[Myce]

I live in a country where most of this is true.

Unfortunately, there are now so many care workers that many people with issues are getting fed up with all the people that come to their house for all kinds of help (think a care worker for finance, one for mental issues,one for physical issues,one to help the person get back to work, one for the kids etc. etc.)

So if there will be a shift from 'police as is', to more like a care worker system, this would be something to consider.

But other than that, it seems to work well. The police is considered your friend. They pretty know each of the people that have issues or who ever committed crime.

They continue to offer help to them,but will make sure they also get off the streets when they become a potential threat.

There continues to be a lot of criticism from certain groups within our country that wants the police act tougher, but I think the majority of people are happy with how the police does it's job here.

[yread]

There is also a wijkagent - "neighborhood cop". Actual policeperson (with gun and all) that has "office hours" when they are walking around the neighborhood talking to people (even just for a chat) at the playgrounds, business owners and so on. People come to them with problems. There is a website where you can look up wijkagent for each neighborhood. Sometimes they're also active on Twitter, FB... Works quite well

[mcv]

It's very important that police is connected to the community they police, and cares about that community. My impression of police in the US is that that is rarely the case in cases where this police brutality occurs.

I'm fairly happy with Dutch police. They're visible and approachable. They're not perfect; there was a case in the 1990s where they cracked down unreasonably hard on a peaceful student protest. And in that case, it turned out that many of those cops were indeed looking forward to a fight, which is a dangerous and harmful attitude. Those instances are fairly rare, though.

[yread]

Yes, no one is perfect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plCdrFYm5b8

[mcv]

Even so, no tear gas, no beatings, and despite the protesters resisting as much as they non-violently can, the police are not using any violence beyond pulling and shoving them into the bus.

I was thinking more of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIwrdriLiZc

(It's surprisingly hard to find anything online about events before 2004. This was all over the news at the time, but now it looks like it never happened. My quality newspaper lacks proper archive functionality for searching more than a year ago. Search engines and Youtube have never heard of this, frequently returning 0 results.)

[devin]

What country do you live in?

[Myce]

The Netherlands. I assume for some more Northern European and Scandinavian countries it's about the same.

[colinhb]

I am an American living in Netherlands, and policing is very different here. Think Dutch police (or at least Amsterdam police) have a much more positive impact on neighborhoods than American police (or DC / San Francisco police). I have seen more mediation and deescalation between neighbors from police in a few years in the Netherlands than decades in America.

This is a tangent, there also seems to be way, way less paperwork in routine police work in the Netherlands than in America.