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An Anonymous Coward writes:
Camden, New Jersey is a very low income neighborhood. According to this NY Times article, until recently it had typical low income policing--heavy on corruption and violence and low on compassion.
But now they have a new chief and things have changed --
"Handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year" — around the per capita income in the city — "can be life altering," Chief Thomson said in an interview last year, noting that it can make car insurance unaffordable or result in the loss of a driver's license. "Taxing a poor community is not going to make it stronger."
Handling more vehicle stops with a warning, rather than a ticket, is one element of Chief Thomson's new approach, which, for lack of another name, might be called the Hippocratic ethos of policing: Minimize harm, and try to save lives.
Officers are trained to hold their fire when possible, especially when confronting people wielding knives and showing signs of mental illness, and to engage them in conversation when commands of "drop the knife" don't work. This sometimes requires backing up to a safer distance. Or relying on patience rather than anything on an officer's gun belt.
While not out of the woods yet, it sounds like there is hope for Camden and maybe it won't just continue to be written off as a war zone.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @12:04AM (2 children)
... is if you stole the money from me to pay for it... which is what you do.
In other words, what could you possibly be saying? Certainly, the current system doesn't place "service" as the ruling guideline; that "service" is total trash.
Here's a thought: There is no such thing as a service which isn't profit-driven.
Profit is the only reason any action ever happens—it just so happens that there are very many forms of "profit" (for instance, establishing a safe place to live is an example of profit, provided that the costs of doing so don't outweigh the benefits). So, achieving good "policing" is a matter of establishing the correct incentives; why, oh, why would you ever expect to be able to establish the correct incentives when your solution depends upon a violently imposed monopoly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @03:21AM
I got your "violently imposed monopoly" right here, moron.
(Score: 3, Touché) by NotSanguine on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:46AM
... is if you stole the money from me to pay for it... which is what you do.
Don't like it? There are a bunch of places that don't have, as you put it, "violently imposed monopolies" (which is disingenous at best). Places like Somalia, the Pakistan/Afghanistan borderlands and the high seas, to name a few.
Why don't you go to one of those places and live out your fantasy?
There are no "violently imposed monopolies" in those places. There's just a whole raft of violent factions. Why don't you negotiate some detailed, fine-grained contracts with them. I'm sure that would work out swimmingly.
The best part is that I wouldn't need to see you posting the same thing over and over and over again.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it:
The more you post your unrealistic (and mostly untenable) pipe dreams, the more I wonder if you're one of these whack jobs [wikipedia.org].
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr