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https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876293261/the-link-between-di... This Story makes a solid argument that police unions are a huge part of the problem. The unions’ protect bad cops, negotiate work rules, influence Elections, effect training programs and oppose reform.

Maybe its time to look at getting rid of public employee unions altogether.

I was explaining this to someone the other day, the unions enable the blue wall and they make it virtually impossible to remove the bad seeds.

I think these are complicated issues, and I am not sure what the best path forward is. Changes to oversight and immunity policies would likely improve outcomes. I think solving the issues that lead to inequity and crime would indirectly have a positive impact on police behavior.

Diverting some police responsibilities to social workers seems like a good idea in general. I don't know if it would be effective in preventing the tragedies we see constantly across our country. These all generally happen in the process of an arrest, which seems like a responsibility that would need to be retained by officers in a system where the responsibilies are split.

I’m curious about this social worker idea. My mother was one and her job had her working mainly in poor neighborhoods. She was tasked with going into homes, speaking with people, and determining if the children there were in a safe environment. If it was judged it wasn’t safe, then they would remove the children.

As you can imagine this was a fairly dangerous job at times. Almost every time they had to make a removal the police would need to be called to assist. Even getting into the homes they’d need police sometimes as they’d be threatened and intimidated.

She eventually left that role to work with elderly people in need.

> 3.) Policing is an adversarial job. This leads to a us vs them mentality and also contributes to the next problem

This has another point: America's desire for ... extremely long and, from an European POV, frankly ridiculous prison sentences.

In most of Europe, even someone carrying a car load worth of meth earns only a couple years of prison time in decent conditions (don't get me wrong, our prisons are not perfect, but generally mental and physical healthcare are given, food is decent and gangs/prison rape is nowhere near the widespread problem as it is in the US) if caught. There is no incentive to shoot a cop, in fact there is an incentive to be cooperative and friendly with cops at e.g. traffic stops (so that they don't search the car in the first place).

In America however? A drug runner often has to choose between either not shooting the cop and definitely earn decades of prison time in overcrowded prisons with inhumane conditions or shooting the cop and possibly getting away. This is why US cops are so trigger happy and assuming every person they interact with is out to shoot them, plus the ... extremely widespread availability of guns.

A huge part of solving the police violence problem will be gun control, sentencing reforms and prison reforms, as unintuitively as it sounds.

This a great point, but there is a counter-argument that reducing punishments for drug-related offenses may make the opioid epidemic in the US worse. This is a huge problem and roughly 70k Americans die per year from OD, which is much more than the number of police killings. I personally lost a cousin to drug OD a couple years ago.

One extreme solution that might work is making all drugs legal for adults (21+), and have extremely strict punishments on providing drugs to minors.

This sort of policy change might have saved my cousin because:

1.) It would put dealers out of business which I think would make it harder for teenagers to acquire hard drugs. When I was in HS in California, it was way easier to get marijuana than to get alcohol because there was a system of distributors for it. Acquiring alcohol meant asking someone's older sibling or friend, or getting a fake id and hoping the liquor store clerk doesn't confront you, or sneaking some out of parents' pantry. None of these were great options, and none of these methods would work for hard drugs like heroin which nearly the entire adult population has a severe negative perspective, unlike alcohol.

2.) If adult users bought from regulated sources, it would at the very least ensure the drugs aren't cut with fentanyl and that doses are intentional.

> This is a huge problem and roughly 70k Americans die per year from OD, which is much more than the number of police killings. I personally lost a cousin to drug OD a couple years ago.

I am sorry for your loss, but I would not blame a "lax" drug enforcement on the general opioid crisis. Even the death penalty doesn't prevent drug smuggling, all it incentivizes is higher prices and cutting!

