The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

A fundamental tenet of the US Constitution is that policing should be hard, lest average citizens lose their rights.

While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.

I invite anyone and everyone to peruse the contents of https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

Things not protected by the constitution:

* Driving a stolen car

* Driving a car used in a recent homicide

Unless we change the law, selective enforcement is the default. Courts have found again and again that cops have effectively no responsibility to even try to do their job. They can enforce what they want, and ignore what they don't.

So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"

When I was younger, in the summer, when I had a (very dark) tan and worked a night job which involved my driving around at odd hours I would get pulled over once or twice each summer for pretty flimsy reasons which equated to me matching the profile of the sort of person the police officer in question felt should be stopped/questioned.

It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.

The arrest/conviction generally follow the pulled over stopped rates. It's pretty hard to arrest/convict people you aren't stopping. These types of biases and stereo types are often pervasive within certain groups of people, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and often the subset of the local community in power. If you've ever been to court (even traffic court) you'll find the word of the officer is given tremendous weight, while the word of the defendant is almost totally marginalized (no matter what your race). Even though you are "presumed innocent", the defendant has a natural incentive to lie and the officer presumably doesn't.

To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.

There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.

I didn't say this was a solution or that the problem has a simple solution, but pretty much any solution needs to start with community involvement and community oversight seems a useful component to consider.

I'm not for “successful policing”: the term is way too ambiguous and I know that many people would have definitions in mind that I would find repugnant.

Virtually everyone is, including those who oversimplify and go too far with words like "abolish". The problem we have right now is that "successful policing" is currently defined in such a way that there's almost zero accountability for those who enforce the law.

With the so-called justice system the US has got -- which is a mixture of inane proceduralism with senseless brutality -- I'm very much not for "successful policing." I would be, as I think that every person in the abstract would be, if there were comprehensive justice reform and tort reform.

Yeah, so you fit in exactly the category I described. Assuming a better system then almost no one would argue against it, but our system is so tragically flawed that many conclude we don't need a justice system at all.

Go get successfully policed and then come back here.

Should they? There's lots of things that are currently crimes that I don't believe should be crimes, so I have no reason to support policing in at least those cases.

Yeah imagine a purely efficient state that actively enforced all written laws. We would need to rescind a lot of them.

Yes, this sounds amazing. Enforce all the laws and rescind the bad ones! There are tons!

Unfortunately we’re not real good at rescinding bad laws, so you just get tyranny (and a lot of mysteriously voided tickets for cops and politicians)

Exactly:

The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.

Policing is enforcement of law, which inherently lags/fails to reflect reality. "100% Successful Policing" would have even larger swaths of the population in prison for use of controlled substances, which includes you if you've ever even TRIED smoking weed.

Sure, if anyone could agree on a definition of success. Police forces don't even obey legislative bodies where their definition of success and the public's definition of success differs.

Things have drifted since Robert Peel defined successful policing as "Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime". Civil forfeiture is a good example that would horrify him.

His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.

Why should I be in favor of 100% successful policing? I don't accept the premise that all de facto law should be in line with de jure law. That sort of society is unprecedented

The one official statement I have ever seen on that was when a new Base Commander was being interviewed and was asked, "Will there be a quota on the number of speeding tickets issued by the Security Police on base?" and his response was, "Absolutely, and it will be 100% --- I expect all instances of speeding and other traffic violations which endanger public safety to caught and ticketed --- such disregard of regulations and safety is incompatible with the standards of the Air Force."

And that's fine (ish) when the centralized authoritarian socialist organization consists solely of members who joined voluntarily.

Maybe there should be less de jure law then...

Successful policing looks like directing funding away from police and towards solutions better tailored to problems they do a poor job of handling.

Perfekt enforcement never existed and our current laws were written for a reality where that was an impossibility. Not considering second order effects is reckless IMHO.

Turns out if you let private company do it, then its totally possible and constitutional.

Just let private companies do the papier bitte I guess, we're half way there.

> I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.

Flock does not force cops to be less arbitrary/selective any more than bodycams do.

If policing was really "successful" there will not be a single person not charged with some crime. So fuck that. There has to be a balance. Lots of laws serve anything but "the people"

Or else!

“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”

“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”

“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”

This is not an issue with bad policing, but bad policy.

If your notion of good/bad policing is predicated on perfect policy, your notion of good/bad policing does not survive contact with the real world.

I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.

You are wrong in your expectation, I really just dream of being able to actually police crime. Which we do horribly.

Why does crime happen?

The policy is: Everyone should be for successful policing.

We just want the enforcement of this policy to be maximally successful! What’s wrong with that :-)