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An idea I like better is defunding police departments then augmenting the staff with social workers. So much of police training is in dealing with people in cri

An idea I like better is defunding police departments then augmenting the staff with social workers. So much of police training is in dealing with people in crisis situations. Why not bring in experts instead?

ashtonkem 6y ago
Also, police departments are insanely expensive for what we get as the public. Excluding pensions Baltimore will pay $268mil, and has a homicide case closure rate of 30%. It’s hard to say that this is a reasonable usage of Baltimore’s resources.
pyuser583 6y ago
Or training police to be social workers? A good friend went through multiple police academies a few years ago. They all had lots of training in “social work” and “community policing” and “root causes of crime”.
- kthejoker2 6y ago
  Why not just train developers to be designers? Why do all these software product teams hire separate people for thhe two roles? There's tons of classes on design available... It's for the same reason, and based on the basic principles of natural selection and economics. When you have two skills that are orthogonal to each other (make it work; make it pretty), group fitness is improved by separating those roles into different members of the group. Letting one member or subgroup own both responsibilities always leads to the same outcome. They optimize group selection and fitness for the responsibility that is most required for survival - developers for solving problems with code, cops for meeting force with greater force - and the other, like a vestigial tail, exists but is functionally useless.
  - pyuser583 6y ago
    Because policing and social work are more like development and systems administrators. I live in a city that requires police officers to have graduate degrees before they are permanently hired. Most police don’t have their graduate degrees when initially hired, so they have to go back to school and earn them to get a permanent offer. Because local universities have great social work departments and law schools (and sub par criminal justice departments), most cops get degrees in law or social work. The local university had a program that offers both, so many cops do that. So i can tell you from experience that police officer/lawyer/social worker hybrids are a thing. And it works out very well.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Also, police departments are insanely expensive for what we get as the public. Excluding pensions Baltimore will pay $268mil, and has a homicide case closure rate of 30%. It’s hard to say that this is a reasonable usage of Baltimore’s resources.

pyuser583 6y ago

Or training police to be social workers? A good friend went through multiple police academies a few years ago. They all had lots of training in “social work” and “community policing” and “root causes of crime”.

kthejoker2 6y ago
Why not just train developers to be designers? Why do all these software product teams hire separate people for thhe two roles? There's tons of classes on design available... It's for the same reason, and based on the basic principles of natural selection and economics. When you have two skills that are orthogonal to each other (make it work; make it pretty), group fitness is improved by separating those roles into different members of the group. Letting one member or subgroup own both responsibilities always leads to the same outcome. They optimize group selection and fitness for the responsibility that is most required for survival - developers for solving problems with code, cops for meeting force with greater force - and the other, like a vestigial tail, exists but is functionally useless.
- pyuser583 6y ago
  Because policing and social work are more like development and systems administrators. I live in a city that requires police officers to have graduate degrees before they are permanently hired. Most police don’t have their graduate degrees when initially hired, so they have to go back to school and earn them to get a permanent offer. Because local universities have great social work departments and law schools (and sub par criminal justice departments), most cops get degrees in law or social work. The local university had a program that offers both, so many cops do that. So i can tell you from experience that police officer/lawyer/social worker hybrids are a thing. And it works out very well.