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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31241 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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My only wild idea would be to break up all larger police departments into smaller (but overlapping) jurisdictions.

This is similar to what we have in Allegheny County, PA, and it's not a model to emulate. In the county there are 130 municipalities, of which 109 have their own police departments. Allegheny County Police and PA State Troopers have blanket jurisdiction over the entire county, but that jurisdiction is somewhat limited. Then add in all the various special-use police departments—university police, transit police, housing police, etc. Then add in the various state agencies with sworn enforcement arms that regularly conduct law enforcement activities in the county like the PA Fish and Boat Commission, which is responsible for patrolling the rivers, and PA Liquor Control Board, and there are over 150 entities within the county that could conceivably be called police departments, each with its own jurisdiction that may or may not overlap with another jurisdiction or jurisdiction, whether in geography, subject matter, or both. The end result is that there are a ton of tiny police departments that only field a few officers and are woefully underfunded and provide their employees low pay and inadequate training. The guy who shot Antwon Rose had been dismissed from the University of Pittsburgh Police, essentially for being an asshole, and took a job with the East Pittsburgh Police (East Pittsburgh is a separate borough from the City of Pittsburgh), a community of less than 2000 and a median household income of around $30,000. Though he was ultimately acquitted, there was general agreement that he wasn't cut out to be a policeman and that he wouldn't have been one if these small boroughs weren't so desperate for warm bodies that anyone with prior experience was automatically given a job.

This is where the

way for the results there to end up expanding the latter jurisdictions and budgets at the expense of the former

bit, which I haven't figured out at all, would have to come in. Market competition works because consumers have both incentive and ability to switch to a better competitor. If it's not easy to switch then you don't get competition, just fragmentation.

I jokingly suggested Shadowrun's private police forces before as a solution to police unions, maybe I'll do it again here--if each of those PDs has to compete on service quality, it will definitely cut down on the number of departments Allegheny has, making it sound like less of a tollbooth kingdom after some point.

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