with the police as they actually exist today, they are very much not necessary, and are a drain on public safety, social order, and personal liberty.
- javagram 6y ago
  That doesn’t make sense. There are 300 million guns in America and plenty of crime happens every year. It’s true crime is down from the historical highs of the 70s and 80s, but there are very much still murders and thefts that need to be investigated and punished. The reality is if police were abolished we’d go back to the bad old days of private detective agencies being used for security. Would you rather have some sort of unholy fusion of Blackwater and the Pinkerton detective agency performing policing tasks in our country?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - detaro 6y ago
    The argument by most seems to be not "get rid of all police and then nothing", but rather to replace it as much as possible from the ground up. Which might very well mean re-allocating resources and removing responsibilities from police, e.g. around mental health, but not getting rid all law enforcement. Phrased this way and not as a "reform" because they believe attempting to reform the existing system slowly won't work.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    The bulk of crimes committed in the USA do not require traditional LEO aside from apprehensions. Investigations, evidence collection, interviews, etc can all be done by any old bureaucrat. Much like the FDA investigators and Fire Marshals don't need the authority of an LEO. There's no need for police to be first-responders in purely medical situations. It's unfair to expect that police also take up the burden of medical care. While we are at it, it's also silly that the fire department responds to non-fire medical incidents in their big ass fire truck. Doing so compromises their abilities to handle situations where their expertise is explicitly required. Every town in America does not need a SWAT team. Thsoe should be specialized agencies that serve a particular region and have a limited number of deployments. If we were building a system from scratch today, people would not suggest dumping these duties on beat cops.
    - javagram 6y ago
      > Investigations, evidence collection, interviews, etc can all be done by any old bureaucrat. Much like the FDA investigators and Fire Marshals don't need the authority of an LEO. So a police detective? I don’t really see how renaming police detectives “Investigator” or some similar name shuffling changes or resolves anything. Unless you’re suggesting farming these tasks out to the private sector. I guess towns could contract with PIs or a private detective agency, but I find it hard to believe such a privatized agency would be any better than sworn LEOs in terms of corruption, brutality, etc. The comparison with a fire marshal is instructive; according to Wikipedia “Fire marshals may be sworn law-enforcement officers and are often experienced firefighters.” In other words, just like in the case of police detectives, it’s seen as a good thing for them to have experience and authority. > There's no need for police to be first-responders in purely medical situations. It's unfair to expect that police also take up the burden of medical care. While we are at it, it's also silly that the fire department responds to non-fire medical incidents in their big ass fire truck. Doing so compromises their abilities to handle situations where their expertise is explicitly required. I don’t think acting as EMTs is a big part of police calls. As you note, the FD often responds to such purely medical incidents as they are better trained and have better resources. I agree that the use of SWAT teams for small towns should be looked at. In my opinion, these specially trained officers should be part of state police or big cities only. State police could support local PDs if needed. In general, your post is about some types of police reform. It doesn’t interact with the post I originally responded to, which posited that “police” are “very much not necessary” in modern America.
nkozyra 6y ago
Because there is a great deal of sentiment that the approaches used in the United States are excessively militarized, racially unjust and insufficiently transparent. Using a problematic customer like that as a marketing highlight is just not a great idea.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MuffinFlavored 6y ago
  What's the alternative though? Pretending that if you needed protection due to crime coming your way/your family's way... you wouldn't call 911? I feel like this entire movement is really taking away credit from the "ok" and "good" cops. How many cops are there in America? Ok, some of them aren't perfect. They are racist/dicks/thirsty for power. Why does this mean as a citizen I should feel less safe because we want to defund police and have less cops protecting us? Because "cops aren't protecting us?" They are. Even if there were 1,000 police brutality related deaths a year (there aren't), police would still be a huge net win for society, no? Am I missing something?
  - tom_ 6y ago
    You appear to be arguing against a point that wasn't made.
  - wvenable 6y ago
    > I feel like this entire movement is really taking away credit from the "ok" and "good" cops. I feel the response to this movement shows that there are fewer good cops that anyone would have expected. They protect their own at the cost of citizens they should be protecting. They lie. They cheat. They assault and murder without consequence. > Even if there were 1,000 police brutality related deaths a year (there aren't), police would still be a huge net win for society, no? Am I missing something? Yes. You're missing the fact that it doesn't have to be this way. That police don't have to work entirely without consequences. They don't have to militarized. This is not required for them to do their jobs. And it can be changed.
sg47 6y ago
The police aren't enabling a civil society right now. The current policing methods in the US are barbaric to put it mildly. Some third world countries have better behaved police.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  Some third world countries have better behaved citizens.
  - sg47 6y ago
    What are you trying to say? That these protestors are not well behaved?
hellomyguys 6y ago
For many people in the US, providing the police your tech means you are implicitly supporting actions of police brutality and racism by cops. Using it as marketing material optically looks even worse.
ryanSrich 6y ago
