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Comment by keerthiko

From my understanding that's a core goal of the "defund the police" movement. The police as it exists in this country right now is a state militia. We need more 911 respondents that are not armed to the teeth, to join the corpus of medics and firefighters, replacing the police in 80% of use cases. Noise complaint? Homeless person shooting up? Car accident? Cops are over-equipped and undertrained in most of these cases. They respectively need negotiation, compassion and first-aid, and a logistics/insurance official.

Cops don't necessarily need to be trained in all these things, because cops suck up so much funding to deal with the few cases they might actually be necessary (gang shootout, protest security, armed robbery, etc), and one official can only be reliably trained in so many things. They just need to not be sent for these non-violent cases in favor of specialized unarmed social workers.

parent keerthiko 3 years ago

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