In this thread we post our most :LIB: takes, and discuss whether that is the logical end point on a given topic or whether we need to lose that last bit of liberalism.
In this thread we post our most :LIB: takes, and discuss whether that is the logical end point on a given topic or whether we need to lose that last bit of liberalism.
It's important to remember that police are actually not very good at investigating crime - for the largest Australian state of New South Wales, only about a third of reported sexual assaults, thefts, robberies etc. are marked by police as finalised (i.e. solved with or without prosecution) by 30 days - 30 days being the measure because anything beyond that tends to introduce things like police attributing every burglary in the last 6 months to someone and marked them as solved.
There is also no reason why you'd need to combine the prevention, intervention (often violence but many ambulance staff have to detain people without utilising much violence), crime investigation and prosecution and doing so introduces strong conflicts of interest.
I wonder if police are actually bad at solving crimes, as in unable to do it, or if it's more apathy/poor use of resources. In the U.S., for instance, there's an enormous backlog of rape kits waiting to be processed. Not processing those rape kits isn't the police being unable to solve crimes so much as it's apathy or poor use of resources. As with a lot of other problems, we have the tools to do better, we're just choosing not to.
Absolutely.
There's certainly apathy and lack of effective use of resources, but even if those were solved you'll still have issues relating to who the investigating police are and how they are trained - i.e. largely not drawn from the community they investigate, a previous role arresting and detaining primarily poor and nonwhite people, racist and sexist views, training in dodgy police forensics and interview techniques that are designed to extract confessions - in addition to training in practices that are designed to obtain pleas of guilty in exchange for a reduction in the burden on defendants where police are also the prosecuting agency.
Oh yeah, no current cops should keep their jobs. My thinking is more that the statistics around solving crimes might not be reflective of our maximum capacity to solve crimes.