> Is there not a legitimate role for policing in a civil society? Look around. Most Americans would say no to this question. I don’t think they’ve thought through the consequences of that, but I guarantee a random poll would show most Americans want to abolish or >70% defund the police (which is effectively the same).
- xwowsersx 6y ago
  Where are you getting that from? Do you have polls you can point to that support the assertion that "Most Americans would say no to this question"?
- microcolonel 6y ago
  > Look around. Most Americans would say no to this question. How is it possible to conclude this? There have been polls the last few days where more than half of respondents of both parties support sending the National Guard to quash the rioting and looting, and a significant proportion of Democrat respondents think the Federal government should send the U.S. military to do the same. If you live in a place where people broadly do not support the police as an institution, you live in an odd place. Now, given recent events on the top of the national consciousness, there is broad concern that some very bad police tend to be protected in many police departments, but that's an entirely different opinion.
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    > If you live in a place where people broadly do not support the police as an institution, you live in an odd place. This could be the case. Tier 3 on the West Coast in the US. Everyone marching and protesting want the police either completely gone or heavily defunded to the point where they basically don't exist.
  - xwowsersx 6y ago
    Right. It seems to me that many here are making sweeping and unsubstantiated generalizations. There are problems in policing that need to be addressed, but to extrapolate from that that police are not necessary and/or are a net decrease in safety is really a conflation of two separate issues.
designdesign 6y ago
Just because there's a legitimate role doesn't mean that it's currently being practiced ethically. If it's not being practiced ethically the argument is that you can't ethically profit from it. That's the entire issue.
- jessriedel 6y ago
  No one can sell anything to any police department ethically? If I'm a plumber and the local precinct calls me to fix their toilet, I am morally obligated to refuse?
  - designdesign 6y ago
    Why do people always look for hard and fast rules? If it's your business you can do what you want. No one's obligating you to do anything. In this case Slack's employees felt as though it's unethical. That's totally within their rights to do.
    - jessriedel 6y ago
      Moral systems based on clear and universalized principles are more intrinsically compelling than arbitrary preferences that are merely labeled "moral". If Slack employees said they felt is was unethical to serve chocolate over vanilla ice cream, none of us would pay attention.
      - 6AA4FD 6y ago
        Yes, but there is almost no way to fully follow through on clear and universal principles. Instead of worrying about that, consider the possibility that our moral feelings are generated by a natural receptivity most of us have to the suffering of others, and that even if these feelings to not appear consistent with a universal and logical philosophical schema, I think it's more appropriate to carefully listen to the compassionate concerns of others than to try and develop ways to ignore them. Maybe there are situations where it's justifiable to sell goods or services to a PD (if there are situations where it's justifiable to buy a smartphone or laptop, this is probably the case in my opinion) but it's still unproductive to dismiss someone who disagrees out of hand. They are probably disagreeing because they have a strong moral feeling about the practice, and it's worth respectfully listening to the reasons they have for feeling so strongly, rather than dismissing it out of hand because you don't think it's feasible to implement universally.
rolph 6y ago
a truly civil society requires zero policing, when uncivil elements exist then policing is required, the question should arise what is the root cause of incivility?
slg 6y ago
When most people advocate for divesting, defunding, or abolishing the police, they aren't suggesting that we go without literally any law enforcement. They simply believe the current system is too broken and corrupt to be reformed and that we need to start completely over. These advocates are generally against other avenues of reforms because those reforms can give a false sense of accomplishment without addressing the underlying problem. Reform or any level of support for the current police system in the US is therefore seen as delaying that ultimate end goal of having a just law enforcement system in place. To put it into computer terms, it is the equivalent of your computer performance degrading over time. You can try force closing programs, restarting the computer, removing programs from autorunning at startup, updating drivers, uninstalling unused programs, etc. However sometimes none of that will truly work and you will need to reinstall the OS.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  Most people aren't advocating for that though.
  - slg 6y ago
    That wasn't what I was intending to say so I apologize that my poor phrasing might have given that impression. I used "most people" as a modifier of the group who are advocating for divesting, defunding, or abolishing the police. While that movement is growing, it is still a minority opinion and I wasn't trying to argue otherwise. I included the "most people" phrase mainly as a disclaimer to acknowledge that there are likely some people who want to see police abolished and not replaced, however that is not a common goal.
- lstroud 6y ago
  What you are suggesting isn’t a reboot or a reinstall, but a rewrite.
sbmthakur 6y ago
Not speaking for the US. In my country, police is heavily stressed, corrupt and understaffed which often makes them ineffective in many scenarios. If everyone (from the lowest ranked to the highest) in the department uses a tool like Slack then a lot of things will improve. At present, lowest ranked cops are not even tech literate and they can't reach to those high ranked officers due to a hierarchy.
wayoutthere 6y ago
Honestly? No, there really isn't, at least not the way we think of policing today. The threat of state-sanctioned violence as a means of keeping the peace leads inevitably to people who will use that violence for their own means. Community policing and restorative justice are more effective in 95% of cases. More cops just leads to more intergenerational trauma, not less.
thinkingemote 6y ago
It's just bad optics right now. Doesn't need to make sense, just perceptions.

