Saturday, August 21, 2010

Why you should be worried about our police even if you feel safe around police

Arising from this.

It seems the best strategy the police can think of when faced with a large peaceful crowd with a minority of criminal element hiding inside is to arrest everyone.

Apart from the fact that the world can be defined as a large peaceful crowd with a minority of criminal element hiding inside, we should be worried because arresting everyone appears to be the best strategy they can think of.

That's not a very good strategy, is it? Any of us could have thought of that!

Think about your own profession or vocation or calling. You sometimes face challenges that look impossible to outsiders, right? And, using your training and experience and expertise and talents, you can find solutions to these challenges that outsiders would never have thought of, with a better outcome than they could have ever achieved themselves, right?

If part of your hair gets cut off by accident and you look like an idiot, you'd expect a professional hairdresser to be able to work around it to give you a flattering cut that looks like it's on purpose. It would be unacceptable for them to shave your head. If you stain a difficult-to-clean piece of clothing and take it to a professional drycleaner, you'd expect them to come up with some way to remove the stain without wrecking the clothes. It would be unacceptable for them to throw it in the washing machine with Tide and bleach and hot water.

It would be unacceptable for your translator to run the text through Babelfish. It would be unacceptable for your dentist to tie one end of a string to your sore tooth and the other end to a doorknob. It would be unacceptable for the Morgentaler clinic to come at you with a wire coathanger. It would be unacceptable for a hired hitman to just bomb the whole city where the target lives. If any of these things happened, you'd assume they're incompetent.

The reason we have professionals in the first place is that they can do things way better than we ever could ourselves - more accurately and precisely and effectively, with better results and less damage.

It appears the police couldn't come up with a better strategy for finding a small criminal element hidden in a large peaceful crowd than to arrest the entire crowd. Which any schoolchild could have thought of. If you trust and/or depend on the police to keep you safe, you should be worried about this.

1 comment:

laura k said...

It really calls into question the entire notion of police professional and training, doesn't it?