bT017: The "Recompartmentalization" Of A Police Force
How do you make the police useful? By changing the culture of what it means to police something.
bT017
The “Recompartmentalization” Of A Police Force
Copied from a post:
The major issue with policing is that they all claim to protect, serve, and put their lives on the line, but when it comes down to it, they try not to do that, avoid doing that, and they are not legally required to do that. So what does the job become? Well - if you make all the cops the type of people that /would/ sacrifice their lives pushing shooters or a shooter, they wind up being aggressive psychopaths that oftentimes harm others.
If you make all of the cops the types of people that /wouldn't/ do that, then all you have is now a class of civilian who's main purpose is to do nothing of any real """importance""" (besides serving citations) except to be actively considered to be "above you" yet, at the same time lashes out as if they are being considered "below you."
The only option that isn't a radical and *complete* overhaul of the way *all* policing physically works, which can be painful, is to make an actual attempt to change the underlying culture of what policing /actually/ entails.
You do this by serious compartmentalization of job roles and functions. A cop should not inherently be considered to also be infantry on the side as well as a medic and a negotiator. Why would you want someone being all of those things at once?
At the very most basic level, a cop can be an individual with a uniform and a fully-identifying ID badge stuck to them, which acts as proof of their ability to process a citation versus an individual who is acting in violation of some law. And it can be just that - no gun, nothing.
If there has to be some sort of moderate swap to a different method of policing that changes the inherent concept of what a cop actually is, so you stop winding up with infantrymen going straight from the US military directly into a police force, then it's done by drastically spreading out the spectrum of what it is that cops actually do when they are cops. That means having officers that are unarmed entirely and not necessarily dressed super authoritatively. It means having officers that are unarmed but in some format of authoritative uniform. Then uniformed officers that are armed. So on, so forth.
Within this, it would be best to not have there be a literal job that is called "The cop with the most amount of firepower." We don't need Judge Dredd occurring, so these things should realistically only be offered to those with low incidents across time of service.
Also, within this, the existing police force of some area that were to adopt this model of re-compartmentalization of a police force needs to make sure that they aren't suddenly hiring a ton of people to fill these roles, because when that happens, it suddenly gives the police a reason to on-foot over-police almost every area in a given space.