The real reason behind large parts of the US opioid epidemic is that the US lacks a modern welfare system:

- physical healthcare and paid sick time for all. People are too often "pushing through" pain by abusing painkillers and then getting dependent on them (as they cannot afford fixing the cause of the pain), people can't afford to miss work too much so they'll ask for (and get) strong stuff after operations so they can work instead of having the proper time for recovery.

- mental healthcare. Many people, especially the homeless, are "self-medicating" with drugs, and there is next to zero support systems for people going through individual crisis (divorces, death of a family member and job loss are the most common start point of drug careers).

- related to the above point: government assistance for the unemployed, especially in areas going through rapid de-industrialization. It is no coincidence that the areas affected by the opioid crisis the most are those where the effects of unchecked rabid capitalism and globalization have wrecked entire communities.

No matter of "law and order" will help there, people will still try to self-medicate the effects from the lack of these three points - with all the side effects that come with it, including kids like your cousin ending up with people shooting H in school.

And regarding age... when I grew up (admittedly in Germany, where beer is legal at the age of 16!) honestly we all knew one or two crackheads too - but in the entire school. The wide, wide majority was happy enough with beer, wine and some schnaps for parties, a decent lot were stoners, and that's it. We never had the need to resort to hardcore illegal drugs, and the pot dealers were all guys who did some side dealing to finance their own stoning.

Overdoses is far more of a problem of poorly regulated supply than use. You don't see the heroin users with a clean, stable supply that they can afford very often because they're mostly functioning members of society who hold down jobs, and they rarely OD or are on the streets any more than you see alcohol users as typical wrecks - you see the small portion of the worst of the worst. The popular image of a heroin addict is a complete fabrication that only works because so few people are aware of heroin use among people they know.

Heroin is by no means a good drug to get dependent on, but it is vastly more dangerous when users don't have a stable, clean supply. And a typical heroin addict could satisfy their addiction for $10-$20/day with medical grade heroin. We know this because the UK NHS buys heroin both for addiction management and for post-op pain management in some hospitals as an alternative to morphine.

So your "extreme" solution isn't extreme at all, in fact, and it's a massive shame that politicians still rarely dare address this. Heroin prescription to addicts tends to not just improve their quality of life massively, but also reduce crime substantially, because it frees addicts from having to try to finance their addiction.

As for the opioid epidemic in the US, blame Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, and the Sackler Family who owned it and leached it dry before the company was forced to settle claims over OxyContin and went into bankruptcy. Basically they're some of the biggest drug lords in the world.

Purdue Pharma extensively misrepresented how to prescribe OxyContin to make more money, in a way that left people dependent. That's a far bigger reason for the opioid epidemic than illegal drug sales. The rise in illegal opioid use is a consequence, not a cause.

The rise in heroin use in the US is largely because heroin is cheaper than black-market oxycodone a lot of places, and so people who have had their OxyContin prescriptions cut, which idiotically often happen when they exhibit signs of dependency, instead of helping them off it, often end up transitioning to heroin.

> Purdue Pharma extensively misrepresented how to prescribe OxyContin to make more money, in a way that left people dependent. That's a far bigger reason for the opioid epidemic than illegal drug sales. The rise in illegal opioid use is a consequence, not a cause.

Additionally, it's not "just" Purdue and others (like the pill mills) at fault, they are just enablers following a demand.

There would be no supply without massive massive demand and let's be honest the majority of addicts didn't start out in hospitals with legit pain management. They search self-medication for issues caused by a lack of mental health care, physical health care and basic social safety networks.

A lot of the issues the US faces at the moment boils down to this as a root cause (and to condense it more, one ends up at systemic historical racism and massive wealth inequalities). Nothing can be solved alone, the US needs sweeping general reforms across the board.

It's not just Purdue, but Purdue lied to doctors and had doctors prescribe the pills in completely inappropriate manners that significantly raised the chance of ongoing addiction.

Those lies created a massive surge in demand. This was not a matter of just giving in to pre-existing addicts, but creating new ones.

There's a reason they've been sued into bankruptcy.