[ExI] that's why

[Dave Sill]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 11:37 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> There's a basic structural problem with policing, as an institution. It is
> fundamentally the wrong solution for many of the tasks we've handed over to
> it.
>

There's certainly a mismatch between what we want police to do and what
they actually do.


> "Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep
> imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make
> them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence
> workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government
> functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations
> where the average citizen would be arrested.
>

Police need to be more than one-trick ponies: hired thugs that violently
counter every threat, damn the collateral damage. It's not asking too much
that they be able to use violence as a last resort. The presumption of
innocence should apply to dealing with the public.

So when we turn a problem [i.e. homelessness, mental health, narcotics
> abuse, disruptive behavior in schools, etc] over to the police to manage,
> there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they
> are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's
> what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we
> should try to figure out how to not get the police involved."
>

Yeah, in major metropolitan areas we could have separate departments for
all of those things. In the other 98% of the country, the police need to
wear multiple hats--at least as first-responders.

-Dave
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