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Comment by howmayiannoyyou | Hacker News Reader

We ask cops to be part social worker, part solider, part lawyer, part investigator, part paramedic - and we pay them a salary for just one of those professions at best. Law enforcement is a small part of the job many days.

It's time to create mission specialist in large police forces with depth in these areas and to deploy them as teams of 2-4. Yes, there will be shortages in coverage and that is okay.

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"We" didn't ask them to be any of these things, especially soldiers - this is power that they actively pushed for, there was no crime wave in the early 2000s when the militarization of police began in full swing - just a post-9/11 power opportunism and the need to find jobs for discharged soldiers.

Mission specialists always existed, they're called detectives.

> there was no crime wave in the early 2000s when the militarization of police began

I would argue we started the militarization of police in the 1970s-1980s when NYC was a festering hotbed of crime and when Miami drug dealers were shooting automatic weapons during turf wars (which was when we started Civil Asset Forfeiture... which allowed police/prosecutors to essentially steal assets from civilians without a criminal conviction).

We gave surplus DoD weapons to police for cheap after 9/11 and judges started rubber-stamping no-knock warrants around 2001, but I don't think that was the only inflection point.

Not the only, but 1970s-1980s had a real crime emergency, the 2000s didn't nearly as much.

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