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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Are these two things even mutually possible? I’ve seen data that more community members equals better policing but I’ve also see data that things like more education (easier to train etc) leads to better policing.

I realize now that BLM's "representation" platform might be more of an affirmative action program, which I wouldn't be in favor of. Community representation to me would be avoiding a situation where officers are commuting exclusively from a distant suburb and have no nexus to the neighborhoods they're patrolling. The ideal situation would be where cops and residents know each other by name and see each other as neighbors motivated towards a common goal.

But yes, I can see a potential tension between recruiting from a limited pool while making sure the applicants are of high enough quality. It depends what's worth prioritizing at the margins, perhaps it can be accomplished by residency requirements?

Honestly, in a lot of these crime- and dysfunction-ridden neighborhoods, the suburban cops who commute are among the few functional, decent, and caring human beings that a lot of these people will interact with on a regular basis. I think we absolutely should want to be hiring all the officers we can who want to police these neighborhoods, even if they don't want to live there. Hiring exclusively from those problematic neighborhoods is not only going to be recruiting from a narrower pool of recruits, but I highly suspect it will lead to more incidents like the Tyre Nichols killing in Memphis where you essentially have the same thugs from those streets, just in a police uniform.

When I looked into joining the Fort Worth police department it mentioned requiring applicants live ‘within 30 minutes of a police station’. I’m sure that most police departments have some sort of requirement along this sort.

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