In this thread we post our most :LIB: takes, and discuss whether that is the logical end point on a given topic or whether we need to lose that last bit of liberalism.
In this thread we post our most :LIB: takes, and discuss whether that is the logical end point on a given topic or whether we need to lose that last bit of liberalism.
I'll start:
In the most utopian society I can imagine, we will still need professional police. We can get rid of all the economic drivers of crime, we can get rid of all of the bullshit crimes (e.g., decriminalize homelessness, end the War on Drugs), but some people will always end up committing real crimes. Some people will still murder, some people will still rape, some people will still start fights, some people will still destroy, damage, or steal personal property just to be an asshole. We will still need someone to investigate those crimes, and they will need to be professional (as opposed to some sort of part-time, volunteer, community-based quasi-police). Obviously these utopian police will bear little resemblance to the cops of today, but they will still be there.
Modern-day cops can still eat shit, and the police as an institution is so awful today that no current cop should be allowed to work as a cop going forward.
I think maybe the most important progression to make is a response to how police are a catch-all service with a gun. In other words, violence workers whom we also count on to do nonviolent work.
Having a team of social/mental assistance workers to respond to most cases would stop cops from having to wear both the gunman hat and the mediator hat. Then if there's a situation they can't handle, they can pull out and call in the violence workers.
By separating the violent and nonviolent functions, people will better be able to see modern-day police for what they are, and minimize their role. People dig in their heels to defend the police largely because they believe in the effectiveness of the nonviolent functions. Once you split the police into violence workers (current forces) and care workers, it becomes politically much easier to cut funding from the former and shift it to the latter, which probably wouldn't be populated with authoritarian types.
We can train everyone to do police like duties and take on police like duties on a rota, meaning that all people will cycle through police like duties and remove the need for a professional police force. We may still have detectives and investigators, but they will be separate from the day to day duties of community defense and safety.
That seems reasonable, and those detectives and investigators are what I meant by "professional police."
It's important to remember that police are actually not very good at investigating crime - for the largest Australian state of New South Wales, only about a third of reported sexual assaults, thefts, robberies etc. are marked by police as finalised (i.e. solved with or without prosecution) by 30 days - 30 days being the measure because anything beyond that tends to introduce things like police attributing every burglary in the last 6 months to someone and marked them as solved.
There is also no reason why you'd need to combine the prevention, intervention (often violence but many ambulance staff have to detain people without utilising much violence), crime investigation and prosecution and doing so introduces strong conflicts of interest.
I wonder if police are actually bad at solving crimes, as in unable to do it, or if it's more apathy/poor use of resources. In the U.S., for instance, there's an enormous backlog of rape kits waiting to be processed. Not processing those rape kits isn't the police being unable to solve crimes so much as it's apathy or poor use of resources. As with a lot of other problems, we have the tools to do better, we're just choosing not to.
Absolutely.
There's certainly apathy and lack of effective use of resources, but even if those were solved you'll still have issues relating to who the investigating police are and how they are trained - i.e. largely not drawn from the community they investigate, a previous role arresting and detaining primarily poor and nonwhite people, racist and sexist views, training in dodgy police forensics and interview techniques that are designed to extract confessions - in addition to training in practices that are designed to obtain pleas of guilty in exchange for a reduction in the burden on defendants where police are also the prosecuting agency.
Oh yeah, no current cops should keep their jobs. My thinking is more that the statistics around solving crimes might not be reflective of our maximum capacity to solve crimes.