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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

I've been a victim of both violent crime and property theft. Police did nothing. It was pulling teeth just to get them to write up reports so that I could file insurance claims.

Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.

And cops in our city have criminally generous pensions -- when you count the pension, lots of these high school grads making 100K+/yr. To say nothing of the absurd capital expenditures. So, I'm super okay with shifting resources from PDs to basically any other program. Value per dollar spent is just super low. Probably lower than literally every other item on the budget sheet.

Doesn't have to be a political thing. Hell, prior to 2019, right-leaning libertarians were the only ones who I could find who agreed with me on this. PDs are just a shit use of tax dollars until we figure out how to bust up the unions and reign in the excessive toy purchases.

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With most crime you rarely need someone to show up who is trained to use guns and kill people because any violent threat is long gone.

If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating. Up until that leads to the act of actually arresting someone there's very little need to have people who are trained in the violent use of force involved at all.

And that's before you start asking questions about how our current police force is trained to use violent force and if they could do all that differently or not.

> If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating.

Which is not at all what our hiring standards at police departments select for.

> Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.

Awarding a well-marked group with some measure of public accountability the right to use violent countermeasures for the protection of life and property in a geographic area facilitates commercial trade and societal advancement.

However, the “garbage-in, garbage-out” phenomenon applies to policing, which makes it less of a silver bullet. A certain amount of criticism lobbed at police forces in America can be reduced to hysteria over police being unable to turn lead into gold.

I mean, accountability is severely lacking nearly across the board because the incentives are so messed up. (E.g. internal reviews are just the police governing themselves, and external reviews would be a prosecutor prosecuting the police, but that’s a professional relationship the prosecutor doesn’t want to mess up.)

But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?

I’d also say it works the other way around, where garbage input to the police force will result in garbage policing. And since education and training isn’t that rigorous, it’s hard to correct that.

Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily. Perhaps you could argue whether or not the “hysteria” is justified given the number of times it happens. But the biggest outcries are normally against things you see where police are pretty obviously in the wrong. (Or at the very least, where police were incredibly brutal. Which in my opinion is nearly always wrong.)

> But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?

The point is to preempt a power vacuum threatening social order, e.g. imagine if Japan didn’t have a police force.

> Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily.

I don’t disagree, nor did I claim to. However, I’d be curious to know whether you’d prefer all police be replaced by robots and drones which perfectly upheld the law. For many, that’s an even scarier thought than imperfect, human policing.

No, I wouldn’t want that :)

What I would want is:

- More intensive training and education with less focus on violence.

- Better laws to increase accountability and to reduce conflicts of interest.

- Police or social worker units which don’t need to carry guns. Basically separate dangerous crime from vice or disturbances in terms of enforcement. I fully agree the FBI should have resources to hunt down serial killers. I don’t think we need a similar level of force (guns) for dealing with a drug addict on the street, or a drunk driver.

And other things would be good or better I’m sure! My feeling now is that police are entrenched in their own system of power enough that many types of good changes are unlikely to happen. Why would police want to increase their risk by adding more oversight, for example?

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