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We railed against the cops publicly during 2020, I think the police are happy to sit back as municipal workers and wait 10 years to collect their pensions. Wha

We railed against the cops publicly during 2020, I think the police are happy to sit back as municipal workers and wait 10 years to collect their pensions. What people don't realize is reducing police interactions with citizens is exactly regressive, leading to more mistrust between citizens, traffic deaths, and even pollution and climate change as per this article. This comment on HN would have been downvoted to grey for the better part of 18 months until only recently, as a point of reference. During the Trump years assumptions would have been made about the commenter. Now I think we're all coming to agreeing that we need police to do their jobs and to hold them to it, or we get articles like this one.

technobabbler 5y ago
Maybe it doesn't have to be as binary as more vs fewer police? I wish the call wasn't "defund the police" but "create institutional alternatives to militarized policing". That same heavily-armed force you use to fight druglords doesn't have to be the same force used for routine traffic enforcement, and maybe traffic enforcement shouldn't automatically get people scanned for outstanding warrants and such. A broken brakelight need not escalate into an armed car chase. The same way the fire department is separate from police, maybe there needs to be other institutions for tackling different situations, with academies training for different tactics that don't always involved armed conflict. Our one-size-fits-all policing might seem relatively harmless for middle-upper-class whites and Asians, but they can be outright deadly if you're black or brown. You never really know if you're just going to get a friendly warning or say the wrong thing and be killed. The way we do policing is relatively unusual in the developed world, and very violent, and encourages both arms races and a severe distrust in certain communities. Just reimplementing that sort of system is going to get us back to the same place... armed enforcers that serve one part of the citizenry at the expense of others.

technobabbler 5y ago

Maybe it doesn't have to be as binary as more vs fewer police? I wish the call wasn't "defund the police" but "create institutional alternatives to militarized policing". That same heavily-armed force you use to fight druglords doesn't have to be the same force used for routine traffic enforcement, and maybe traffic enforcement shouldn't automatically get people scanned for outstanding warrants and such. A broken brakelight need not escalate into an armed car chase. The same way the fire department is separate from police, maybe there needs to be other institutions for tackling different situations, with academies training for different tactics that don't always involved armed conflict. Our one-size-fits-all policing might seem relatively harmless for middle-upper-class whites and Asians, but they can be outright deadly if you're black or brown. You never really know if you're just going to get a friendly warning or say the wrong thing and be killed. The way we do policing is relatively unusual in the developed world, and very violent, and encourages both arms races and a severe distrust in certain communities. Just reimplementing that sort of system is going to get us back to the same place... armed enforcers that serve one part of the citizenry at the expense of others.