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by DanielBMarkham 4326 days ago
The idea is that police want to have a risk-free lifestyle. "Every cop deserves to go home at the end of his shift"

I completely agree with the sentiment, but in reality the police are paid to take risks to ensure public safety. You can't automate your way out of getting to know the corner grocer.

There's also a strong paramilitary nature to police in the U.S. Always has been. Local police departments are full of either former soldiers or guys who wanted to be soldiers but never could pull it off.

Finally, a lot of pundits, politicians, and security folks have been going on and on about how the future is going to be full of poor, angry folks raising hell. This might be true, but it's also a self-fulfilling narrative. The more you escalate the law enforcement side, the more the civilian side will counter-escalate. The trick for LE is to be just bad-ass enough to have Angry Joe Sixpack demonstrating, but not violent (or a victim). Very tough thing to pull off.

Personally? I'm not afraid of escalating police brutality or demonstrations. This tension is natural in a free society. What I'm afraid of is that one side finally figures out how to totally dominate the other side (which I believe has already happened). If the townsfolk get really angry and hit the streets -- only to have the cops flip a switch and make them all go back inside again? Then we're truly hosed.
1 comments
allegory 4326 days ago
It doesn't work like that in the real world. Look at Northern Ireland's history over the last 40 years.

The most powerful people are the people who end up in the newspapers, not introducing kerfews and patrolling the streets tooled up.

Also the post-Katrina mob rule in some areas in the US.

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arethuza 4326 days ago
Northern Ireland eventually worked out reasonably well when we started talking to the "terrorists" and realizing that they represented a minority community who had some pretty legitimate grievances - both sides eventually recognized that fighting was never going to get anywhere.

I'm not sure how relevant the experience of NI is to this situation - but one thing I would note is that the pictures do look alarmingly similar!

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