Apr 22, 2020, 11:55 AM
—“How different would the function of law enforcement be under P-law than how it operates in today’s society?”—
Primary differences are:
1) adopt sheriff public service model rather than police (corporate revenue generation) model,
2) to increase the number of officers in each incident so that force isn’t required
3) coupled with the ability to call large numbers of ‘trained’ citizens (militia) to assist (similar to volunteer fire departments); This increases the chances that someone who knows the individual can talk him or her down.
4) the population would be trained by continuous pubic service announcements on how to react to police officers.
5) Restore more discretion by senior officers, and lower the number of people who are put into the system.
In other words ‘make time for human beings’.
The acceleration of human behavior into rat-utopia panic is due to alienation, and the consequences. Social pressure and getting attention on one’s ‘ir-reciprocities’ and ‘feeling the social pressure (guilt)’ does not accelerate conflict behavior as does a relationship between an ‘oppressor / opponent / authority” with an officer. Shame is more effective than we think. Which is something we used to know.
6) We would restore all rights of self defense and all OBLIGATIONS to defend the commons: physical, normative, informational, and institutional. Meaning that a lot more criminals would be shot for ‘starter crimes’ – my favorite being porch-thieves, and within a decade behavior would return to ‘normal’.
What does this amount to? Restoring the number of people protecting private and common.
ORIGINS
Where does this come from? Study of dutch british and german police forces, and study of how french citizens are taught to react to police.
Source of the problem is distributed us population vs concentrated european population, and associated coverage costs. In effect we are forcing officers into a position where they cannot use numbers to encircle (see italian method) remain calm, and de-escalate, and so must use force to obtain control and bring into the system.
The ability to storm someone’s home rather than wait to take them in public is another that needs to be changed.
In effect we are trying to be too efficient with expensive officers, and we are paying the cost in increased distrust of the police courts, and political institutions becasue of it.
We don’t need wild west sheriffs. We need to encircle, show consideration, de escalate, and if escalation is necessary it’s because there is no other choice, not because of the power ratio between officers and subjects.
I can write more but in general, Americans suppress more petty crimes than europeans which is important and why we have nicer suburbs – and we want to keep it that way, and we are better at investigation – esp FBI – than european countries, but they are better at civil policing than americans.
We are a more militarized society
However, what I’m recommending is that we are a more “MILITIA-ISED” at the local level so that we restore investment in the material, social, political, and informational commons.