Why though? Is there not a legitimate role for policing in a civil society? And if there is, don't they need to coordinate and collaborate just like any other organization?

revscat 6y ago

In the abstract police are necessary. In today’s America, with the police as they actually exist today, they are very much not necessary, and are a drain on public safety, social order, and personal liberty.

javagram 6y ago
That doesn’t make sense. There are 300 million guns in America and plenty of crime happens every year. It’s true crime is down from the historical highs of the 70s and 80s, but there are very much still murders and thefts that need to be investigated and punished. The reality is if police were abolished we’d go back to the bad old days of private detective agencies being used for security. Would you rather have some sort of unholy fusion of Blackwater and the Pinkerton detective agency performing policing tasks in our country?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- detaro 6y ago
  The argument by most seems to be not "get rid of all police and then nothing", but rather to replace it as much as possible from the ground up. Which might very well mean re-allocating resources and removing responsibilities from police, e.g. around mental health, but not getting rid all law enforcement. Phrased this way and not as a "reform" because they believe attempting to reform the existing system slowly won't work.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  The bulk of crimes committed in the USA do not require traditional LEO aside from apprehensions. Investigations, evidence collection, interviews, etc can all be done by any old bureaucrat. Much like the FDA investigators and Fire Marshals don't need the authority of an LEO. There's no need for police to be first-responders in purely medical situations. It's unfair to expect that police also take up the burden of medical care. While we are at it, it's also silly that the fire department responds to non-fire medical incidents in their big ass fire truck. Doing so compromises their abilities to handle situations where their expertise is explicitly required. Every town in America does not need a SWAT team. Thsoe should be specialized agencies that serve a particular region and have a limited number of deployments. If we were building a system from scratch today, people would not suggest dumping these duties on beat cops.
  - javagram 6y ago
    > Investigations, evidence collection, interviews, etc can all be done by any old bureaucrat. Much like the FDA investigators and Fire Marshals don't need the authority of an LEO. So a police detective? I don’t really see how renaming police detectives “Investigator” or some similar name shuffling changes or resolves anything. Unless you’re suggesting farming these tasks out to the private sector. I guess towns could contract with PIs or a private detective agency, but I find it hard to believe such a privatized agency would be any better than sworn LEOs in terms of corruption, brutality, etc. The comparison with a fire marshal is instructive; according to Wikipedia “Fire marshals may be sworn law-enforcement officers and are often experienced firefighters.” In other words, just like in the case of police detectives, it’s seen as a good thing for them to have experience and authority. > There's no need for police to be first-responders in purely medical situations. It's unfair to expect that police also take up the burden of medical care. While we are at it, it's also silly that the fire department responds to non-fire medical incidents in their big ass fire truck. Doing so compromises their abilities to handle situations where their expertise is explicitly required. I don’t think acting as EMTs is a big part of police calls. As you note, the FD often responds to such purely medical incidents as they are better trained and have better resources. I agree that the use of SWAT teams for small towns should be looked at. In my opinion, these specially trained officers should be part of state police or big cities only. State police could support local PDs if needed. In general, your post is about some types of police reform. It doesn’t interact with the post I originally responded to, which posited that “police” are “very much not necessary” in modern America.

