Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

As I said yesterday[1], I think we've reached the point where better enforcement of laws harms more than it helps. A big reason for this is that "crime" is a very broad subject, covering everything from vagrancy to murder. Measures that might make sense against violent crime end up being used for minor violations.

Similar to how firefighters, EMTs, and police are separate agencies with different uniforms and vehicles, I wish police were split into violent and non-violent crime departments. It would solve quite a few problems. First, we could have something more nuanced than the typical "cops are bad"/"cops are good" debate. Second, we might see decreases in some types of crime, since minor criminals wouldn't fear informing the Department of Homicide. (Similar to how nobody fears calling the fire department if there's a fire.) Lastly, it would make it obvious where budgets were being spent. Most taxpayers are fine with throwing money at law enforcement, because they think it's preventing violent crime. If they saw how much was going to the Department of Vice, they might have other ideas.

Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen. These agencies are too big to change in any reasonable time frame.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7172857

Back in the day, non-violent crimes were handled by peace officers and violent crimes handled by specialists.

But budgeting, training, progress, and influx of war abundance has merged and blurred the two.

We could end up with a Judge Dredd scenario.

Or we could end the war on terror, which in turn reduces the urgency we have now of eroding privacy, and we can also end the war on drugs, which in turn reduces the incentive for police forces to invade homes and seize property for profit.

I firmly hold the belief all that will happen when the current crop of crappy old people in power die.

> I firmly hold the belief all that will happen when the current crop of crappy old people in power die.

What prevents a new crop of "crappy old people" from simply taking their place?

HN's generations will take power believing they are so much smarter, and would not call themselves crappy

The next generation. Cycle refreshes constantly.

Isn't that just as likely to mean that the cycle will produce more of the same? Why do the Baby Boomers have a monopoly on self-serving, harmful policy? "The old generation got it wrong. We'll get it right" is a very common refrain. Pretty much every generation has said it. And with each cycle, you get the same sorts of people in political power.

The sorts of qualities that attract someone to a life in politics, if not the very qualities that make someone successful in politics, tend to be the same qualities that lead to corruption, pandering, opportunism, and all the other vices. It's not a generational thing; it's a human-nature thing. Before long, the next generation will be looking at us and hoping things get better when we finally get off the stage.

I don't mean to be cynical. I'm just attempting to be realistic. I'm hopeful we can do better -- and if I didn't believe that, I'd be pretty damned depressed -- but I'm not basing that hope on the idea that we'll break a mold as old as politics itself.

Why do the Baby Boomers have a monopoly on self-serving, harmful policy?

What's kind of funny is that a good many of the Boomers were of the peace-and-love dope-smoking hippy '60s. They saw first-hand the results of Vietnam.

You'd think they would be the ones to spearhead gay rights and legalization of drugs and avoiding wars of interventionism. But by the '80s is was clear that all that youthful optimism and charity was but a phase.

As the saying goes, people become conservative the minute they have something to conserve.

It's because it is not about generation. It's a matter of social classes, if I may call it that. Most HN's folks are not going to do politics. The ones who end up in political power groups have been through different education and developed mindsets closer to the ones already there, who became their models.

tl;dr: time won't make thing better, we need refactoring

To be replaced by a new crop of crappy old people in power.

Right, but this crop of crappy old people will have learned that the wars on terror/drugs were mistakes bred of fear and ignorance. They'll sweep them off the board and clear space to make new and interesting mistakes out of fear and ignorance.

The war on drugs has been around since the 1930s; there have been MANY crops of crappy old people keeping it going. The police constitute a concentrated interest group in favor of the power they get from the various Wars so the policy survives for much the same reason crop subsidies survive. Any policy that bestows concentrated benefits to a small group and widely distributes costs to everyone else is hard to stop once it gets started.

"I firmly hold the belief all that will happen when the current crop of crappy old people in power die."

It isn't the people. It's the financial incentives, which will outlive the demise of their current beneficiaries and welcome their replacements.

Have a look at the documentary "Growing up in America". It is about the activists of the 60s, how they thought they could change the world, and what had happened by the 80s. There was also this idea that everything would improve once the old generation would be dead, but it did not happen.

https://archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_019.dv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles come to mind. It's a British idea -- that police officers are citizens in uniform and police by consent of their fellow citizens.

>Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen. These agencies are huge and there's just too much inertia to change them.

