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Well, nobody is forced to be a police officer and interact with "highly emotionally activated individuals" on a daily basis. I'm still in favour of giving police at most the right to violent self-defence that the normal person gets (except perhaps no duty to retreat), and perhaps even less on account of having special privileges and hence responsibility. If any existing police are unhappy with these terms, they should be fired and replaced with new hires who are; in the event that there is then actually some difficulty filling police positions (which would surprise me) we could discuss next steps.
Surprise!
Follow the logical outcomes. If we tell police officers "If you don't like it, you can quit" some amount of them will. People (despite what they post on social media) want police. That means we have to re-fill those police positions that have quit. Who takes the job? We've already self-selected out the median reasonable person, right?
You see where I'm going. This becomes a doom loop down. Throw in the fact that being a cop doesn't exactly pay great and you're getting people who aren't really meant for the job taking the job. The primary issue I see it cops today is pretty plain - many are obese.
If you create a working environment that is extreme, you get extreme (in one direction on the other) candidates filling those roles. In some cases, this is preferred - you want high performers or the deeply committed. In policing, I would argue you want something like "the modal reasonable person" as a cop.
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Sounds like a great idea, with a few caveats:
A part of me can't believe we're redoing the whole police brutality debate, before the dust really settled after the last one.
I've been in Europe for the past three years or so, where US-style police brutality is not really an issue, but otherwise I'd almost accept these terms except "you don't get to move out of a small jurisdiction" would be a huge imposition completely orthogonally to any sociopolitical experiments performed there. Do I get to have the rule follow me to whatever small jurisdiction I move to instead?
Also, do you actually expect some negative consequences for people other than members of the police from such a policy (which ones?), or is your presumable opposition just based on its consequences for police themselves? To be clear, I'm not actually in favour of anything that looks like police abolition - on the contrary, I am pretty sympathetic towards sending them to round up petty thieves and ethnic gangs, disparate impact be damned. I just think that policing is in the class of necessary occupations engaging in which invariably induces moral corruption and decay, and whose practitioners therefore should be shunned and restricted in their rights vis-a-vis regular people, rather like medieval executioners or burakumin (but without heredity or compulsion because we are past such medieval injustices). I don't think the European middle ages suffered from a shortage of executioners, at any rate.
Sorry, I missed this originally. I expect both, or rather one leading to the other. Once it becomes established that cops can get into trouble for overstepping their "no better than a civilian" line, they'll just avoid hazards and do the bare minimum required to do their job. Once that becomes apparent, the criminals will start becoming more bold, and if you defend yourself against them the cops will go after you, because you're the easier target.
I don't disagree, but I think they need rights beyond those of a civilian to be able to do their job.
Like I said: cool idea, as long as you try it out away from me, and are forced to live with it's consequences.
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Because it put food on the table, and starvation was always an option for some people back then. There is a reason why western countries increasingly have recruitment problems for the less pleasant jobs. The only people being willing to be police officers under your scheme would be immigrants I'd wager. I don't know a single person who I could imagine willingly signing up to this.
And yet people still willingly sign up for the military, which is far more dangerous than policing ever could become. Do you know any people who did? I reckon that there are actually many for whom the idea of being authorised to engage in violence has enough of a draw that they would be willing to take considerable risks and encumbrances for it, but they might be underrepresented in the sort of circles rat-adjacent debate addicts like us are overrepresented in.
Actually the military is the poster boy for this problem in most prosperous western countries to my knowledge. Btw yes, I know some people who signed up, though most of them a generation above mine. They constantly have to lower requirements because the only people nowadays willing to sign up would have been considered unfit for service in the past.
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I've been in Europe my entire life, and it not being an issue has nothing to do with limiting the police to civilian self-defense rights.
Absolutely not, the rule is meant to limit the damage your ideas would do, and this would let you spread it throughout the world.
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