Re:Slack Removed a Blog Post Showing How Police Use Its Tech
by AnthonyMouse on Friday June 05, 2020 @02:59PM
(#23432430)
> What's the alternative though? Pretending that if you needed protection due to crime coming your way/your family's way... you wouldn't call 911?
Have you ever called 911 to summon the police? Do you know anyone who has? It's quite uncommon.
The average police response time is almost 10 minutes. In an emergency situation it might as well be 10 hours. In general by the time they get there, whatever was happening has already happened. Which means you have to be prepared to deal with it on your own anyway.
Most of what the police actually do is not shootouts with bank robbers. It's writing stuff down.
For example, a major function of the police time-wise is vehicle accident reports. You don't need a police officer for that, only any trustworthy official. We could give vehicle accident reports to the fire department and then have more firefighters and fewer police.
We could hire clerks to man a desk who are not police, are not issued weapons and have no authority to cite, arrest or give orders to anyone, give them responsibility for all filing of "police reports" and then have more clerks and fewer police.
We could end the war on drugs and have many fewer police.
By the time you get to the point that the police only investigate murders and such and take everything else away from them, you can get rid of 80% of them and then have 80% less of all the bad stuff associated with whatever percentage of the police are bad cops. We might even do better than that, because when there are fewer of them you can spend more resources vetting each one and pay higher salaries that attract higher quality applicants. Make a police job harder to get, better to have and easier to lose and see what it does to their behavior.
Have you ever called 911 to summon the police? Do you know anyone who has? It's quite uncommon.
The average police response time is almost 10 minutes. In an emergency situation it might as well be 10 hours. In general by the time they get there, whatever was happening has already happened. Which means you have to be prepared to deal with it on your own anyway.
Most of what the police actually do is not shootouts with bank robbers. It's writing stuff down.
For example, a major function of the police time-wise is vehicle accident reports. You don't need a police officer for that, only any trustworthy official. We could give vehicle accident reports to the fire department and then have more firefighters and fewer police.
We could hire clerks to man a desk who are not police, are not issued weapons and have no authority to cite, arrest or give orders to anyone, give them responsibility for all filing of "police reports" and then have more clerks and fewer police.
We could end the war on drugs and have many fewer police.
By the time you get to the point that the police only investigate murders and such and take everything else away from them, you can get rid of 80% of them and then have 80% less of all the bad stuff associated with whatever percentage of the police are bad cops. We might even do better than that, because when there are fewer of them you can spend more resources vetting each one and pay higher salaries that attract higher quality applicants. Make a police job harder to get, better to have and easier to lose and see what it does to their behavior.