This is the power of a 3rd party winning the presidency. All of this force falls under the executive branch whose policy can be changed in an instant.

Don't think of it as impossible, 20 years ago Ross Perot received around 20% of the vote. All it takes is someone 3 times more "popular" than Ross Perot.

Interestingly enough, the number of non voters in 2012 was higher than the number of votes for either Obama or Romney.

So if all the people that didn't vote (many because they feel that their vote doesn't change things anyway) voted for a third party candidate, that candidate would win without having to take a single vote from either of the two main party candidates.

That candidate would win the popular vote, but that doesn't mean they'd win the electoral vote. All people who's votes counted voted in the last election...

Third parties don't win, but they do affect outcomes. If Perot hadn't gotten back in in 1992, Bush would probably have been re-elected. No Clinton presidency, no impeachment, no Hillary. Would be quite a different political landscape by now.

Policing is a state issue.

No executive order is going to solve this problem.

The executive in each state controls statewide police, in smaller jurisdictions either sheriffs are elected or appointed by the executive.

This is true, but rather undermines the original point about the POTUS doing it.

State governors and city mayors tend to be a lot more willing to do things like this, but you'd still have to get the political will. I'd expect you'd need someone to successfully get elected on a platform of doing it, and for the opposition to not find it reasonable to attack that item on the platform.

> Don't think of it as impossible, 20 years ago Ross Perot received around 20% of the vote. All it takes is someone 3 times more "popular" than Ross Perot.

Right after that, the two factions of the big-business party collaborated to ensure that no other party could mount a serious challenge. This involved forming the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) in 1987, which re-wrote the debate rules to effectively block challengers from participating. Out of sight, out of mind.

The power of TV is at its lowest point in recent history. Any candidate could have a fulltime youtube channel where they are gathering supporters everyday.

Gary Johnson posted tons of videos to his YouTube channel, had online debates with Jill Stein and other third party candidates when they were all shut out of the CPD debates, did several Reddit AMAs, spliced his own responses into CPD debate footage and posted them on his YouTube channel, and generally had a very active online presence.

The sad fact is that even though the power of TV is diminishing, it's still by far where the majority of voters get their information from and if you don't get on the televised debate you don't stand a chance. Unfortunately democracy at this level means you are ruled by the low-information voter.

"Right after that, the two factions of the big-business party collaborated to ensure that no other party could mount a serious challenge. This involved forming the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) in 1987, which re-wrote the debate rules to effectively block challengers from participating. Out of sight, out of mind."

Incredible. After Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, they traveled back in time to form CPD in 1987. Amazing story.

I sure screwed up my recollection on that one.

I confused the CPD taking over from the League of Women Voters in '87 and greatly dumbing down the format with the CPD raising standards for party inclusion in the debates in 2000.

My memory is fuzzy but wasn't he winning for a while? I remember him kind of going kooky towards the end of the campaign and lost a lot of votes. Is that accurate?

It's possible, but extremely unlikely due to the game theory of Plurality Voting or IRV (in countries/regions which have switched to that) both of which are bad, yet overwhelmingly used for single-winner elections (like, for selecting a president, or in some countries for selecting a single representative per voting district).

http://rangevoting.org/Duverger.html

There's a political science term called a realigning election, but it involves a radical change to a party, or the displacement of at least one of the two dominant parties with a new party, after which elections go back to a two-party-dominated playing field for a while; a persistent 3-or-more party system is not viable without changing voting systems.

"IRV which are bad"

Did you mean first past the post (FPTP) aka winner takes all?

In election reform circles, IRV refers to instant runoff voting.

PV is the same as FPTP. IRV is very nearly as bad, and perhaps worse due to monotonicity. See http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

And like rangevoting.org mentions, Range Voting technically may give you the least regretful results, but its a great deal more complicated than Approval Voting, which is dead simple and nearly as good. http://rangevoting.org/Approval.html http://www.electology.org/approval-voting

In some areas, there is a distinction between local PD and the Sheriff's office. The former are general first responders to emergencies(using force if necessary) while the latter generally perform bureaucratic duties(summons, evictions, etc).

I like this on an instinctive level, so I'd like to try to take it apart.

1. Would you still have a police commissioner at the top?

2. Does this kind of thing already exist in any form?

...okay, I am bad at coming up with these. Help?

Budget cuts, take a look at Detroit.

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