[strogonoff]

Looking from the outside, seems like the police system used to work at some point in the past and now it doesn’t. Maybe taxpayers taking the brunt of it in case of police misbehavior is a case of a system “failing loudly”, a useful indicator that the police doesn’t work well and people should elect differently in favor of revamping the police according to current realities.

[filoeleven]

> seems like the police system used to work at some point in the past and now it doesn’t

What decade(s) would you place that time frame in?

[strogonoff]

No idea, presumably it stopped working some time after it was established and before recent years? It must have worked originally.

[filoeleven]

Okay. You mentioned looking from the outside, so I was curious if there was some “golden age” from news reports or our exported entertainment that you had in mind. A lot of domestic folks think that time was the 1950s, and I wondered if that was your impression as well. It was certainly mine until I started looking into things further.

The reality is that the police in the US are here to enforce the social order, not to protect the public.[0] It has always been that way; as the sibling poster said, it’s just more visible now. I think we have the chance to improve policing now because of that visibility.

Edit: I’m adding this paragraph in response to your other comment, which says in part “Police must have satisfied the primary requirements posed by the people at some point in the past, if we are to believe that democracy works at all.” I understand what you’re saying, but we are still struggling to get equal representation up and running here. Democracy may or may not work, but lots of people were excluded from the process until very recently, and there are continuing efforts to keep it that way. So in a very narrow sense, sure, police did what they were designed to, which is to enforce the social order. The social order is messed up, therefore police are too and always have been.

[0] See this Supreme Court case from 2005; a lower court ruling from 1981 says the same thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...

[TedDoesntTalk]

I don’t agree.

I think it was always broken, but it’s only since police body cams and everyone carrying a video camera (10 years, give or take a few years) that problem has been given a voice.

[strogonoff]

Police must have satisfied the primary requirements posed by the people at some point in the past, if we are to believe that democracy works at all. Requirements must have evolved since then, which is to be expected.

Sometimes it feels like the prevailing sentiment is just “police hurts us so we need to create outrage until they remove police and/or give us a better one”, which is understandable but remembering that how police works today is in fact a result of democratic process (and that indeed it works for the taxpayer) might be useful—less “us vs. them” and more “taxpayer today vs. taxpayer of the past”.