I’m sure it’s more complex than this, but why isn’t the federal government jumping at this as a massive employment opportunity. You could train a wide variety of people for these jobs, and the way the jobs could be structured, support roles might not require college degrees in a lot of cases. Award grants or conditional extra city funding to cities that grow the program and make it work. People get to feel good about giving back, the country can feel good about reducing needless arrests, we can make bigger strides to solving homelessness, we can make good on various social justice reform items not only without necessarily massively defunding police, but also by freeing police up to actually do the much harder job they are trained for and stop treating police like they need to also be an arbitrary mental health issue handler.

There’s a lot of complexity for sure. This idea will hit a lot of roadblocks. But it seems like the potential upside across a dozen or so dimensions is super high.

Of course this is the same country that shuts out widespread nuclear power, so maybe this is the last we’ll hear about it when some police equipment manufacturer starts lobbying against it the minute one of these workers is involved in a violent encounter or significant arrest or something.