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‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

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Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#31

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #30
Yetanfou wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to treat violent crime? What are you going to do about street gangs? No amount of social work, hand-holding or counselling will get at those.

This is not entirely true. Why do people join gangs in the first place? They feel outcast, need money, feel pressured, etc. So let’s tackle those problems proactively. Invest in neighborhoods. Make sure there is economic opportunity. Provide ways for people to feel accepted by their community. The point is to try to stop these things before they become problems, rather than only deal with them punitively under threat…

Curiously, those efforts sound very like recruiting for a gang. You'd have to beat them at their own game. As they add the threat of violence, it could be a hard sell.

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#32

Post by jakelazaroff »

andi999 wrote: post #26
jakelazaroff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to close it and not replace it. The only tool in the police toolbox is violence; despite this, they have become catchall first responders despite being wholly unequipped for most scenarios. We should treat drug use and mental illness as public health issues. We should treat homelessness by housing and feeding those who want help. We should treat domestic disputes with social work. These are complex issues…

Let me get this right: so no police in that city? Seriously?

Yes. Why is this crazy? There’s no natural law that says a society needs a police force as it exists today. Police in the US have only existed since the mid–1800s. In the South, they rose from the ashes of runaway slave patrols; in the North, they were created to quell labor organizing [0]. So the issue is that police as we know it today is intrinsically racist and classist, and we need to entirely reimagine it.

[0] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#33

Post by jakelazaroff »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #31
jakelazaroff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not entirely true. Why do people join gangs in the first place? They feel outcast, need money, feel pressured, etc. So let’s tackle those problems proactively. Invest in neighborhoods. Make sure there is economic opportunity. Provide ways for people to feel accepted by their community. The point is to try to stop these things before they become problems, rather than only deal with them punitively under threat…

Curiously, those efforts sound very like recruiting for a gang. You'd have to beat them at their own game. As they add the threat of violence, it could be a hard sell.

Providing community services and job opportunities sounds like recruiting for a gang?

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#34

Post by andi999 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #32
andi999 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me get this right: so no police in that city? Seriously?

Yes. Why is this crazy? There’s no natural law that says a society needs a police force as it exists today. Police in the US have only existed since the mid–1800s. In the South, they rose from the ashes of runaway slave patrols; in the North, they were created to quell labor organizing [0]. So the issue is that police as we know it today is intrinsically racist and classist, and we need to entirely reimagine it. [0]…

This is just a perspective from a foreign country. My worry would be would I trust armed neighbourhood vigilantes more than the regular police. I dont know enough about the US, but do you think that would be better?

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#35

Post by Yetanfou »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #30
Yetanfou wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to treat violent crime? What are you going to do about street gangs? No amount of social work, hand-holding or counselling will get at those.

This is not entirely true. Why do people join gangs in the first place? They feel outcast, need money, feel pressured, etc. So let’s tackle those problems proactively. Invest in neighborhoods. Make sure there is economic opportunity. Provide ways for people to feel accepted by their community. The point is to try to stop these things before they become problems, rather than only deal with them punitively under threat…

They've tried these things here in Sweden, for decades. It has not worked, the opposite is true. Economic opportunity sounds nice but the 'economic opportunity' of robbing someone who made use of that economic opportunity and in such a way get the spoils without doing the toils keeps on winning out for some, no matter how many programs are created, how many youth centres are built, no matter how many integration programs are started. As to whether it is the lure of easy money, the false glamour of the bling-bling lifestyle as glorified by a significant part of rap and hip-hop artists, the 'rebel against the prevailing culture' attitude which permeates large areas or some other factor, something keeps on pulling increasing numbers of young boys and girls into crime.

Ineffective policing may be part of it, an alarmingly low number of violent crimes is solved here - ~10% of murders and violent crimes (the categories are combined in the report), %19% of sex crime including rape, ~6% of robberies and theft going all the way down to ~0.5% of bicycle theft cases [1,2]. The trend for the percentage of solved crimes has been going down for a very long time now so things are not improving, at all.

[1] https://www.bra.se/download/18.7d27ebd916ea64de5304de44/1585...

[2] https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1...

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#36

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #33
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously, those efforts sound very like recruiting for a gang. You'd have to beat them at their own game. As they add the threat of violence, it could be a hard sell.

Providing community services and job opportunities sounds like recruiting for a gang?

"Accepted by their community", where the community is the gang. Economic opportunity - gangs can provide that too.

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#37

Post by panarky »

Yetanfou wrote: post #35
jakelazaroff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not entirely true. Why do people join gangs in the first place? They feel outcast, need money, feel pressured, etc. So let’s tackle those problems proactively. Invest in neighborhoods. Make sure there is economic opportunity. Provide ways for people to feel accepted by their community. The point is to try to stop these things before they become problems, rather than only deal with them punitively under threat…

They've tried these things here in Sweden, for decades. It has not worked, the opposite is true. Economic opportunity sounds nice but the 'economic opportunity' of robbing someone who made use of that economic opportunity and in such a way get the spoils without doing the toils keeps on winning out for some, no matter how many programs are created, how many youth centres are built, no matter how many integration prog…

How does the murder rate in Sweden compare with the United States?

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#38

Post by Yetanfou »

panarky wrote: post #37
Yetanfou wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've tried these things here in Sweden, for decades. It has not worked, the opposite is true. Economic opportunity sounds nice but the 'economic opportunity' of robbing someone who made use of that economic opportunity and in such a way get the spoils without doing the toils keeps on winning out for some, no matter how many programs are created, how many youth centres are built, no matter how many integration prog…

How does the murder rate in Sweden compare with the United States?

At ~1.1 per 100.000 inhabitants it is lower than the USA which lies around ~4.9 per 100.000 (data from BRÅ (Sweden) and FBI (USA) for 2016). Compared to the rest of north-western Europe Sweden lies on the high side, e.g. Norway has less than half of this number, the Netherlands about half, Germany around ⅔, Denmark has a comparable murder rate. The situation in Sweden varies markedly from place to place with Malmö generally lying somewhere at the top (~3.5 murders/100.000). Where most countries in the region have seen a downward trend in the number of people subject to a crime, Sweden and Germany go against the trend with a steadily rising number [1,2], in Sweden this seems to be largely due to the rise in gang-related violence which has also led to a sharp increase in the number of shootings and gun-related homicides [4], hand-grenade attacks [4] and stabbings (on which I do not have separate data other than noticing the number of knife-related crimes in the news steadily increasing). For more info see Wikipedia:Crime in Sweden [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden-crime-1976-2016-ro...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Crime_in...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden

Re: ‘Duty to intervene’: How some US cities are telling cops to police each other

#39

Post by pyuser583 »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #29
pyuser583 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or training police to be social workers? A good friend went through multiple police academies a few years ago. They all had lots of training in “social work” and “community policing” and “root causes of crime”.

Why not just train developers to be designers? Why do all these software product teams hire separate people for thhe two roles? There's tons of classes on design available... It's for the same reason, and based on the basic principles of natural selection and economics. When you have two skills that are orthogonal to each other (make it work; make it pretty), group fitness is improved by separating those roles into d…

Because policing and social work are more like development and systems administrators.

I live in a city that requires police officers to have graduate degrees before they are permanently hired.

Most police don’t have their graduate degrees when initially hired, so they have to go back to school and earn them to get a permanent offer.

Because local universities have great social work departments and law schools (and sub par criminal justice departments), most cops get degrees in law or social work.

The local university had a program that offers both, so many cops do that.

So i can tell you from experience that police officer/lawyer/social worker hybrids are a thing. And it works out very well.

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