[parineum]

>cops still don't actually do anything in the realm of preventing the harm rather than just cleaning it up.

That's their job. "Preventing harm" is acting _before_ crime happens. It's politicians and citizens job to prevent harm.

[couchand]

You seem to see through the deception, but most don't. The whole policing house of cards is built on the idea that they "stop crime". They don't really, as you point out. In general, they do a pretty terrible job cleaning up after crimes occur, too.

The one thing that police consistently and effectively do is themselves act as a criminal organization outside the law. They cause destruction and mayhem regularly on very flimsy premises and see little to no oversight for it.

[datameta]

Directly from the NYPD website:

" Values

In partnership with the community, we pledge to:

Protect the lives and property of our fellow citizens and impartially enforce the law.

Fight crime, both by preventing it and aggressively pursuing violators of the law.

Maintain a higher standard of integrity than is generally expected of others because so much is expected of us.

Value human life, respect the dignity of each individual and render our services with courtesy and civility."

It occurs to me that the concept of fighting crime is as much of a misnomer as the war on drugs, providing the wrong primer for the mind. One cannot fight a concept or object. I think it's important to retire the phrase. They see everything they do as fighting, they're trained to see threats, and so threats they will see regardless. (Just the wrong ones)

[UncleMeat]

Great. So cops are not actually achieving any goal of keeping people safe, since they fundamentally do not prevent harm.

[parineum]

They "protect and serve" by attempting to intervene in crime in progress if possible but mostly trying to find the people who've committed crimes so they can be held accountable by the state and it's citizens (jury of your peers and all that).

At least ideally. It doesn't always work that way but it's a misnomer to blame the police for a neighborhood being unsafe and you're going to be disappointed if you expect them to.

[ryandrake]

They also get called to many non-crimes and to other situations that do not require armed, violent responses.

I think it would be great to set up competition to Police forces: Cities should create and staff an unarmed "Helper Force" who gets deployed to non-emergencies, to help people in distress, investigate "Karen's" complaints of this and that, to defuse mental health episodes (maybe bring a social worker), incidents involving children, rescuing cats out of trees, and so on. Carry on for a year, and then have both the Helper force and the Police force summarize in writing how they benefitted the community over then last 12 months, and have them fight for funding on the basis of that report.

I think taxpayers would decide that they'd rather have the helpers.

[UncleMeat]

If the only thing police did was correctly and safely execute arrest warrants for specific people I think people would be far less critical of them.