51–60 of 505 posts
How much you need the police depends on how much capital you have. If you don’t have any the police don’t do much for you. In a world of increasing inequality fewer people need the police.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you believed such a role was appropriate to establish in society, why on earth would you want the police doing it?
You do need some people to be in charge of violence. If you make that their only job you'll be in a situation of hammers seeing nails wherever they look. You'll be much better off assigning that unavoidable violence duty to people whose main responsibilities and qualifications lie elsewhere.
That depends entirely on how much power you give them, and how much accountability you impose upon their use of it. The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Trying to give them duties that conflict with those objectives is simply always going to fail. Personally I wouldn’t want my children receiving civics instruction from somebody who has to hedge against the possibility that one day they’ll be trying to put them in jail.
To pull from fiction, my idealized vision of the perfect police force would be a “Starfleet”. Someone like Picard who is more than capable of defending themselves and others if it comes to it, but who goes in with phasers on stun, and a primary motivation to diffuse a situation through psychology and diplomacy.
Couldn't you argue that is what motivates a lot of cops to act more violently when they see their fellow officers injured and killed?
One of my current frustrations with American politics is how radical everything has become. The debate is now, either we don't have any police and defund them, or, we allow them to continue being completely unaccountable. Neither of those situations sound ideal. It feels like Europe and other places have a much more reasonable and nuanced view. Police get funded, and well funded, but the job requirements are strict,…
It's pretty clear that police unions allow for a lot of this institutional rot and inability to address abuse. I fear that the left doesn't want to recognize that unions are capable of becoming institutional agents of oppression and injustice. Yet reforming public sector unions is perhaps one of the most practical and effective steps to correcting the malfeasance of police as we know them today without fundamentally changing how they operate.
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…
> If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP. Or you lost a sports game, let's not pretend the bar for rioting is very high... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_rio... EDIT: Sorry, I missed "you just won a sports game" as a reason for rioting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_riot > After the Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins in the first round of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoff…
But it's also a separate issue entirely. It's like seeing a scatter plot and being like but what about this point right here ---------------------------->
In Eugene, OR, where I live, there is a program called CAHOOTS ("Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets") which is more or less the mental health equivalent of an ambulance. They're dispatched by non-emergency operators to situations such as mental health crises, public intoxication, and welfare checks- things where police officers would be asked to serve as a social worker, as the article puts it. My understan…
I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…
This framing of the police seems very strange to my Canadian sensibilities. I'm curious about whether Americans largely agree with this description.
But maybe that's just me, as a Canadian, with unrealistic beliefs that the police are on my side.
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…
Civil disobedience is encouraging the state to use violence against you, but not all protest is civil disobedience. Getting large groups of people together to chant in common cause can easily be just about showing solidarity around a common cause. People out in the streets today aren't trying to get police to abuse them. They're trying to show the world this is something they care about.
Why beat the crap out of someone for saying I believe x? It's antithetical to the American spirit, I think.
The American police force seems to be a catch-all for the vast amount of social problems caused by unequal access to healthcare, limited social security and a host of puritan laws that ignore peoples needs. Making drug users criminals despite the massive numbers of them drives up prices and decreases access causing large amounts of crime out of social problems caused by missing social systems. The drug war has also c…
I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…
This framing of the police seems very strange to my Canadian sensibilities. I'm curious about whether Americans largely agree with this description.