- Joined
- May 25, 2020
This idea's second half can work, just not with the first half. I've been making this point to some people who simply cannot process that less funding for the police will have a deleterious effect on the least privileged in society, because they fundamentally reject that violence is not predicated on police presence. Anyways-
Police aren't trained for a lot of the shit they get handed. Sometimes they're given rudimentary, useless training and most of the time it's just the local officials finding someone to hand the bill off to. Police are fucking busy and usually understaffed, so it's not like they have a ton of time to train on it anyways. The idea of taking some of these things and shifting them over to social workers makes sense IF any form of responder (that is, not just someone filing paperwork or conducting harmless interviews or so-on) is also given a police escort.
Got a crazy guy shitting himself in the street? Send a social worker and the cops. Cops make sure the guy isn't violent, social worker then takes over registering everything, processing the paperwork, so-on, so-forth. Maybe the guy spends some time in a tank, maybe he doesn't - but at least there's a record of it, and the social worker takes the drudgery off of the cops. Home disturbance? Have the cops escort a worker, make sure the case is clear, then get the worker to get the required information and perform follow-up shit and so-on. Rape victim? Cops on the scene to be robocop if necessary, but you let the processing and treatment and follow-up get handled by a social worker.
You'll notice that unless you've turned off your brain in order to receive validation from signalling, this would generally be an increase in costs - cops are still required, they're just not being expected to play psychologist, sociologist, therapist, accountant, and case worker all in one. Maybe eventually you could get a good enough sample going and ready to figure out what things wouldn't need police escort and what would, and you could roll back shit then. Social workers would be able to directly see what the cops deal with, so you'd have a reasonable avenue for these bright-eyed, silver-spooned revolutionaries to wake up to the reality of what they were calling for.
There's certainly enough graft you could eliminate to produce some of the additional funding, and it pales in comparison to the retarded amounts these protesters want to shovel into "community" organizations that essentially entertain their donors and otherwise fart around when they're not shilling for the lefty fotm cause. But this idea might require a bit of nuance and would take time to see the results of, so it's better to just assume that 5'1" 110lb suzie will be just dandy buzzing on over to the scene of a drug addict hanging around the local starbucks and yelling at people.
