[atweiden]

> Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.

Awarding a well-marked group with some measure of public accountability the right to use violent countermeasures for the protection of life and property in a geographic area facilitates commercial trade and societal advancement.

However, the “garbage-in, garbage-out” phenomenon applies to policing, which makes it less of a silver bullet. A certain amount of criticism lobbed at police forces in America can be reduced to hysteria over police being unable to turn lead into gold.

[noahtallen]

I mean, accountability is severely lacking nearly across the board because the incentives are so messed up. (E.g. internal reviews are just the police governing themselves, and external reviews would be a prosecutor prosecuting the police, but that’s a professional relationship the prosecutor doesn’t want to mess up.)

But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?

I’d also say it works the other way around, where garbage input to the police force will result in garbage policing. And since education and training isn’t that rigorous, it’s hard to correct that.

Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily. Perhaps you could argue whether or not the “hysteria” is justified given the number of times it happens. But the biggest outcries are normally against things you see where police are pretty obviously in the wrong. (Or at the very least, where police were incredibly brutal. Which in my opinion is nearly always wrong.)

[atweiden]

> But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?

The point is to preempt a power vacuum threatening social order, e.g. imagine if Japan didn’t have a police force.

> Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily.

I don’t disagree, nor did I claim to. However, I’d be curious to know whether you’d prefer all police be replaced by robots and drones which perfectly upheld the law. For many, that’s an even scarier thought than imperfect, human policing.

[noahtallen]

No, I wouldn’t want that :)

What I would want is:

- More intensive training and education with less focus on violence.

- Better laws to increase accountability and to reduce conflicts of interest.

- Police or social worker units which don’t need to carry guns. Basically separate dangerous crime from vice or disturbances in terms of enforcement. I fully agree the FBI should have resources to hunt down serial killers. I don’t think we need a similar level of force (guns) for dealing with a drug addict on the street, or a drunk driver.

And other things would be good or better I’m sure! My feeling now is that police are entrenched in their own system of power enough that many types of good changes are unlikely to happen. Why would police want to increase their risk by adding more oversight, for example?