I don’t think the solution is to disarm the police. The reality is that it is facing an armed and rather violent population. The problem is rather that they behave like a bunch of trigger happy cowboys. The solution is rather better training, a change of culture and real accountability in the case of unlawful shootings.

Even in countries where the police doesn’t carry guns, the equivalent of the Swat will always do.

But Swat teams must be aware that Swatting is a thing, and should have no expectation when they break into a house to find fully rational people. It’s not a crime to be drunk at home, or to have taken sleeping pills and to not respond quickly to a bunch of guys shouting orders at you in the middle of the night.

I think that disarming the police would improve things even with no changes to civilian gun laws in the US. The US obviously has a severe civilian gun problem, but things are nowhere near bad enough to justify the trigger-happy attitude of police. The danger police face is drastically overblown, and homicide is a tiny portion of the danger police face on the job (more police deaths are from traffic accidents, health conditions, and suicide).

Policing is also becoming a lot safer, despite the rhetoric that things are getting worse and police are increasingly “under attack.”

For starters, we could reinforce the Batson rule [1] and mandate that any jury selected must mirror the racial and sexual makeup of its community, +/- 10%.

Having to prove racial discrimination in jury selection is an absurdly high bar, and usually impossible.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky

I understand what you're going for, but I think this idea would just reinforce the imaginary walls we use to group humans. The underlying idea is that X-people understand X-people, where X is some arbitrary group, but non-X-people lack the perspective they need. For example, we consider people with black skin to be a group, but not people with blue eyes, or people who can curl their tongues. Let's just work our way toward thinking people are just people instead.

The problem is that juries without a minority on them absolutely find minorities guilty at a higher rate than when one or more minorities are on the jury.

As the thread below noted, it's not fair to have historical conditions that produced winners (white men, countries with colonies, etc) and then make things more equal by saying "That's all over" and failing to recognize the results of previous injustice that are still embedded in our lives.

I could have offered other suggestions. I specifically said 'juries that roughly reflect their communities in racial and sexual senses'. I don't feel that's an unreasonably burdensome ask in pursuit of Justice.

http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D13...

Sure, but let’s not pretend the last millennium didn’t happen or shape the present in critical ways.

How is that in any way relevant? How does that at all mean that black people better understand black people, or justify explicitly selecting a jury on the basis of something arbitrary like skin color?

So build a post-racial world by building up racial barriers and continuing the "other"-ness of people with different skin colors? I'm not trying to be a dick or strawman you, that's the only thing I can get from this comment.

Build a post racial world by acknowledging that racial barriers exist independently of your thoughts, seek to weaken them and repair ongoing harm. The most powerful group playing pretend isn’t going to fix a damned thing. Trying to pretend that everything is better now... please explain how you see this working?

Edit: Or just downvote and move on, that says something too.

Note about HN down voting: when replying to a post, the parent poster cannot down vote you. The down vote you were awarded came from another commenter.

At this time, this comment has positive karma. At any rate, complaining about down voting distracts from your very good point.

Fair enough, I’ll keep that in mind going forward. Thanks for taking the time to teach.

You might have difficulty empaneling juries if this were a requirement. What makes a good jury goes well beyond racial or sexual makeup. Also, in many places the jury pools don't match the community at large. This approach would therefore have the effect of jeopardizing the right to jury trial without really alleviating injustice.

A more fruitful approach might be to try to make the pools more balanced. Getting more community participation in the justice system seems like a very good thing at multiple levels.

I think we'd do better to, at least at first, start solving some of the reasons why our jury demographics are so skewed. Stronger protections for workers that need time off (there should be no work hardship exemption and employers should be forced to give jurors full pay for the duration of the trial) would be a good start to not discriminate against poorer people who can't take off from work without struggling financially or getting fired. Also, criminal convictions shouldn't disqualify someone after they've served their sentences. The current system disqualifies a disproportionate number of minorities and that leaves predominantly-white juries to convict even more minorities...a self-reinforcing cycle. Also, the SCotUS needs to recommit to the Batson doctrine to prevent prosecutors from dismissing minority jurors based on race.

A right to a trial by a racially biased jury isn't much of a right in my opinion.

I'm all for throwing people in jail if they don't want to serve on a jury.

Fair enough.. It is definitely an idea with a lot of merit. I guess I have three questions:

1) Do you think this is politically feasible? Being seen as "tough on crime" is almost never a bad thing in any kind of election, and what you are proposing feels decidedly the opposite of that. Further, even if you aren't disarming existing officers, they have unions and a fair amount of political clout.

2) Do you think you could find enough people willing to do this job unarmed?

3) I definitely see how this would lead to less escalation in a lot of situations (escalation seems to be the default behavior of police now), and it could prevent some of the high-profile police shootings that have been in the news lately. But it also seems like a high percentage of them (the one in this SWATting situation, Michael Brown, the 6 year old in Bexar County last week, Aiyana Jones) would be handled by armed officers anyway, so that only solves part of the problem, right?

I want to be clear that this idea doesn't have much to do with SWATting. What makes SWATting so evil is that it's deliberately designed to place officers in the scenario most demanding of readily deployed lethal force.

Having said that:

1. Yes, I think it's feasible. Not in DFW or Maricopa County, but test cases in places like Madison and Columbus? Remember: big cities already have people like this --- parking enforcement, traffic direction --- and most cities are facing pension problems due to the assault forces they already have.

2. Clearly we can find the people to do the work. TSA staffs unarmed people at checkpoints designed to catch armed terrorists. Big cities already put unarmed officials in adversarial contact with citizens.

3. It only solves part of the problem. But I'd hope that by gradually relegating assault officers only to those scenarios where escalation was known to be required going in, we'd eliminate the kinds of snap-judgement mistakes police make in routine confrontations that end up with firearms deployed.

Those are all good points.

I guess the one part I remain a skeptic about is whether or not people are going to be ok with it, much less demand it. It feels like the underlying attitude towards policing is the sticking point - the same attitude that lets police literally get away with murder would also prevent people from demanding unarmed police.

Perhaps I overestimate how pervasive this attitude is, especially in big cities. It is definitely something I'd love to be wrong about.

Commenting on 2, yes, it shouldn't be a problem at all. In the UK, police don't carry lethal weapons routinely. In fact, knowing a few of them who are active and a couple retired, even the use of a baton is usually not required at any point in their careers. They rely more on teamwork and communication than physical weapons. I also know an officer from an armed unit. He says he's bored 99% of the time as he's only of use to a tiny amount of call outs and has never had to fire his weapon while on duty in the public.

As to 3, the UK police do escalate sometimes, and I think some of their behavior is disgusting, but at least it results in non-lethal harm (and hopefully disciplinary action) when there are no armed units involved.

The UK doesn't allow anyone to buy a gun, and certainly not a military grade assault rifle.

> would be handled by armed officers anyway

Exactly. Expecting police to go to an active shooter / hostage situation unarmed seems rather flawed. That said, I think many other situations police officers are in don’t warrant being armed.

"We" could do it. But "we" - as in, US population - don't want to. As to why, it remains a mystery to me, but this is clearly the case.

I think that the majority of the population considers that these types of events are very unlikely to impact their own lives and they therefore don't give it much thought. Maybe if a law was passed that required all adults in the county to serve 16 hours of jury duty for every instance of a police shooting and killing an unarmed person then that would be enough of an inconvenience to force a change in attitude.

That seems unlikely. The police have strong political support; they would have to accept it.

I think you're missing the point of the concept. Nothing changes for the police.

I think the police are smart enough to realize that Police 2.0, whatever you call them, are intended to replace them.