• chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      12 hours ago

      Not sure what you’re trying to say here. I’m against mass surveillance! I’m against big powerful government in general. All the fear people had with the Republicans coming to power would not have happened if there was no power for them to come to in the first place.

      As for crime, that’s the job of a small, local, effective, community police force to deal with. Not a militarized thug squad that we have now!

      • Eheran@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        12 hours ago

        Small local police can not deal with everything tho. There is a reason for multiple “layers”. The problem arise when anyone can be police, dealing with people’s lives without any meaningful training or selection, while other professions need years of training and certificates before they are allowed to do far less consequential things.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 hours ago

          The problem with police is that they are “others.” If they were members of their communities and they knew the people they worked with (say, by walking a beat on foot and talking to people like a friendly mail carrier) then we wouldn’t have these issues.

          • Eheran@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            11 hours ago

            But that would take far more cops to actually know people? Like in the order of one per 100? There are currently 700’000 cops, that would be 5x as many. How many people could one cop realistically know? What problem would this “knowing people” actually solve?

            • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              10 hours ago

              How many people could one cop realistically know?

              Presumably somewhere around Dunbar’s number (or some other number with a similar goal likely calculated in a better way), which is wildly unrealistic from a practical perspective.

              What problem would this “knowing people” actually solve?

              They likely believe that police that are “members of the community” are much less likely to react based on vague heuristics built up over time because they are more likely to directly know the people involved and thus be less likely to need to rely on a snap judgement of strangers. It’s right up there with “maybe we should train them better”, except training is several orders of magnitude more manageable from a practical standpoint than having more law enforcement per capita than Bible belt small towns have churches per capita.