this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Small local police can not deal with everything tho. There is a reason for multiple "layers". The problem arise when anyone can be police, dealing with people's lives without any meaningful training or selection, while other professions need years of training and certificates before they are allowed to do far less consequential things.
The problem with police is that they are “others.” If they were members of their communities and they knew the people they worked with (say, by walking a beat on foot and talking to people like a friendly mail carrier) then we wouldn’t have these issues.
But that would take far more cops to actually know people? Like in the order of one per 100? There are currently 700'000 cops, that would be 5x as many. How many people could one cop realistically know? What problem would this "knowing people" actually solve?
Presumably somewhere around Dunbar's number (or some other number with a similar goal likely calculated in a better way), which is wildly unrealistic from a practical perspective.
They likely believe that police that are "members of the community" are much less likely to react based on vague heuristics built up over time because they are more likely to directly know the people involved and thus be less likely to need to rely on a snap judgement of strangers. It's right up there with "maybe we should train them better", except training is several orders of magnitude more manageable from a practical standpoint than having more law enforcement per capita than Bible belt small towns have churches per capita.