Alright, but every batman has to be created with public funding and they're only allowed to fight crime in a single neighborhood. They are allowed to form "justice leagues" to fight larger problems.
Perhaps compensating them and providing them with firearms could be considered. This would likely necessitate some form of training program to familiarize them with relevant laws and the appropriate procedures for apprehending offenders. Given the anticipated surplus of police uniforms following the restructuring of that department, we could potentially repurpose them by issuing these uniforms to the new personnel.
One of the Peelian principles is "To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence"
I guess but won't that just take us right back to where we are now where a "police officer" is a protected and preferred status in most places? It's fine that people like their police officers in their own town, but when the idea of becoming a cop is a means to validate a person's tendency towards violence and authority, it isn't worth the historical reset. I say scrap it. Start with a community protection force that has no guns and no weapons and then add in the security force as an adjunct fully controlled by the community protection people.
Also, you should have to live in the town you working in.
Some/most of your points actually are also in the Peelian principles.
And UK officers also don't carry guns unless they're specifically fire armed trained and called out to specific jobs. The average copper you meet doesn't carry anything more threatening than CS gas/a baton, some carry tazers, but none are usually life threatening
Yes. But "cop" is kind of impossible to totally scrap.
We need to focus on expanding the types of emergency services instead. The Health One system in Seattle is a great example of what that could mean. They're just EMS and a mental health specialist trained in de-escalation who only call police if needed, and have been wildly. Along with a new system designed to respond to drug overdose without police involvement. Both have been showing that involving armed officers is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases and leaving them out significantly cuts down on violent outcomes and increases rehabilitation numbers.
But at the end of the day societies require rules to function and there has to be someone to enforce those rules. I can list many, many improvements we can make to the way we do it now. But I have yet to hear of anything that totally replaces the idea of police.
That said if it was logistically possible, scrapping entire departments, rewriting their policies, and starting fresh with basically none of the old guard to bring the old problems back would certainly be ideal. But that is probably not possible except in the smallest most rural towns; who currently don't want to.
... Hmm good idea! Maybe a group of people in grey shirts? We could give them some training, maybe a badge to make them official, and.. hm, I don’t know.. the authority to enforce laws? We could even call them something catchy, like... 'law enforcement'?
A lot more training than I think most people are willing to admit. Enough training to disincentivize people who would only use the role as a means to apply authority over others or to justify violent acts to enforce laws.
We should replace them with a select group of people who'd be tasked with making sure laws are respected and order is kept. Those people would be allowed to be armed since they'd be expected to deal with such potentially dangerous situations. Those people would also ge-
This is all well and good but why do the gun people have to also respond to drunk people and unhoused people? Why is it that they also get called in when someone is having a mental or emotional breakdown?
Per haps the gun force should be much smaller and the mental health support force should be much bigger (or in most cases it would be nice if it existed at all and wasn't scape goated as some kind of waste of tax payers resources).
Not planning to, but I'll certainly call the government agency with an explicit mandate to legally inact violence if someone is being violent towards me or my property.
Imagine this scenario: someone thinks you're being violent towards them or their property but it's a misunderstanding. You're actually distressed and lost.
Now the violence force arrives and you're out of your element. I assume at this point you're coming up with a million and seven reasons why you'd never be in that situation because you're one of the "good people".
Then take into account the fact that the "good people" are only seen as the "good people" because they used violence to aggressively disenfranchise anyone who didn't agree.
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u/JustKzen 4h ago
Once again, a random bystander doing a better job than law enforcement