nkozyra 6y ago

Because there is a great deal of sentiment that the approaches used in the United States are excessively militarized, racially unjust and insufficiently transparent. Using a problematic customer like that as a marketing highlight is just not a great idea.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MuffinFlavored 6y ago
What's the alternative though? Pretending that if you needed protection due to crime coming your way/your family's way... you wouldn't call 911? I feel like this entire movement is really taking away credit from the "ok" and "good" cops. How many cops are there in America? Ok, some of them aren't perfect. They are racist/dicks/thirsty for power. Why does this mean as a citizen I should feel less safe because we want to defund police and have less cops protecting us? Because "cops aren't protecting us?" They are. Even if there were 1,000 police brutality related deaths a year (there aren't), police would still be a huge net win for society, no? Am I missing something?
- tom_ 6y ago
  You appear to be arguing against a point that wasn't made.
- wvenable 6y ago
  > I feel like this entire movement is really taking away credit from the "ok" and "good" cops. I feel the response to this movement shows that there are fewer good cops that anyone would have expected. They protect their own at the cost of citizens they should be protecting. They lie. They cheat. They assault and murder without consequence. > Even if there were 1,000 police brutality related deaths a year (there aren't), police would still be a huge net win for society, no? Am I missing something? Yes. You're missing the fact that it doesn't have to be this way. That police don't have to work entirely without consequences. They don't have to militarized. This is not required for them to do their jobs. And it can be changed.

sg47 6y ago

The police aren't enabling a civil society right now. The current policing methods in the US are barbaric to put it mildly. Some third world countries have better behaved police.

spoopyskelly 6y ago
Some third world countries have better behaved citizens.
- sg47 6y ago
  What are you trying to say? That these protestors are not well behaved?

hellomyguys 6y ago

For many people in the US, providing the police your tech means you are implicitly supporting actions of police brutality and racism by cops. Using it as marketing material optically looks even worse.

ryanSrich 6y ago

> Is there not a legitimate role for policing in a civil society? Look around. Most Americans would say no to this question. I don’t think they’ve thought through the consequences of that, but I guarantee a random poll would show most Americans want to abolish or >70% defund the police (which is effectively the same).

xwowsersx 6y ago
Where are you getting that from? Do you have polls you can point to that support the assertion that "Most Americans would say no to this question"?
microcolonel 6y ago
> Look around. Most Americans would say no to this question. How is it possible to conclude this? There have been polls the last few days where more than half of respondents of both parties support sending the National Guard to quash the rioting and looting, and a significant proportion of Democrat respondents think the Federal government should send the U.S. military to do the same. If you live in a place where people broadly do not support the police as an institution, you live in an odd place. Now, given recent events on the top of the national consciousness, there is broad concern that some very bad police tend to be protected in many police departments, but that's an entirely different opinion.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  > If you live in a place where people broadly do not support the police as an institution, you live in an odd place. This could be the case. Tier 3 on the West Coast in the US. Everyone marching and protesting want the police either completely gone or heavily defunded to the point where they basically don't exist.
- xwowsersx 6y ago
  Right. It seems to me that many here are making sweeping and unsubstantiated generalizations. There are problems in policing that need to be addressed, but to extrapolate from that that police are not necessary and/or are a net decrease in safety is really a conflation of two separate issues.

