[HarryHirsch]

These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals

What if that was the point? The system is making work to justify its continued existence. The police aren't working for you, they are working for the sheriff, and these interest do not match.

[save_ferris]

Could be. The current fight around felons receiving their voting rights in Florida adds another incentive here: the justice system was/is being used to suppress votes by aggressively penalizing kids to take away their voting rights. You're basically picking who gets to vote at that point.

[non-entity]

This is a sherrif too, so they're elected, not neccesarily by any sort of experience or merit.

Nobody likes to hear it, but I'm willing to bet this person has been in office for a while. Tough on crime is popular among "model citizen" voters even if it utilizes dystopic tactics.

[baq]

what if people who could run against this guy in an election turned out to have high risk pasco profiles?

[pchristensen]

Their grass might be 1/4" too long, or they might not have numbers on their mailbox (examples of justification for police harassment from the article).

[pchristensen]

The article says he was appointed by the governor in 2011, and has been re-elected every time since 2012.

[naringas]

I think about the "war on drugs" with that same pattern.

what if the point was never public health but increasing overall corruption?

they knew prohibitions increase corruption after the alcohol prohibition... so why not?

[djaque]

That was very explicitly the point. We now have top Nixon advisors explaining that they couldn't make hippies or black people illegal, but they could do it by proxy with "the war on drugs" [1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-ant...

[coliveira]

Exactly, it is in the interest of police to create more criminals so they can justify their work. It seems absurd when clearly stated, but that is the end result of what they do.

[pstuart]

Just like the War on Drugs.