Welp. Tonight I read 130 pages about the philosophy and historical evolution of the modern institution of police work, and I'm now here to tell you that I understand why people flee civilization and become hermits.

It is so, so, horrendously complicated.

I'm too burned out to do this justice tonight with one of my longer essays (and frankly I'm feeling kind of hopeless after developing a better understanding of the factors involved), but I'll share a few thoughts.

First, a fundamental barrier to any kind of police reform is going to be about economic pressure and inequality issues. I now believe it's not incorrect to say that police work is inherently racist in America, but not because cops are inherently racist.

Furthermore, it's not useful to say that as an argument for ANYTHING because it's so nuanced that it's doomed to be misinterpreted. The people playing that line back mostly have no idea why what they're saying is correct. It's reduced to extremely simplistic terms for most people

Second, the only likely way to improve outcomes in police work is to transform police work from a military class of work to a professional class of work and basically every possible factor is working against this outcome.

Again, I can't see this being implemented in anything but the most shallow, ceremonial ways because of the massive investment and effort required, and anything less than a complete transformation would be regarded as a failure and politically derided. This is the likely outcome.

There are no incentives to do it for most of the actors involved and many bad faith actors in numerous positions that would actively attempt to subvert it for their own benefit, and they'd probably view their actions as justified.

In order to have a police force you want, which keeps the peace and reduces senseless acts of harm within your community in a fair way that resorts to minimal acts of force, we need well-funded cops with great personal discretion and high status, who are also liked and trusted.

But the very nature of their work erodes trust and likability within the community, shaped by factors outside of the control of any individual policeman and rooted in economic inequality that lead to differences in status among competing groups.

Structural inequality and deeply ingrained negative attitudes toward groups that are perceived as low status will continue to erode any attempts at a more just police force. This is where we get structural attacks on marginalized groups. But not because ACAB; that's too easy!

It's in the embedded attitudes of society toward those groups plus a scarcity mindset over competition for resources that create the incentives which shape police work as we know it. They're operating in the system we all find ourselves in and can't get out any more than we can.

Basically what I'm saying is that this too is Moloch and tonight I have no hope for our crumbling society to pick itself up out of the ashes and fix things without fragmentation into many small, competing groups.

Like... they literally made attempts at fixing the same problems we're grappling with now in the 60s and what we got was community police outreach, which became an internal joke and was massively underfunded and everyone pointed at it as being misguided and ineffective

I am so skeptical we'll do better this time and I so wish I wasn't

Oh and in case you need more despair, one of the primary factors fueling this is that focusing on a career in law enforcement effectively excludes you from all other skilled labor positions

Of course they protect their own, none of them have other options if they get fired