there are great books on the evolution of the retail side of policing. police spend most of their time responding to 911 and patrolling (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Reinvention_of_Poli...) as part of a change towards reactive policing.

how could it trend differently? you would have to come up with an alternative to 911 generally, which is very very hard.

in terms of preserving 911 but improving outcomes, the strongest consensus among experts is that police need more specializations, much like healthcare.

ultimately i think these problems exist everywhere in the world, and communities where homeless interacting with citizens & police issues are acute, like in san francisco, are actually the future, not the past, for other communities. coercion, like the kind that used to exist in California for the mentally ill specifically, is going away everywhere. it's not coming back.

there are many ideas but ideas that are not going to be enacted are not valuable, even if they are interesting to talk about, and once you get a sober look at what really does get enacted and why, the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.

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weakfish 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you’re spot on about specialization. Police are chronically under-trained and unequipped to deal with such a broad swathe of what they’re expected to, from speeding tickets to mental health crises. As long as there’s a combination of ill training, high pressure situations, and bad pay, there’s going to be terrible outcomes.

I definitely think that there’s a ton of ways in which the American police state is a horrible shitshow that attracts power-hungry assholes, but I also think that the nature of the job as it is currently set up inevitably will lead to mistakes from cops who wouldn’t have violent behavior otherwise.

That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but it’s important to understand the circumstances that create horrible outcomes.

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boredatoms 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think theres a government organizational aspect, that in the US the police forces are often very small. If the forces we’re combining into larger units the specialization becomes economical.

As an example, in the state of New South Wales in Australia, its 1 police force organization for the whole state (8 million people)

	▲	xp84 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s certainly one possible way to address, at least when considering rural sheriffs or small-town police forces. But that kind of suggestion starts making people feel pretty uncomfortable in the US. Local control is better at convincing people that those empowered to police in their communities are accountable to local voters. As with anything, of course it’s going to be partisan, too. NYC leftists don’t want Albany dictating how their police operate, and rural Californians don’t want the uniparty government in Sacramento controlling theirs.

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airstrike 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm honestly amazed someone could point to San Francisco's homeless problem and its policing or lack thereof and say "that's the future"

	▲	doctorpangloss 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		there is a certain kind of mook (https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/) out there: he finds a community in the United States, or who talks about communities they've never lived in in East Asia, like Singapore, or talks about communities that lack free press or elections and therefore verifiable statistics, like most of China, or are closed communities, like some of the EU, who says: "If we only did X like they do in community Y, there wouldn't be problems!" And what I am saying is, not that San Francisco does things well, but that the homeless problem in San Francisco is coming for those communities too. They are in San Francisco's past. Drugs are coming for those communities, the K shaped economy is coming for those communities, expensive OT-based compensation, a bloated public sector, falling commercial real estate, NIMBYism, private schooling, way too intensively used roads... Obviously, a lot of good stuff is coming too - Section 377A was only repealed in Singapore in 2022 - but my point is that nobody gets it right. They are just behind in a certain sense of getting it wrong. To fix policing, you have to look at things like a Darwinian system, rather than looking for antagonists or agonizing over statistics.

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spenrose 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for the book recommendation.

“the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.” +1. Another response to your comment mentions forces being small, which touches on a fundamental dynamic: Baumol-ian labor costs. As long as policing is defined as “an officer showing up” it will grow inexorably more expensive. Many HN commenters are foot soldiers in the effort to oppose automation in the form of cameras, drones, etc.

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NoMoreNicksLeft 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>the strongest consensus among experts is that police need more specializations, much like healthcare.

One of criticisms of healthcare is that we need more generalists so that people can afford basic checkups and routine care without obscene expenses. The call for more specialization might only serve some small minority of cases at wildly out-of-proportion rates.

Part of why policing seems so ineffective is because, whether or not it was deliberate, police forces have mutated into the "drug money confiscation force". Most people do not have active problems caused by or aggravated by drug dealers, and certainly not to the degree that would be indicated by how much police effort is expended toward those criminals. When real crimes are reported, we're told "tell it to your insurance company", the police never investigate, solve, or prosecute the people who commit those crimes.