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Comment by skinpop | Hacker News Reader

the very concept of the police is a form of political ideology.

what an insane take. police has existed in every form of society and it is necessary for a civilized society to function. its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation.

the dichotomy of LA crime being out of control and LA people being so anti-cop will never fail to amuse me.

LA isn’t “out of control” because of a lack of police, certainly. Do you think cops prevent crime?

Well... To a certain extent they do. You're not gonna rob a store if there's a cop standing outside

I love that the American solution to fire is... fire? We tried putting grown-ups with guns in schools after Columbine, and somehow more guns hasn't solved the violence problem. I don't think putting a cop outside each store will stop theft, especially when wage theft alone represents a larger loss than all larcenies, burglaries, and auto theft combined. [0]

> in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years [1]

[0] https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...

I don't think diordiderot is claiming more cops = better. They're giving one example of how police could stop crime, but one that is self-evidently not scalable. One cop per storefront would cause the number of police to explode, and even then only covers a specific subset of crime (i.e. I think they'd agree with you).

It is a common complaint that the police tend not to prevent crimes but instead just show up afterwards and at best shrug and move on (at worst they do pretty gruesome stuff like sexually harass the victim or shoot the person who called them in). So I'd agree that more police or more guns probably won't cure the causes of crime.

Our modern system of policing traces its roots to slave patrols and is a few hundred years old, at most. For the overwhelming majority of human history it was an ad-hoc community organization more akin to a watch. We get police from the Greek polis (city or polity) by way of the Latin politia (citizenship). The US idea of a civil force salaried and charged with deterring crime is something we inherited from England with the idea of "keeping the king's peace". We have slave patrols to thank for marrying the watch to the militia. [0]

Your last sentence ignores the possibility that the LAPD, a department downright infamous for its police gangs, could be a contributing or even causative factor for LA crime being, as you put it, "out of control".

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...

Minor nitpick, the agency infamous for gangs is the LASD which is separate. The LAPD is infamous in other ways though, Rodney King is going to stick in many people's minds for a long time, and there's an enormous "Corruption and misconduct" section in their wikipedia page that is full of some really awful stuff.

>police has existed in every form of society

"State enforcers to protect the politicians and people in power have existed in every form of society" * yes.

>its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation

Yes.

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