| Or maybe instead of promoting a class of people to have magical powers of coercion who are jointly above the law we could rely on personal and social accountability. The continued erosion of individual accountability through bureaucracy and institutions has done little more than destroy communities and complicate regular function through a litany of Catch-22 scenarios and provide an illusory backdrop of "security" while promulgating an ideology firmly founded in the broken window fallacy and leveraging policing authority to generate revenue. It should be noted that historically, police did not function as they do now. Beginning in the 1830's and finally reaching saturation in 1880. It was a system meant to subjugate the bottom class that originated in slave recapture. It's not intended for peacekeeping, it's not preserved in our interests. Gary Potter, "The History of Policing in the US"[1]: "In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992)." "More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the “collective good” (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state." Neil Postman, "Technopoly": “Adolf Eichmann becomes the basic model and metaphor for a bureaucrat in the age of Technopoly. When faced with the charge of crimes against humanity, he argued that he had no part in the formulation of Nazi political or sociological theory; he dealt only with the technical problems of moving vast numbers of people from one place to another. Why they were being moved and, especially, what would happen to them when they arrived at their destination were not relevant to his job. Although the jobs of bureaucrats in today's Technopoly have results far less horrific, Eichmann's answer is probably given five thousand times a day in America alone: I have no responsibility for the human consequences of my decisions. I am only responsible for the efficiency of my part of the bureaucracy, which must be maintained at all costs.” [1]:https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-... |