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>law enforcement officers performing their official duties can be secretly recorded because they have no expectation of privacy. Sounds about right. I was wor

>law enforcement officers performing their official duties can be secretly recorded because they have no expectation of privacy. Sounds about right. I was worried that this referred to personal conversations and was about to say "dang have we gone too far?" but yeah this makes sense. Probably goes without saying but — we don't want to condemn/bastardize/immiserate the entire institution...

yareal 2y ago
The institution of uniformed police forces is relatively recent, established in the 1800s, and it reflects an 1800s era sensibility towards crime. In that it is predominantly focused on protecting the property interests of the wealthy. (The original police forces grew out of a desire to socialize the costs of protecting merchant investments -- the warehouses and docks and factories in much of the world, and slaves held as property in the south of the U.S.) Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch". Police in the modern era have been used as a threat of violence against common people more or less since their inception in the 1800s, from slave patrols to strikebreaking. They've been used as political assassins killing the political opponents of the state (see Frederick Hampton) to the systematic oppression of gay and trans people (see, for instance, Stonewall inn). Lest these feel like old examples, just this year police shut down a gay bar in Seattle for having "indecent apparel" being worn by the gay men in attendance. I think it's absolutely fair for people to think critically about the history and legacy of the institution and wonder, is this the best institution we can imagine to fill this role? Are there better ways to imagine the roles it fills today? Are there systemic issues that need fixing with it? The reason I bring this forward is that any thoughtful critique of the institution is often painted broadly as, "you are just an anarchist who cannot think beyond your slogans!" Perhaps the institution could do with some immiseration.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch" Dispensing violence as part of these watches was also generally accepted. I'm not sure how that would work in a modern environment. (You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. The people maintaining order had their own security forces.)
  - yareal 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm explicitly not calling for the return to night watches. I'm saying it should be possible to imagine societies without uniformed police forces, because we've had many models for justice without them in the past. We could, with some effort, imagine something better.
    - lotsoweiners 2y ago
      I’m imagining the alternative is going to be some kind of AI powered robo cops. Not sure I like that idea any more than the current one.
      - yareal 2y ago
        That's the bad alternative, for sure. I'm an anarchist (not the purge, but instead self organizing local communities kind). I genuinely believe that much of the role can be done by local community, reserving only the most violent and extreme things for a uniformed force.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. By most definitions of "feudal", there has never been such a period. What does "feudal" mean to you?
- quickslowdown 2y ago
  This was way better written than the expletive filled reply I had cooking in my head. I appreciate the history, and in reply to the other commentor, I DO condemn the whole institution, and anyone who participates in it. This isn't some job where you're tricked into doing heinous things to ordinary people, they choose to be that way & anyone working to further the goals of the organization is part of the problem.
  - yareal 2y ago
    Appreciate it. It was apparently flagged, despite my efforts to present a historical accounting and narrow, factual framing that was relatively judgement free until the end where I suggested we should be allowed to be critical towards police.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Ah, no; this is historically completely inaccurate. Even as early as 1285, King Edward I put into law rules on the minimum number of officers (“constables”) per area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable
  - yareal 2y ago
    Constables are not the same as "uniformed police forces". Constables and shire reeves (from which we derive the word sheriff) did predate uniformed police forces, but they generally operated on the "I'm the local law, and if necessary I can draw on local posses to enforce my law". A constable with the power to draw men into his service temporarily is not the same as "these hundred men are full time employed as police officers as their job". The men hired by constables were typically not uniformed, full time workers, but temporary muscle. The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800 with London following in the 1820s.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Also, IIRC, constables in England were not paid in money, they were paid in opportunities to dispense violence (which many men find rewarding for its own sake) without incurring legal liability and in opportunities to stick it to their enemies as long as the enemies were sufficiently low in rank. "legal liability": if you beat someone up in Medieval Europe, the big danger is not the authorities' sentencing you to jail, it was getting sued by your victim. England before 1780 or so was organized for the benefit of the artistocracy (barons and higher ranks). You can see just from the fact that constables were not paid a salary that they probably were a net harm (more of a menace than a help) to the common person, but they were a net benefit to the aristocracy because they generally kept commerce humming along at an faster rate than it would have without the constables and because any constable that messed with an aristocrat would be harshly punished. (The aristocrats specialized in military violence, but it was tedious for them to moderate disputes between commoners, so they farmed some of that work out the the constables, who of course were commoners.) When historians say the world's first police force started in England in 1810 or whatever year it was, they mean the first force with a monopoly on violence that was a net benefit to the every class of society including the commoners.
