The ‘community patrols’ would very quickly turn into KKK lynch mobs going after anyone that was ‘woke’.
Yeah, ACAB, but the alternative that would happen in most places is pretty bad too. There’s gotta be a 3rd way to keep people safe without using either cops as they exist now or vigilance committees.
I think the 3rd option is just this with licensing.
I don’t expect a system of community policing right now to be good, but let’s start with the idea of cops who are required to live and serve in the same area. No traveling to the next town over to police people.
Next, no qualified immunity. No special exemptions to laws or unique authorization of violence. You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
If you required local protectors to organize within a licensing body that only let people participate in their organization after meeting requirements I think what you’d get would be an improvement on what we have without being totally chaotic and lawless.
Mostly, yeah. But being part of the community also means having potentially the same bigotry as the community. Again: I’m in a very, very white town in the rural south; most of the residents are low-key racist, and some aren’t even low-key about it.
You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
This one I would disagree with. I don’t think that there should be a general right for citizens to arrest people; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t too terribly far from me, and that started as citizens trying to arrest a guy for jogging while being black. (Come to think of it, based off police arrests, doing pretty much anything while being black is an arrestable offense.) I think that powers of arrest should be limited to people that have gone through a minimum of two years of training in law enforcement–including law!–and have passed exams to become certified. (So yes, I agree that there needs to be a licensing body that exists outside of the control of the police departments or police unions.)
I absolutely agree that qualified immunity shouldn’t exist, or at least, not the way it does now. What is covered should be codified into law, and everything that’s outside of that should be not covered. Take, for instance, a high speed chase, where an objectively dangerous person is fleeing police; without qualified immunity, if a police officer lost control of their car and caused harm to a bystander, that officer would be criminally liable. I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome, given that the alternative–not pursuing an objectively dangerous person–seems like the worse option. (Yes, yes, they could use a helicopter, but that’s not always an option.) But there are a lot of things that do get covered under qualified immunity–like killing someone by tazing them repeatedly while their hogtied in the back of a patrol car–that absolute should not, under any circumstances.
The police problem is genuinely difficult. I think that a lot of it is cultural, with old cops sharing institutional practices with new cops, and perpetuating cycles. I think that kind of culture needs to be broken, so that cops genuinely feel a sense of responsibility, and want to do the right thing in the right way. I don’t know what the best way to approach that is though.
I live in a small town in the rural south.
The ‘community patrols’ would very quickly turn into KKK lynch mobs going after anyone that was ‘woke’.
Yeah, ACAB, but the alternative that would happen in most places is pretty bad too. There’s gotta be a 3rd way to keep people safe without using either cops as they exist now or vigilance committees.
I think the 3rd option is just this with licensing.
I don’t expect a system of community policing right now to be good, but let’s start with the idea of cops who are required to live and serve in the same area. No traveling to the next town over to police people.
Next, no qualified immunity. No special exemptions to laws or unique authorization of violence. You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.
If you required local protectors to organize within a licensing body that only let people participate in their organization after meeting requirements I think what you’d get would be an improvement on what we have without being totally chaotic and lawless.
Mostly, yeah. But being part of the community also means having potentially the same bigotry as the community. Again: I’m in a very, very white town in the rural south; most of the residents are low-key racist, and some aren’t even low-key about it.
This one I would disagree with. I don’t think that there should be a general right for citizens to arrest people; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t too terribly far from me, and that started as citizens trying to arrest a guy for jogging while being black. (Come to think of it, based off police arrests, doing pretty much anything while being black is an arrestable offense.) I think that powers of arrest should be limited to people that have gone through a minimum of two years of training in law enforcement–including law!–and have passed exams to become certified. (So yes, I agree that there needs to be a licensing body that exists outside of the control of the police departments or police unions.)
I absolutely agree that qualified immunity shouldn’t exist, or at least, not the way it does now. What is covered should be codified into law, and everything that’s outside of that should be not covered. Take, for instance, a high speed chase, where an objectively dangerous person is fleeing police; without qualified immunity, if a police officer lost control of their car and caused harm to a bystander, that officer would be criminally liable. I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome, given that the alternative–not pursuing an objectively dangerous person–seems like the worse option. (Yes, yes, they could use a helicopter, but that’s not always an option.) But there are a lot of things that do get covered under qualified immunity–like killing someone by tazing them repeatedly while their hogtied in the back of a patrol car–that absolute should not, under any circumstances.
The police problem is genuinely difficult. I think that a lot of it is cultural, with old cops sharing institutional practices with new cops, and perpetuating cycles. I think that kind of culture needs to be broken, so that cops genuinely feel a sense of responsibility, and want to do the right thing in the right way. I don’t know what the best way to approach that is though.
I can also see community “policing” in cities devolve into chaos as a bunch of petty kings pop up in every neighbourhood.
The guys in those hypothetical lynch mobs are the cops today.
At least in this scenario you could get your buds and shoot back at the klan fuckers, maybe.