Police
What are they for?
Washington Post published an opinion piece about the police response when a gunman invaded an elementary school in Uvalde Texas. Here's a link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/25/uvalde-report-police-violence-prevention/
The article talked about how 376 police from many police departments waited for over an hour before confronting the gunman even while hearing gunshots and screams from children.
There were so many cops that there was no chain of command and nobody could take initiative.
The theme of the article is that the purpose of police is violence prevention.
This is plainly untrue. In the Uvalde case, most of the people were killed before the police arrived and they were on the scene in 3 minutes. They could not have prevented those deaths. They could only respond to the situation. And they plainly were unprepared for it and more kids were shot.
One of the first people on the scene was the school district police chief. School district police chief? I can remember where that came from, (IIRC) it was a response to mass shooters in schools and the local police were already stretched thin and couldn't post officers in schools. People were indulging in the "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" myth. The fact of the matter is that in a nation awash in guns one of the obvious ways of reducing gun violence is to reduce the number of guns.
I think that a lot of the outrage at the police inaction in that hour has to do with that myth. They were there!!! They had guns!!! They were good guys!!! Bingo - another myth bites the dust.
(aside: The fact of the matter is that in a nation awash in guns one of the obvious ways of reducing gun violence is to reduce the number of guns. But that's another topic.)
What strikes me though is this idea in the article: "the purpose of police is to prevent violence." It brings to mind - well - what is the purpose of police in a democratic society? As the article mentions, as other social networks collapse the police are called on to do more and more things and this obscures their purpose. That purpose is hiding in plain sight: the police are armed agents of the state who can speak with the authority of the state, to normal citizens and the citizen can be compelled to oblige.
A primary use is to enforce certain laws. Another use is to investigate crime. Another is to apprehend criminals.
And, truth be told, often the police are used to protect the interests of the rich against the poor.
Twenty three agencies responded to the school at Uvalde. Twenty three!!! How could there be so many police agencies in a small town in Texas? I'm seeing the beginnings of that fracturing here in Vancouver. We have transit police and city police and Mounties and border police and I don't know what all else.
I speculate a bit here, but I expect that the city police and Mounties are very expensive. They need training in everything from riot control to the law. I imagine that transit police are less expensive with more specialized duties. But I also imagine that the transit authorities wanted a police force more directly responsive to them than the city police were since the city police are a whole other organization.
The police are force oriented. They can force people to do things under threat of harm. They can shoot you or beat you up or arrest you. This is all "negative" reinforcement. BF Skinner showed years ago that positive reinforcement is a more powerful motivator than negative reinforcement. But the practitioner needs a completely different mindset (and expensive training) than the negative reinforcement person needs.
My neighborhood has a lot of people who are not sane and are not happy. I see people howling almost every day: I mean walking through a crowd yelling and screaming at nobody in particular. They are left alone and nobody get's hurt but I feel my stress level rise when they are near and I'm sure everyone else does too. And what are the police to do? If they come along then that in itself might provoke the person in trouble.
And yet, I wonder, is that the best we can do for that person?
Maybe it is. There is lots about these people and their support network that I don't know - but these people seem fed and fit so there is some sort of support there. They aren't like the homeless ones crowding the sidewalk outside the soup kitchen.
I'm encountering the idea that a lot of tiny police forces are counter productive. They don't communicate well with each other and get into turf wars. But maybe a we could have a variety of national police forces that do specialized tasks.
For instance, rather than local police enforcing traffic laws there could be a national traffic police body whose members get specialized training. And we can reconsider the things that are illegal and the laws we ask the police to enforce. How many 'no-knock' drug raids have had fatal results in the past few years with no drugs found? There must be a better way to handle that.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.