- clbrmbr 2y ago
  Appreciated. Could be a fascinating read, how societies through history have maintained internal order with various approaches to security. Did Rome have police? What about the Venetians or 16th-18th century europe? Any reading recommendation? Also, I’m now curious what a the future of homeland security could look like. Is anyone writing rationally about this?
  - yareal 2y ago
    Rome had a few different approaches, the Vigiles mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Several countries had armies enforce legal codes. Some places had night watches run by their local communities. Some had night watches you could pay to avoid participating in. It was considered quite unpleasant and low class to perform a night watch, so the people paid to do it were often those who could not otherwise find work or found it difficult to work elsewhere. In some societies you could seek justice via a duel, essentially calling out the criminal and relying on social pressure to see the duel adhered to. In England there's a system of tithings, shires and shire reeves, individuals who were kept employed and told to keep the peace. The shire reeves could muster people to enforce the law, temporarily. In the 1600s-1800s the monarchs in various countries instituted police forces, but they were typically plainclothes or carried only a symbol of office. (E.g. a badge) These police were closer to what we expect police to be in the modern era, but were not typically or consistently in the same visible, standard uniform. (Though they may have carried, e.g. a sword that might mark them out.) The U.S. also had other police systems, including slave patrols, essentially self formed posses that would ride down escaped slaves. In the 1800s, police forces in England thought, "you know what would deter crime? Visible police!" And they began to standardize uniforms with the intent to prevent crime, rather than react to crime. Prior to this moment, policing was typically reactionary -- an aggrieved party seeking justice. The innovation was that if people saw a neighborhood patrolled by uniformed police, they might believe that area was safer and criminals might go elsewhere. Around the 1860s, this idea really took off, and you see many places copying it. I'm on my phone, I'll dig for sources later.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > Several countries had armies enforce legal codes. We do that now. The division of the army responsible for that is called "the police".
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  Prior to uniformed police, law enforcement was a largely private matter, and private "thief-takers" were enlisted to apprehend criminals. My understanding is modern state-run police forces developed in response to public anger over misconduct and corruption in the thief-takers, such as the Macdaniel affair. Particularly they were infamous for playing "both sides" by taking money from a victim to arrest a thief, then taking money from the thief not to arrest them.
- magnetowasright 2y ago
  Beautifully said. Your comment about slogans reminds me of the 'thin blue line between anarchy and order' slogan the police themselves use which, to me, is a bare-faced admission of existing to protect the property and interests of the wealthy by suppressing the rest of us. I've never quite understood why that slogan became so popular.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Because most people don't equate "order" with "oppression by the wealthy", they understand it to mean "the stability that allows me to live my life without fear", which is a pretty unambiguously good thing by most people's measurement. We can argue about whether the police deliver what the slogan offers, but your inability to understand why the slogan is popular stems from your very weird take on its meaning.
    - magnetowasright 2y ago
      I don't understand how it's a 'very weird take' on its meaning. Is it any weirder than people finding comfort in it? It's just hilarious (and confusing) to me that it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required. At all. Other such slogans are usually a bit more obtuse and harder to challenge than 'yeah, that is exactly correct, and it horrifies me', hence the confusion. I suppose it is a very effective thought terminating cliche.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        > Also an anarchist! From your other comment. This is the only way in which that slogan can be interpreted to mean anything negative—if you're one of the very small number of people who believe anarchy to have positive connotations. > it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required It's not a leap of logic, it's a leap of semantics. For the vast majority of English speakers "order" has positive connotations and "anarchy" has negative connotations. For you it's the opposite. Given that, it's not surprising that you interpret it the opposite way as most people, but it's weird that you have so little understanding of the rest of the Anglosphere that you don't realize that you're the odd one out.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Now I'm wondering about analogies to useful-but-dangerous technologies, where "why do you worry so much about the police" is a bit like "why do you worry so much about butane lighters and cans of gasoline."

