I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail, say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of radiation if there were an accident.
You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations. But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up. There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think ahead.
Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or, as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of the car and shoot him in the head.'
Unless the civilian is armed I see no reason why the police should even arrive at the scene with a gun, unless the situation is violent to begin with, or after being called in as backup.
When you add police then the utility of everyone goes down, i.e the police may randomly shoot you for doing nothing whatsoever.
In the middle ages ( > 100 years ago) the english tried making the punishments more severe than the crime, e.g hanging or transportation for stealing a loaf, but that didn't result in decrease in crime, even if it made the crimes unprofitable.
If the punishment is random and unfair, as it will be, Then the deterrent effect is negligible because the probability that you will get away with it increases more than the severity of punishment.
Humans mostly avoid crime not because it is unprofitable, but because humans are mostly nice. Adding police to society decreases the probability that they will be nice. SO in most police states police and police penalties on society are heavy yet nobody wants to live in a police state.
tldr: police do not work as a deterrent to crime.
This makes no sense if you've ever interacted with other humans. There are several logical societal deterrents to stealing beside police. (Ostracism, retribution, foresight, modeling…)
A prisoner's dilemma is a wholly fictional and game-theoretic construct involving single, isolated interactions among perfectly rational agents.
None of that has anything to do with humans. Humans never play the prisoner's dilemma because they're never any of the above concepts. Humans are certainly not perfectly rational, and almost always interact with the same set of people. You can't apply such an abstraction to public policy.
The first sentence is certainly true, but the second is debatable.
There are thousands of good things being done every single day by cops all over the country. You don't hear about it because it isn't exciting.
If you think overall there are more corrupt / racist / evil cops than good, you most likely need to stop only getting your news from such biased sources.
There is a simple test to see if the above is true: How often do cops step forward to denounce brutality and corruption? What happens to the ones who do step forward?
Unfortunately for us, the real answer is not very pretty, and not the one most people wish were true.
The outcome is not what you think, if you are just consuming your police news via /r/politics, HN (and MSNBC the last two weeks).
Don't imagine for a millisecond that we could somehow do without police.
What about civilizations in the past that did do it without anything we would recognize as modern police?
We could do without that many fewer police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons.
I don't think that's a very good metric. You wouldn't measure "how good of a person" a murderer is by counting how many minutes of his life he spent murdering versus how many minutes he spent not murdering. And you wouldn't measure "how good of a disease" cancer is by counting how many people it kills versus how many people it does not kill.
Sounds like the phrase "everyone hates the cops until they need one" applies.
I'm not so sure. The few encounters I've had with the police have made me wonder. I live in a medium crime city and every time I have to call the police for something they never really do anything except write a report and then I never hear from them again.
In one instance when my car was stolen I was victimized more by the police than the car thief. The cops when they found my stolen car towed it to a lot and then told me they had found it via registered mail at which point I had to go pay several hundred dollars to get my car back that was only worth several hundred dollars to begin with. Also couldn't just write it off and leave it because they would still come after me for the towing and storage fee which was $50 per day. On top of that when I went to get the car the employees at the police station were _literally_ illiterate and made so many errors in transcribing my name and VIN number onto the vehicle release form that the towing company questioned whether it was actually my car!
In another instance when my car was the victim of a hit and run it took the police 4+ months to get the police report to the insurance company so that that they would pay for the repairs.
I mean if you can't take reports and return stolen property efficiently what the heck are you there to do?!
First night he's managing, a group of kids come in and rob the store of a large bank of small vending machines. You know the kind. They have stickers and gumballs and such. It was like six of them, all bolted together. He freaks out, calls the cops and you know what their response was?
"Uh yeah, our officers have far more important things to do then petty theft. We'll send an officer out when he has a chance." It took two weeks before he saw a cop who took the report and he never heard back after that.
Sure he was pissed, but I had to explain that in bigger cities, there's always something more important than what happened to you. Got mugged? Yeah, well someone just got murdered. Your car got stolen? Yeah, well a gang member just shot up a McDonald's because his fires were cold and shot three people.
So for all the people who complain that "Isn't there something more important you could be doing?" Well, yeah, but don't get pissed then if they blow off whatever petty incident you were involved in to go catch a real criminal.
Which is why drug crime is so heavily inforced. It's easy to get a steady stream of people.
As a side note, I once had a cop show up and say someone found your cellphone come to the impound if you want it. 'wasteful' sure, except the odds where vary good I would be there so it's worth a little effort.
The things that police are used for are things like 'the war on drugs' etc... not necessarily positive, helpful, community level things.
The same officer that helps someone with their Metro card can be the officer that 5 minutes later is "stopping and frisking" someone.
Police are horrible to rape and domestic assault survivors. They resent doing the paperwork for cases and often are totally unsympathetic. Police aren't trained well at all in how to relate to trauma survivors, so they end up causing vastly worse outcomes. This is why things like rape crisis centers exist, precisely because the police were not helping. In domestic violence cases, police will frequently side with the abuser and in states without mandatory arrest laws, often leave the survivor with the abuser, which obviously isn't a good thing to do.
I think the majority of cops are people doing a job. They see themselves as good people, but they're part of a system that hurts and kills people. Regardless of the above, the primary job of police in the united states is to fight the drug war, which is really just a modern variant of jim crow.
I live in Washington DC and would never in a million years ask a metro cop for help. Nor do I typically see people doing so. The only thing I see metro cops doing are "randomly" searching black people or punk-looking kids' bags.
The US Postal Service has a better justification for being armed and having bombs and guns than the police do -- they at least have a positive mandate to defend the mail in their custody from robbery.