I hear you, I see you, I fell for you! Yes Black Lives Matter!
If you are a police officer and your priorities are not in this order:
- Safeguard life
- Teach and enforce the law
- Your own wellness
then you need to find a different job!
Imagine a soldier going to battle and putting his life first above of his duty.
Reverse this values and the police becomes difficult to be distinguished from a gang, it becomes the reverse of what we all think it should be. No policeman can be proud and be respected with a reversed system of values. I have faith and pray that most officers have it right
We need to stop looking at policing as “normal jobs” because no normal employee has the right to kill people (basically any of its customers and employers). Policing is an essential occupation, is so different from any other human activity that we have to see it as it is, Special!
I found this TVO documentary called “Coppers”, revealing about what is wrong with the current system and how it ends up hurting people both citizens and police officers.
I also do not understand the role of police unions. In general unions fight for the rights of their members against greedy employers and/or dangerous work environments. The problem is that we the citizens are the employer of the police services. In this case unions fight against us and put the lives of the officers above the people they should protect. It basically makes the police unions antisocial. Maybe a better solution would be to declare police as essential service and have a hard talk about their pay and work safety. Clearly we want to pay our officers well and yet tied to the median wage of the people they serve and keep them as safe as possible and yet not at the expense of citizen’s safety.
The above requirements may be very difficult to obtain without employing advanced technology we now posses.
We have now the technology to finally solve this problem in a way that can be fair and safe for everyone. By combining the new AI capabilities, 5G and/or Starlink (or equivalent but publicly controlled) systems, drones and robotics we can rethink and reshape the notion of safety and policing in a potential #SelfReliant society.
I’m not talking about autonomous drones and robots that can roam free and take decisions of their own. That would be very very wrong and scary! I’m talking about human controlled technology where members of the public and law experts are together as a group remote controlling the technology in order to safeguard life, teach law and keep the peace.
We need to extract the police officers from interacting directly with humans so we can keep them safe and cool minds can prevail. Additionally any mission involving robots and automation MUST also combine civilian groups monitoring every mission where machines are controlled by officers. This is when officers can be helped by society avoid misconduct at any level.
The semi automated remote presence machines can also take the tedious work away from humans and allow them to analyze the big picture social wellness and be proud of the work they do.
Some YouTube videos exemplifying the technologies I’m pointing to, some are sales pitches for the products but please look beyond that, just at the current capabilities and imagine future capabilities.