3D Police

I have friends in law enforcement, yet I myself am no fan of law enforcement. Now people are talking about reforming the police. I have some very specific points to make about this:

1. The legal system itself and its extremes are as much of a danger as the police themselves.
2. Rodney King lived: a big part of the problem of policing now is their cowboy attitude towards the use of firearms.
3. We have the technology: there are technical solutions to many of these problems.
4. We need to move on towards a crime prevention model rather than a law enforcement model.

Look at both sides of this argument. On one hand the police have a dangerous job to deal with dangerous people, and our society can't function without them: at the very least the police do a great job of preventing angry mobs from hanging innocent people. On the other hand the police are an enemy of the people funded by those people's tax dollars, and we should be able to fire them if they are a problem for us, which they are.

Both sides are 100% correct. So let's move forward into the future with better solutions.

First there are lots of laws that overly punish. I am strongly against the legalization of prostitution. However charging the prostitutes with felonies doesn't make any sense at all: what would it take for you to sell your self to questionable men on the street, how desperate would you have to be to do that? Prostitutes are more victim than perpetrator. Prostitution is exactly the sort of crime that should be not a felony, not even a misdemeanor, but a simple infraction. Prostitution should be ticketed to the point were it isn't profitable, that's it. In general if something isn't harming other people or property, it should be an infraction, not a misdemeanor, and most definitely not a felony.

There's massive injustice in our legal system. Seeing so many innocent hard working people "plead guilty for time served" so they could get back to their jobs and families while I was an assistant teacher at the King County Jail is a big part of why I decided to not go into law enforcement myself. The sad fact is that the prison industrial complex is making a lot of profit off of innocent inmates.

But going beyond this, our incarceration system has two other shockingly terrible issues: A. There seems to be no serious attempt at behavior reform in the incarceration system... any chemical dependency treatment for example seems to be shockingly antiquated and ineffective. B. Human rights of prisoners is not taken seriously, be it the fact they aren't allowed to vote, or be it the rape culture in our society that suggests a man being sentenced to a lifetime of rape is some kind of significant justice.

Arrest quotas are a violation of human rights. In fact the opposite would be preferable: each officer could be limited to a maximum number of arrests per month, and police that are able to deescalate without arrests should be awarded. Uniformed patrol officers should be focused on crime prevention, not incarceration.

Second, law enforcement should not have holsters on their uniforms for firearms. They should be able to have any firearm they want, but it should stay in their vehicle until such time as they know for a fact they need it. Taking firearms from police vehicles should automatically sound alarms for backup. Every time this happens a civilian review should take place.

The last thing a police officer should be bringing into a woman's apartment in the middle of the night for a wellness check is a firearm. There is no excuse for a 180 pound police officer to shoot a 90 pound woman with a knife.  Once upon a time, police were expected to know how to handle themselves without a firearm, like most men in the past:

Third, police should be allowed to have any non-lethal tech they want to do their job. They should have an abundance of body armor options. If they want to employ nunchucks, two handed batons, pepper spray, tazers, shields, armored military vehicles, whatever, they should have it. One problem with police carrying guns most of the time is it distracts them from making sure they have their nonlethal tech ready to use at the beginning of each shift.

But the other side of this is the police need to all have body cameras. A few bad apples sours the whole barrel, and we already know the police are trained to start telling lies as soon as they arrest us if not sooner. Not having video coverage from body cameras should be grounds for having police testimony thrown out in court!

We should think creatively about using technology to aid law enforcement. In Singapore there are cameras all over the place, preventing most crimes from happening in the first place. With tech in today's world, civilian watch dog groups should be allowed to follow police around with drones to help keep those police honest.

Fourth, and this is most 3D of all these points, is we must move into a new era of crime prevention instead of law enforcement. We tax payers want crime prevented in the first place. A crime is like an unwanted pregnancy, it is a failure of society as a whole when a crime happens.

In our law, ignorance of the law is not an excuse to disobey the law. So then why isn't "Obedience to the Law" a major topic covered in our public education system? Because it's not - not even close. You shouldn't be allowed to have a GED least bit a high school diploma without a sound understanding of how criminal law works, and general strategies for making sure you are obeying the law. Citizens should "know their rights" long before they are arrested, no one should have to learn about the legal system the hard way.

What if the Police were first and foremost focused on preventing crime rather than enforcing the law, what would that really look like? I have painted a sci-fi picture here of nonlethal ninja cops who can shut down trouble without having to kill or arrest most of the time. That isn't realistic now, because what we have now is so opposite of that ideal. We need to have 3D thinking about police reform because the police already fail so badly at what we pay our tax money for them to do: prevent crime!