If you want law enforcement to deal with petty crimes, you're going to have to contend with the externalities of cops operating anywhere. How many bystanders and innocent people reported by paranoid suburbanites are you willing to see injured or killed to protect that deodorant shelf?
Just because the original policing tactic that spawned this thread is abhorrent doesn't mean we can't discuss other possibilities here.
More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.
Given the shortage of cops, I am not sure there is the appetite for this. Politically, cops shaking down businesses people associate with trouble seems more palatable than exacerbating the police shortage.
I'm for this. I think it would get the same pushback that most good ideas for policing routinely gets: They'll say it might make cops timid. As if they're already too timid.
My crazy ideas to stop this and violence/law-breaking in general. This should cause a huge reduction in these issues we claim we're having.
1. Body cams mandatory for all police inside & outside of the station, and they stay on 100% of the time and batteries should last the whole shift. No ifs/buts/maybes. If the need arises, bathroom breaks can be edited out after the fact.
2. National ID card, in all states and mandatory for everyone over 13/16. Put all biometric, facial and possibly DNA data on file, encrypted and only available for searches. Be creative.
3. Remove the need to arrest people for any non-violent crimes. People are positively ID'd via some tech (insert something wild here if you want). Cop files a report, includes evidence of positive ID, person needs to appear in court as they will be notified by SMS/Email/letter/lawyer-visit because that stuff should all be on-file and up to date. Send them warnings if they don't appear in court, meanwhile block their access to everything like cell-phones, bank accounts, etc. Start pro-actively messaging their family, or them, and let them know about the additional time/fines they are racking up by missing court dates. 3.a) Assume they're guilty if they don't show up for court and don't have a valid reason.
4. Disallow police from forcibly cuffing people for arrest. Procedure should be to throw two pairs of cuffs at the person while they're being pointed at with gun/taser, and they have to put it on themselves. Procedure allows for x minutes of that, then by default they have to taze this individual into submission and just arrest them. Once they're cuffed, just carry them in a car/van, or wait for support.
5. Punishment for disobeying orders by a policeman to do the above.
6. Very strict guidelines and sets of laws being broken that justify physical arrest. The default should be to just tag the person and tell them to appear in court. If it's a grey-area, just block their cellphone, bank-accounts, cards, etc.
7. Track all cell-phone locations, strongly-linked and verified to individual identities, and store permanently. Store it securely and allow court-orders to open for case investigations. Allow anonymized access to information-based researches that are told to investigate crimes. This one alone could solve so many crimes in my view that I am saddened to no end that people prevent it from happening safely at the recurring expense of innocent lives.
One could go on and on. But guaranteed the above sets of actions/laws are very unpalatable for the majority of people, and it would cause "human rights lawyers" to salivate at the potential for litigation and for "human rights activists" to salivate in protestual anger.
Currently the issue is that it is a logistical nghtmare die to how large police forces work. Unfortunately we are on the outside so our suggestions mostly fall on deaf ears at management level :(
I would also like to see either a narrowing of the scope of the kinds of things the police are expected to handle or a broadening of the kinds of professionals employed as police.
There are plenty of calls where a mental health professional should either handle the situation entirely or at least be the one calling the shots.
My condolences. I have such aversion to Police types and I wish there was more local civilian control over police departments. If there is enough support here we should seriously consider what we can do to deter poor police behavior.
No one seems to understand this. They lament their stuff getting stolen and in the same day plan their next anti-police protest.
I personally believe the police have totally forgotten their mandate. They’ve become so focused on the big fish, they’ve lost all appetite for anything that doesn’t have the potential to lead to a big press conference.
I want every single little crime investigated like NCIS, not because I think it will lead to less crime (I know the jury goes back and forth on this one), but because I think people don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods anymore, they constantly feel like their neighbors are gonna steal from them and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If instead cops started taking all this stuff seriously, and the courts had a better way to handle it, people would be happier and feel less antagonistic against those they perceive as other (white, black, etc)
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