[green_man_lives]

> I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm.

This is some Hammurabi thinking. It's not about protecting "Osama Bin Laden" (although justice should be blind and not paywalled), it's about ensuring that our system produces fewer Osama Bin Ladens.

To steelman your point, let's say that police are 100% necessary in society and the more police the better. In this universe the police never cause collateral damage and are always 100% in the right.

In this world, even if you lock up every "Osama Bin Laden" you are still putting the police officers in harm's way. They are using their bodies to ensure that the Bob Lee's of the world can keep on innovating.

To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means. If society is a machine that produces Osama Bin Laden's as a byproduct, isn't it in everyone's best interest to reduce the rate at which we produce Osama Bin Laden's? Especially the police who put themselves in harms way?

[all2]

> To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means.

Conversely, increase the number of officers. This will cause the incidence per officer to fall.

There are places in the world that have done this. For example [0], where the populous has been deputized in order to quell violent crime.

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/04/03/ecuadors-...

[green_man_lives]

I don't think you get the point.

[uejfiweun]

I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line. You see this in places like Singapore that are extremely safe yet have much lower incarceration rates. As for the police obviously it’s unfortunate that they get put in harms way, but it is kinda what they signed up for, to an extent. An over focus on cop safety leads to situations like Uvalde.

If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

[green_man_lives]

> I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line.

See my point #5 in the parent comment:

> This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state.

When you give the police overwhelming power to punish dangerous people, you have created a new class of very dangerous people. In my theoretical universe where cops are infallible this is not a problem, in the real world if you give an institution that much power what do you think would happen when they "solve crime". Would they willingly relinquish that power? Or would they aim to extend their influence onto larger swaths of the population with more draconian laws?

> If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

I think you're missing the point. I am not saying there should be zero accountability for criminals and zero police. I am saying we should also attack the root causes of criminality instead of just using punitive measures. Right now we are treating the symptom and not the cause.

[artsytrashcan]

Singapore has perhaps the world's most robust and citizen-accessible public housing system, which enforces not only class but also racial diversity in placement.

>I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes.

Controversial take incoming, brace yourself. Bin Laden was the son of a construction magnate who was radicalized in a war where he fought for the US by proxy, only to be abandoned (except where Western meddling was advantageous for Western interests) when it was over. His picture is the illustration for the proverb, "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."

Bob Lee sounds like a great guy. He is among a class who benefited enormously from federal and state policy that subsidized suburban communities at the expense of cities, arguably in a way that shifted, rather than eliminated, the social ills that are endemic to most human societies above a certain population threshold. The policies that gave Bob Lee et al. their advantageous start created the dangerous, crazy people, when different policies might have diluted the circumstances which shaped them to the point where they might have been treatable, without necessarily cramping Mr. Lee's style.

There but for the grace of housing/economic policy advantageous to my intersectional identity go I.

(Note that we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.)

[confidantlake]

The countries with the most severe punishment tend to be the most dangerous countries. Singapore is a bit of an outlier. Most safe countries like Korea, Japan and Norway are not known for brutal punishments.