yareal 2y ago

The institution of uniformed police forces is relatively recent, established in the 1800s, and it reflects an 1800s era sensibility towards crime. In that it is predominantly focused on protecting the property interests of the wealthy. (The original police forces grew out of a desire to socialize the costs of protecting merchant investments -- the warehouses and docks and factories in much of the world, and slaves held as property in the south of the U.S.) Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch". Police in the modern era have been used as a threat of violence against common people more or less since their inception in the 1800s, from slave patrols to strikebreaking. They've been used as political assassins killing the political opponents of the state (see Frederick Hampton) to the systematic oppression of gay and trans people (see, for instance, Stonewall inn). Lest these feel like old examples, just this year police shut down a gay bar in Seattle for having "indecent apparel" being worn by the gay men in attendance. I think it's absolutely fair for people to think critically about the history and legacy of the institution and wonder, is this the best institution we can imagine to fill this role? Are there better ways to imagine the roles it fills today? Are there systemic issues that need fixing with it? The reason I bring this forward is that any thoughtful critique of the institution is often painted broadly as, "you are just an anarchist who cannot think beyond your slogans!" Perhaps the institution could do with some immiseration.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch" Dispensing violence as part of these watches was also generally accepted. I'm not sure how that would work in a modern environment. (You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. The people maintaining order had their own security forces.)
- yareal 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm explicitly not calling for the return to night watches. I'm saying it should be possible to imagine societies without uniformed police forces, because we've had many models for justice without them in the past. We could, with some effort, imagine something better.
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    I’m imagining the alternative is going to be some kind of AI powered robo cops. Not sure I like that idea any more than the current one.
    - yareal 2y ago
      That's the bad alternative, for sure. I'm an anarchist (not the purge, but instead self organizing local communities kind). I genuinely believe that much of the role can be done by local community, reserving only the most violent and extreme things for a uniformed force.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. By most definitions of "feudal", there has never been such a period. What does "feudal" mean to you?
quickslowdown 2y ago
This was way better written than the expletive filled reply I had cooking in my head. I appreciate the history, and in reply to the other commentor, I DO condemn the whole institution, and anyone who participates in it. This isn't some job where you're tricked into doing heinous things to ordinary people, they choose to be that way & anyone working to further the goals of the organization is part of the problem.
- yareal 2y ago
  Appreciate it. It was apparently flagged, despite my efforts to present a historical accounting and narrow, factual framing that was relatively judgement free until the end where I suggested we should be allowed to be critical towards police.
gjsman-1000 2y ago
Ah, no; this is historically completely inaccurate. Even as early as 1285, King Edward I put into law rules on the minimum number of officers (“constables”) per area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable
- yareal 2y ago
  Constables are not the same as "uniformed police forces". Constables and shire reeves (from which we derive the word sheriff) did predate uniformed police forces, but they generally operated on the "I'm the local law, and if necessary I can draw on local posses to enforce my law". A constable with the power to draw men into his service temporarily is not the same as "these hundred men are full time employed as police officers as their job". The men hired by constables were typically not uniformed, full time workers, but temporary muscle. The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800 with London following in the 1820s.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Also, IIRC, constables in England were not paid in money, they were paid in opportunities to dispense violence (which many men find rewarding for its own sake) without incurring legal liability and in opportunities to stick it to their enemies as long as the enemies were sufficiently low in rank. "legal liability": if you beat someone up in Medieval Europe, the big danger is not the authorities' sentencing you to jail, it was getting sued by your victim. England before 1780 or so was organized for the benefit of the artistocracy (barons and higher ranks). You can see just from the fact that constables were not paid a salary that they probably were a net harm (more of a menace than a help) to the common person, but they were a net benefit to the aristocracy because they generally kept commerce humming along at an faster rate than it would have without the constables and because any constable that messed with an aristocrat would be harshly punished. (The aristocrats specialized in military violence, but it was tedious for them to moderate disputes between commoners, so they farmed some of that work out the the constables, who of course were commoners.) When historians say the world's first police force started in England in 1810 or whatever year it was, they mean the first force with a monopoly on violence that was a net benefit to the every class of society including the commoners.
clbrmbr 2y ago
Appreciated. Could be a fascinating read, how societies through history have maintained internal order with various approaches to security. Did Rome have police? What about the Venetians or 16th-18th century europe? Any reading recommendation? Also, I’m now curious what a the future of homeland security could look like. Is anyone writing rationally about this?
