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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

What if the first words associated with policing were "serving the community" or "supporting neighbors" rather than "fighting crime"? What if lower crime came as a second order effect from having professionally helpful people around and available?

What if recruitment focused on hiring warm, generous, and communicative people who can relate to troubled people and deescalate complex situations -- competing for candidates from nursing and education programs -- instead of on mimicking military structures and courting highly volatile aggro meatheads?

Would these discussions still immediately turn to how "eggs have to be cracked" to defeat the baddies? Or would the discussions instead be about process failures that might be remedied through analysis and reflection?

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I'm as much against Civil Forfeiture as the next guy, and I think there are plenty of wrongs with cops today.

But you have quite a hill to climb with your argument.

There has never been a police force at scale implemented anywhere on earth with the qualities that you state. Not saying that its not possible. But there's a reason people some people become nurses, others become gamblers, other become politicians, teachers, and cops.

I think you could expect better outcomes from simply having more effective means of separating the bad apples, vs taking QI completely off the table for the good guys.

Note - I'm not even against abolishing QI. Yet when I see arguments like this that hinge on changing human nature... and replacing it with a novel concept in recruiting, that has never succeeded anywhere on earth for thousands of years....

Would police forces based on the Peelian Principles count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

> What if the first words associated with policing were "serving the community"

Then the job would be "community service"; we have that in the form of, say Red Cross. Policing by definition is anti-crime in purpose.

Maybe there's a place for the sort of agency you envision, but regardless of the goodwill of others, there will always be wolves trying to eat the sheep, and we'll need an agency to deal with them.

I agree. Furthermore, imagine if the police were measured by the number of crimes they actually prevented versus the number they documented. Yes, I realize that these are orders of magnitude of difficulty in difference. The important thing being that one is what they are expected to do, the other what they actually do.

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