About the Police

[teddywolf]

One of the recent flaps that has gone back and forth between real life and online has tangentially brought up attitudes toward the police. One of the important things about modern civic police forces is that they gain their legitimacy through fair, nondiscriminatory and effective police work. So, I wanted to ask people at large.

You can make comments below. People can comment anonymously here. And for anybody who is coming here for the first time and is worried, I have never worked for or with any law enforcement agency and do not currently work for or with one.

[Poll #1974926]

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

I think that there are certain groups, notably racial minorities and members of various alternative-sexuality communities, who have good reason to distrust the police. There's a long history of discriminatory enforcement against those disenfranchised communities.

Still, they are the only appropriate tool for certain things, especially crimes that have an actual victim where someone is killed or injured, or where their property is taken. Without a trained body of designated people, answerable to a government, who can use physical force and in some cases deadly force on our behalf, we're all reduced to vigilantism, and that's a social structure that sucks far worse. Vigilantism also tends to favor the strong and turn the weak into victims, which is exactly the situation that a system of laws is intended to prevent.