designdesign 6y ago

Just because there's a legitimate role doesn't mean that it's currently being practiced ethically. If it's not being practiced ethically the argument is that you can't ethically profit from it. That's the entire issue.

jessriedel 6y ago
No one can sell anything to any police department ethically? If I'm a plumber and the local precinct calls me to fix their toilet, I am morally obligated to refuse?
- designdesign 6y ago
  Why do people always look for hard and fast rules? If it's your business you can do what you want. No one's obligating you to do anything. In this case Slack's employees felt as though it's unethical. That's totally within their rights to do.
  - jessriedel 6y ago
    Moral systems based on clear and universalized principles are more intrinsically compelling than arbitrary preferences that are merely labeled "moral". If Slack employees said they felt is was unethical to serve chocolate over vanilla ice cream, none of us would pay attention.
    - 6AA4FD 6y ago
      Yes, but there is almost no way to fully follow through on clear and universal principles. Instead of worrying about that, consider the possibility that our moral feelings are generated by a natural receptivity most of us have to the suffering of others, and that even if these feelings to not appear consistent with a universal and logical philosophical schema, I think it's more appropriate to carefully listen to the compassionate concerns of others than to try and develop ways to ignore them. Maybe there are situations where it's justifiable to sell goods or services to a PD (if there are situations where it's justifiable to buy a smartphone or laptop, this is probably the case in my opinion) but it's still unproductive to dismiss someone who disagrees out of hand. They are probably disagreeing because they have a strong moral feeling about the practice, and it's worth respectfully listening to the reasons they have for feeling so strongly, rather than dismissing it out of hand because you don't think it's feasible to implement universally.

rolph 6y ago

a truly civil society requires zero policing, when uncivil elements exist then policing is required, the question should arise what is the root cause of incivility?

slg 6y ago

When most people advocate for divesting, defunding, or abolishing the police, they aren't suggesting that we go without literally any law enforcement. They simply believe the current system is too broken and corrupt to be reformed and that we need to start completely over. These advocates are generally against other avenues of reforms because those reforms can give a false sense of accomplishment without addressing the underlying problem. Reform or any level of support for the current police system in the US is therefore seen as delaying that ultimate end goal of having a just law enforcement system in place. To put it into computer terms, it is the equivalent of your computer performance degrading over time. You can try force closing programs, restarting the computer, removing programs from autorunning at startup, updating drivers, uninstalling unused programs, etc. However sometimes none of that will truly work and you will need to reinstall the OS.

spoopyskelly 6y ago
Most people aren't advocating for that though.
- slg 6y ago
  That wasn't what I was intending to say so I apologize that my poor phrasing might have given that impression. I used "most people" as a modifier of the group who are advocating for divesting, defunding, or abolishing the police. While that movement is growing, it is still a minority opinion and I wasn't trying to argue otherwise. I included the "most people" phrase mainly as a disclaimer to acknowledge that there are likely some people who want to see police abolished and not replaced, however that is not a common goal.
lstroud 6y ago
What you are suggesting isn’t a reboot or a reinstall, but a rewrite.

sbmthakur 6y ago

Not speaking for the US. In my country, police is heavily stressed, corrupt and understaffed which often makes them ineffective in many scenarios. If everyone (from the lowest ranked to the highest) in the department uses a tool like Slack then a lot of things will improve. At present, lowest ranked cops are not even tech literate and they can't reach to those high ranked officers due to a hierarchy.

wayoutthere 6y ago

Honestly? No, there really isn't, at least not the way we think of policing today. The threat of state-sanctioned violence as a means of keeping the peace leads inevitably to people who will use that violence for their own means. Community policing and restorative justice are more effective in 95% of cases. More cops just leads to more intergenerational trauma, not less.

thinkingemote 6y ago

It's just bad optics right now. Doesn't need to make sense, just perceptions.