Policing
This would be nice if it were true, except it's not. Police literally do view the people with whom they are interacting as the enemy.
We are suffering from a history of decades and decades at this point of "warrior cop" training that has poisoned the police force mindset from top to bottom all across this country.
Policing
@deviantollam I mostly support the idea of shifting some traditional "law enforcement" duties like traffic enforcement onto unarmed, civilian agencies, and reserve the police for situations that truly require a forceful response. (And just make some things like drugs legal.) However, I do worry that if the cops only get called in for violent situations they'll start viewing every call as a battleground. Maybe keeping some "customer service" type work would be good for the officers.
re: Policing
@thoolooexpress @deviantollam But like, they *already* view every call as a battleground, *including* the non-violent ones
policing
@thoolooexpress @deviantollam I frankly do not believe that such a culture shift is possible to begin with. Policing is a fundamentally oppressive institution - its outward behaviour isn't some aberration, but rather the logical outcome of how it is structured as a concept.
People often bring up Europe as an example of how things can be better. And while it is true that things are not *as* bad in many places here as in the US, we still fundamentally have the same problems, just at a smaller and less obvious scale, and there's a constant push for making those problems worse from the "law and order" types.
And that kind of gets at the heart of the issue - policing as an institution is a force multiplier. It allows near-absolute power over other people's lives. It will always, inevitably and unsolvably be a juicy target for bad actors to take control over. It will always, *always* trend towards abuse.
@joepie91 @deviantollam You're not wrong. I guess really what I should've said is that I don't think you can solve the problems in a lot of America's police departments by just limiting how often they have a chance to inflict violence on the public. You still have to get the bad cops out and good ones in, and dramatically change the departments' culture and training programs. I think only deploying police to violent encounters could potentially work against the needed culture shift.