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I’m sure it’s more complex than this, but why isn’t the federal government jumping at this as a massive employment opportunity. You could train a wide variety o

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I’m sure it’s more complex than this, but why isn’t the federal government jumping at this as a massive employment opportunity. You could train a wide variety of people for these jobs, and the way the jobs could be structured, support roles might not require college degrees in a lot of cases. Award grants or conditional extra city funding to cities that grow the program and make it work. People get to feel good about giving back, the country can feel good about reducing needless arrests, we can make bigger strides to solving homelessness, we can make good on various social justice reform items not only without necessarily massively defunding police, but also by freeing police up to actually do the much harder job they are trained for and stop treating police like they need to also be an arbitrary mental health issue handler. There’s a lot of complexity for sure. This idea will hit a lot of roadblocks. But it seems like the potential upside across a dozen or so dimensions is super high. Of course this is the same country that shuts out widespread nuclear power, so maybe this is the last we’ll hear about it when some police equipment manufacturer starts lobbying against it the minute one of these workers is involved in a violent encounter or significant arrest or something.

jquery 6y ago
> I’m sure it’s more complex than this For starters, a lot of people have negative productivity. Think of someone intensely anti-social who drags down the productivity of people around them.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Presumably that would be true of any possible intervention and if we overcome that risk in every endeavor reliant on human productivity then it’s not particularly important to call it out as a risk here.
pm90 6y ago
You have to understand how the federal government works. Now that something like this has been implemented and has been successful, it’s likely that it will be adopted more widely, perhaps at the state level. An enterprising congressperson (most likely one of their aides) will notice this opportunity and pick it up as a policy/platform to run on at which point legislation would be introduced that would allocate funds or direct the federal government and/or all states to implement this. Another way is that a Federal agency gets wind of it and pilots it and then proposes to adopt it more widely.

jquery 6y ago

> I’m sure it’s more complex than this For starters, a lot of people have negative productivity. Think of someone intensely anti-social who drags down the productivity of people around them.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Presumably that would be true of any possible intervention and if we overcome that risk in every endeavor reliant on human productivity then it’s not particularly important to call it out as a risk here.

pm90 6y ago

You have to understand how the federal government works. Now that something like this has been implemented and has been successful, it’s likely that it will be adopted more widely, perhaps at the state level. An enterprising congressperson (most likely one of their aides) will notice this opportunity and pick it up as a policy/platform to run on at which point legislation would be introduced that would allocate funds or direct the federal government and/or all states to implement this. Another way is that a Federal agency gets wind of it and pilots it and then proposes to adopt it more widely.