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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

For the most part, police officers need to be replaced with case workers. People who can take records of crimes, provide counseling, and give actual legal advice to people affected. Occasionally we need dudes with guns to bust something up, but very rarely.

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Absolutely. Police officers themselves don't want to do this work, but the police as a system would lose power/ resources and thus they fight against any reform.

I have a fun side-gig in entertainment and thus witness constantly the massive amounts of LE officers who are required to be hired at each of these events just sitting around doing nothing.

Ill have you know they arent just "doing nothing". They're browsing tiktok, okay? Very productive.

The reason those requirements exist is because things do happen occasionally and it can get out of hand at large gatherings when it does. And local taxpayers don't like footing the bill for rowdy people from out of town. Something like an NFL stadium can hold the population of a small city, and when you get that many people together, the law of large numbers applies to the probability of something happening. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/a-quietly-esc...

Most of the ways that things can get out of hand can be handled by a normal security team. For huge events like NFL, it makes sense to have cops at the ready for the extremely unlikely event of a terrorist attack. But there are orders of magnitude more events with far fewer people that do not need unaccountable armed security.

With averages of >10 arrests per ~3 hr event at some of these venues, I'd think it is obvious that someone with arrest powers would need to be there.

Either way, what you are suggesting has been done, and was the standard before many of these requirements were in place. The problems in police staffing that resulted were the reason these requirements originated.

Yeah venues like that should have cops there, but there are a lot of places that are required to have cops but really don't need them.

https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/10/17/small-business-owne...

I'll give you that at large events, but I'm talking 1-10k sized events with 25+ sheriffs deputies and city cops sitting in their cars. It was was negotiated with the city to have so many LE officers there as a condition of the permits. Seems more like a form of tax and compliance. They literally do nothing though. Every event I witness obviously drunk people driving out of there right by the cops with their heads in their phones.

It's my anecdote that I'm trying to make the point with; these - supposedly - highly trained folks with very expensive equipment are being called in to do all kinds of work for which that training and equipment are unnecessary. There is an opportunity for other folks with more directed training and equipment to fill these roles in society.

> I'm talking 1-10k sized events with 25+ sheriffs deputies and city cops sitting in their cars.

That seems pretty out of the ordinary for an event in the US.

Even just letting most police carry under same responsibility as citizens would be big step up. We have constitutional carry here and even with every swinging dick carrying a 9mm under their shirt you can go years without seeing anyone pull one, why the police can't be like that is baffling .

This is largely a problem of creation of qualified immunity caste system IMO.

Police officers should be case workers first and thugs with guns second. If they aren't willing to be that then the whole force should be replaced.

I'm just curious, do you live in a high crime area?

I do. I know a number of people who have been mugged (and I have been accosted myself though escaped without injury or theft). I have never heard a story where a police officer intervened to stop the event. Now of course I'm sure that police presence has stopped many muggings, but it's nearly impossible to blanket any city with enough police to actually stop violent crime from occurring.

> I have never heard a story where a police officer intervened to stop the event.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the police have no duty to protect the public[0]. Worse, in that same decision, they ruled that states cannot impose a duty to protect the public on the police through legislation.

Since this case is about NYPD, it's worth mentioning the case of Lozito vs. NYC. There was a serial killer who went on 28-hour killing spree (four people died in total). The police were dispatched to a subway station in order to catch the suspect. When they arrived, the killer began stabbing Joseph Lozito. Instead of intervening to catch the serial killer that they had been specifically dispatched to apprehend, the police hid in a booth and let him stab Lozito. Lozito managed to disarm and incapacitate the killer, at which point the police decided to emerge from the booth and arrest the killer.

Lozito sued the NYPD. He lost because the SCOTUS ruling created binding precedent that police have no duty to protect the public.

> Now of course I'm sure that police presence has stopped many muggings

This is a common refrain, but research has consistently shown an extremely weak-to-nonexistent correlation between police presence and violent crime.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

Crimes that happen in my area are, as far as I can tell, exclusively handled after-the-fact. The cops appear and take a report.

I'm sure they occasionally use force to intervene in a crime, but it must be extremely rare versus just showing up with clipboards and a concerned look.

Isn't that what a detective is supposed to be?

Citation needed.

Oh yeah when I call the police because I got assaulted I would love a case worker to come and talk down to me about the sociology of crime. Just what we need!

This is funny to me because someone I'm close to called the cops after an assault and they literally just talked down to her and left. What's been your experience with this?

> This is funny to me because someone I'm close to called the cops after an assault and they literally just talked down to her and left. What's been your experience with this?

Police behavior is highly regional and subjective, with a sprinkling of just plain randomness (bad day? good day? roll the dice, armed and privileged either way!)

Somehow McDonalds is able to make the same burger everywhere in the country but getting cops to act in a way that makes bad situations better with any level of consistency is apparently impossible.

They certainly don't have uniform customer service across the country, and that's a much more appropriate comparison IMO.

Maybe, just maybe, police work is a little bit more complicated than making the same shitty mushed frozen burger in a kitchen somewhere to be microwaved for 30 seconds and given to me.

What exactly do you want them to do when they show up after you’ve been assaulted and they left?

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