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[Maximum Spin]

Not beat cops who are at risk every shift

Statistically, this is basically a fiction. "Beat cop" is not actually a particularly risky occupation.

[smjjames]

A wild and likely unworkable out there idea could be to have internships abroad, see how they do it in places where they do have guns but don't have the same problems.

There was this video a long while ago, I think it was mentioned on this thread actually, of French cops dealing with some robbers who had fake guns (but the cops wouldn't have known) and they dealt with it very calmly. American cops would likely be charging in guns drawn and shouting.

[Egan_BW]

And shooting. From outside the building. Cops here don't even need a fake gun to start shooting, just a hypothetical gun.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Let's replace law enforcement agencies with bears. When a crime is committed a bear is released into the streets. Hopefully he or she can track down the criminal and deal with them accordingly. Likely, because the bear has been starved prior to release, it will just eat someone random. However, I surmise that we will possibly see a reduction in crime... or an increase in bear-related deaths.

Anyways, after the bear has dealt with the criminal--assuming whoever the bears eats was the REAL criminal (after all, if the bear is charged with getting the criminal and eats somebody, that person MUST be the criminal) the bear is tranquilized and given a two week paid, food-free vacation before being rotated back into service.

In more rural and suburban areas we replace the bear with a big cat (cheetah, lion, tiger, jaguar, etc.) so that our officers can cover more ground.

[smjjames]

Cheetahs are wimpy, fast as hell, yes, but wimpy.

[Egan_BW]

These are armed criminals we're talking about, bears aren't going to be enough! We need to set bombs underneath everyone's houses, and whenever a crime happens we detonate one.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

These are armed criminals we're talking about, bears aren't going to be enough! We need to set bombs underneath everyone's houses, and whenever a crime happens we detonate one.

I like that. Crime will cease to exist once we institutionalize terrorism. Perhaps we should just forgo the element of waiting for a crime to happen altogether and simply apprehend a pre-determined number of citizens every year. Names shall be drawn from a hat and sentences from a noise-based RNG.

We'll still need the bears of course, to officiate the process.

[smjjames]

These are armed criminals we're talking about, bears aren't going to be enough! We need to set bombs underneath everyone's houses, and whenever a crime happens we detonate one.

I like that. Crime will cease to exist once we institutionalize terrorism. Perhaps we should just forgo the element of waiting for a crime to happen altogether and simply apprehend a pre-determined number of citizens every year. Names shall be drawn from a hat and sentences from a noise-based RNG.

We'll still need the bears of course, to officiate the process.

A sapient hat.

[Frumple]

That works fine for a day or two, but when you start talking about replacing the police with soldiers things change.  Soldiers aren't trained for dealing with civilians, they are trained to destroy the enemy.  I understand entirely that the police are doing a terrible job and need to be reigned in and probably completely re-trained, but the military is NOT the answer to this problem.

I agree that they are better trained, but they aren't trained to do what police do.

Uh. Pretty sure soldiers actually are trained for dealing with civvies, though? If they weren't the afghanistan/iraq situations would have been even more of a clusterfuck than they were. It's not the primary or only training, obviously enough, but to a fair extent what we've seen over the last handful of years seems to suggest whatever they're getting is better than what cops are in some places. If the military really isn't getting any that says a hell of a thing about police training in parts of the country, heh.

Probably lay fair odds that enemy thing is part of why, though. Far as I'm aware part of destroying the enemy is identifying it, and for various reasons most fucked up military training seems to be managing to be more careful about that than police, from time to time.

[Jimmy]

Just sink a bunch of money into robotics development to create a bullet-proof cyborg law enforcement officer and the problem's solved!

[Zangi]

There are still massive fundamental differences in the two groups.  If you throw some rocks and garbage at the police they'll raise their shields, toss smoke and tear-gas, and probably turn the hoses on you (if they get really worried they start shooting with rubber bullets and beanbags).  Do the same to soldiers and they start shooting people and preparing to shell the area with mortars.  The police have been increasingly 'militarized' in recent history, but the gap between how they deal with things and how actual soldiers deal with things is unbelievable.

I dunno man, seems cops are pretty apt at shooting people at the slightest provocation.  And I guess we are assuming that we just plop whatever rambo military with a badge and throw em at our civvies?
Anyways, the scenario you describe seems to be for dealing with riots.  And well, if we do allow the 'policified' military to use lethal/military grade weapons.  It is not like our 'militarized' police don't have lethal weapons either.

[nenjin]

I think the case being made is that the military has more training, discipline and consequences for their actions than your garden variety police department. That doesn't make them better civilian police, but it does give them better control over their impulse to use force. When you've been shot at by actual hostile enemies in an actual combat, suddenly a guy on the ground in a submission position begging for their life seems a little less threatening.

[NullForceOmega]

Once again, the U.S. military receives NO training whatsoever that has anything to do with handling civilian population, there are individual M.O.S. (such as M.P.s, but that opens a different can of worms) that have some level of that kind of training but the vast bulk of soldiers get nothing.  There is no training in investigation of anything, there is no training in conflict resolution, no training in just about any field that is related to police work.  You cannot equate soldiers mostly sitting in their bases and carrying out patrols with a dedicated police force that gets called to domestic disputes and other nuanced situations.

Police serve entirely too many specialized functions to be replaced by soldiers who don't have those skillsets.  I'm not arguing that their trigger discipline isn't better, I'm trying to explain that replacing cops with soldiers is the same as performing complex neurosurgery with a battleax instead of a scalpel.

I get it, the police are really not functioning the way that they are intended, but military intervention is in no way a substitute for them.  You really don't seem to be grasping just what these differences ARE, you are badly over-simplifying how police interact with the public and SERIOUSLY failing to grasp that soldiers have NONE of the skills necessary to replace them.

The fact that soldiers are less likely to escalate a situation is very heavily mitigated by the lack of the skills to do everything else that a police officer does.

Edit: Maybe I'm doing a bad job of explaining this, am I not providing the right kind of information?  Am I making the wrong assumptions about general knowledge of military procedures and training?  I can try to give better information but I need to know where the misunderstanding is coming in.

[nenjin]

I'm going to disagree in part. Soldiers in Afghanistan have both had to get familiar with how to investigate, AND how to handle civilian populations who alternatively may embrace them or try to kill them. In some ways they've been acting as de facto law enforcement in op areas where there is no standing police force.

Not to overemphasize the skills that they have versus police officers, but "NO TRAINING" is patently incorrect.

[NullForceOmega]

The parts of the military acting as law enforcement in those places are M.P.s, they are already trained in the necessary skillsets to carry out those jobs.  M.P.s are an extremely small subset of soldiers (the U.S. Army is around two million strong, and the M.P.s are a very small percentage of that, for contrast there are around 1.1 million police officers in the U.S.), they are adequate for a place that is effectively under martial law but there are nowhere near enough of them to go around.

If we want to discuss M.P.s however, the entire conversation changes, because we aren't really talking about using the military as police then, we're talking about effectively re-creating the Gestapo, a state military police force with broad powers.

I am not saying that it would necessarily be used the same way the Gestapo was, but the possibility exists and it isn't a good idea.

If we want to continue discussing replacing police with soldiers then the same problem exists, soldiers do not have any form of formal training in any of the basic or advanced skillset necessary to operate as police.