- yareal 2y ago
  Rome had a few different approaches, the Vigiles mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Several countries had armies enforce legal codes. Some places had night watches run by their local communities. Some had night watches you could pay to avoid participating in. It was considered quite unpleasant and low class to perform a night watch, so the people paid to do it were often those who could not otherwise find work or found it difficult to work elsewhere. In some societies you could seek justice via a duel, essentially calling out the criminal and relying on social pressure to see the duel adhered to. In England there's a system of tithings, shires and shire reeves, individuals who were kept employed and told to keep the peace. The shire reeves could muster people to enforce the law, temporarily. In the 1600s-1800s the monarchs in various countries instituted police forces, but they were typically plainclothes or carried only a symbol of office. (E.g. a badge) These police were closer to what we expect police to be in the modern era, but were not typically or consistently in the same visible, standard uniform. (Though they may have carried, e.g. a sword that might mark them out.) The U.S. also had other police systems, including slave patrols, essentially self formed posses that would ride down escaped slaves. In the 1800s, police forces in England thought, "you know what would deter crime? Visible police!" And they began to standardize uniforms with the intent to prevent crime, rather than react to crime. Prior to this moment, policing was typically reactionary -- an aggrieved party seeking justice. The innovation was that if people saw a neighborhood patrolled by uniformed police, they might believe that area was safer and criminals might go elsewhere. Around the 1860s, this idea really took off, and you see many places copying it. I'm on my phone, I'll dig for sources later.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > Several countries had armies enforce legal codes. We do that now. The division of the army responsible for that is called "the police".
edflsafoiewq 2y ago
Prior to uniformed police, law enforcement was a largely private matter, and private "thief-takers" were enlisted to apprehend criminals. My understanding is modern state-run police forces developed in response to public anger over misconduct and corruption in the thief-takers, such as the Macdaniel affair. Particularly they were infamous for playing "both sides" by taking money from a victim to arrest a thief, then taking money from the thief not to arrest them.
magnetowasright 2y ago
Beautifully said. Your comment about slogans reminds me of the 'thin blue line between anarchy and order' slogan the police themselves use which, to me, is a bare-faced admission of existing to protect the property and interests of the wealthy by suppressing the rest of us. I've never quite understood why that slogan became so popular.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Because most people don't equate "order" with "oppression by the wealthy", they understand it to mean "the stability that allows me to live my life without fear", which is a pretty unambiguously good thing by most people's measurement. We can argue about whether the police deliver what the slogan offers, but your inability to understand why the slogan is popular stems from your very weird take on its meaning.
  - magnetowasright 2y ago
    I don't understand how it's a 'very weird take' on its meaning. Is it any weirder than people finding comfort in it? It's just hilarious (and confusing) to me that it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required. At all. Other such slogans are usually a bit more obtuse and harder to challenge than 'yeah, that is exactly correct, and it horrifies me', hence the confusion. I suppose it is a very effective thought terminating cliche.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > Also an anarchist! From your other comment. This is the only way in which that slogan can be interpreted to mean anything negative—if you're one of the very small number of people who believe anarchy to have positive connotations. > it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required It's not a leap of logic, it's a leap of semantics. For the vast majority of English speakers "order" has positive connotations and "anarchy" has negative connotations. For you it's the opposite. Given that, it's not surprising that you interpret it the opposite way as most people, but it's weird that you have so little understanding of the rest of the Anglosphere that you don't realize that you're the odd one out.
Terr_ 2y ago
Now I'm wondering about analogies to useful-but-dangerous technologies, where "why do you worry so much about the police" is a bit like "why do you worry so much about butane lighters and cans of gasoline."