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I would not call 911 unless I judged that I needed either the cops or an ambulance and I'd be pretty pissed if a couple hippies in a van showed up.

skitout 6y ago
People trained to manage substance abuse or mental health crises are hippies for you? Don't you think a crew of people that know how to manage mental health crisis will do much better than police officer to manage mental health crisis?
content_sesh 6y ago
911 isn't a personal concierge, it exists to take calls from people in urgent need of assistance and dispatch the correct help to them. If my house is broken into, why does the person who takes my statement so I can file an insurance claim need to be armed? If there's an accident on the highway, why do the people directing traffic while the EMTs and firefighters work need to be armed? The point of programs like this is to acknowledge that currently the police fill many roles - too many roles in fact - and those duties should be split out to other specialists.
- pseudo0 6y ago
  I agree with a lot of this in principle, but there are additional factors at play when it comes to police scheduling and deployment. Serious crime isn't evenly distributed over time, so a police force has to have enough armed officers available on duty to handle spikes in demand. Statistical modelling is getting better, but the failure scenario here of "oh sorry, we couldn't respond to your home invasion for an hour because we were busy" is absolutely unacceptable to the general population. Here's an example of this, where the police were pilloried by the media (https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/intruder-with-knife-boy-being-held-no-portland-police-response-for-1-hour-36-minutes.html https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/intruder-with-knife...). On a typical quiet day though, those officers will end up handling lower severity incidents to keep busy, by taking statements, directing traffic, etc. Just like all redundancy, this looks wasteful until you suddenly need it in a low probability event.

skitout 6y ago

People trained to manage substance abuse or mental health crises are hippies for you? Don't you think a crew of people that know how to manage mental health crisis will do much better than police officer to manage mental health crisis?

content_sesh 6y ago

911 isn't a personal concierge, it exists to take calls from people in urgent need of assistance and dispatch the correct help to them. If my house is broken into, why does the person who takes my statement so I can file an insurance claim need to be armed? If there's an accident on the highway, why do the people directing traffic while the EMTs and firefighters work need to be armed? The point of programs like this is to acknowledge that currently the police fill many roles - too many roles in fact - and those duties should be split out to other specialists.

pseudo0 6y ago
I agree with a lot of this in principle, but there are additional factors at play when it comes to police scheduling and deployment. Serious crime isn't evenly distributed over time, so a police force has to have enough armed officers available on duty to handle spikes in demand. Statistical modelling is getting better, but the failure scenario here of "oh sorry, we couldn't respond to your home invasion for an hour because we were busy" is absolutely unacceptable to the general population. Here's an example of this, where the police were pilloried by the media (https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/intruder-with-knife-boy-being-held-no-portland-police-response-for-1-hour-36-minutes.html https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/intruder-with-knife...). On a typical quiet day though, those officers will end up handling lower severity incidents to keep busy, by taking statements, directing traffic, etc. Just like all redundancy, this looks wasteful until you suddenly need it in a low probability event.