| | TM: ".. and this includes nearly all those out there enforcing the rules of the road. Frankly I don’t even regard these people as police officers or officers of the law because ... So one is stopped for making
an “illegal” U-turn ....
SW: The problem lies in education - not just the academic understanding - which is desperately missing, but that old-fashioned, assertive awareness that other people don't have the right to mess in someone else's business, an awareness that was common 100 years ago.
You both know very little about the police. You have the same citizen's common sense ideas about law enforcement that other people have about philosophy, seflishness, and capitalism.
To take the second point first, the police are educated. You can find departments that require only a high school education. (Though that is an improvement over 100 years ago.) Even if that is the posted minimum, the reality is that competition for those jobs comes from candidates with associate's degrees and increasingly with bachelor's degrees.
This has been going on for over a generation, since the 1960s. (In a Dragnet from 1969, Joe Friday takes a college class at night in sociology. He was upgrading his skills under the LEEA Law Enforcement Education Act.) At my community college, to get a degree in criminal justice, you have to pass a class in symbolic logic so that when some idiot says that because 60% of the men in prison are Black, therefore African Americans are more likely to be criminals, you have the ability to see through the fallacy. To earn an associate in arts in criminal justice at Washtenaw Community College, you must pass a class in statistics, again, so that you are not flummoxed by other people's spurious numbers.
In terms of policing, we learn "community policing" -- weed and seed, fixing broken windows, and other metaphors for preventing crime because crime prevention is more effective than law enforcement.
This era of the educated cop is a generation old. Before that, the improvement was called "professional policing." It was invented by August Vollmer of Berkeley, California, the first department to engage polygraphs, motorcycles, and college courses. Professional police were detached from their patrol neighborhoods so that they could not be corrupted by it, as had been Chicago by the bootleggers.
Before that, cops were political appointees and it is no accident that city governments and police departments are both organized by precincts.
We have one diary (only one, unfortunately) from the 1880s from Boston, the diary of a cop on the beat who recorded his life. He was a roving magistrate, integral to the neighborhood who remediated disputes. When that did not work, someone was hauled before a judge for more formal discussions. He protected a battered housewife, he turned juveniles away from delinquency, all the rest.
We have come back to that -- but added the professionalism of a succeeding generation -- and a college curriculum that includes art, culture, science, literature, and more.
That still leaves you with the problem of who becomes a cop. Guardians are not traders. Get over it.
(Now, myself, well... ok... we're having that discussion elsewhere... so let's skip over that...)
My brother-in-law retired from the Air Police. Nice guy, smart, too. Non-assertive as an officer. Just does the job. So, one day, to start a conversation, I asked him if he thought about the origins of crime. He said, that he had that conversation once before and his answer still stands: "Some people are just scumbags."
I asked, "So, okay, you live in a society with polygamy, but you only want one wife..." and he cut me off and said, "Like I said, some people are just scumbags." He was speaking deeply. He knew I got it. You are raised in a society to have certain morals and values and some people are predators who break those rules, regardless of what they are.
And that's why we have traffic stops. Traffic stops catch criminals because criminals are predators who have no respect for law and order in society. Pull someone over for any violation and don't be surprised when there is an outstanding warrant. Traffic stops catch criminals. Women cops do more stops than men. College educated cops do more stops than high school graduates. Good cops work hard to protect society from anarcho-perpetrating u-turn making college professors who think that orange is a socially acceptable color. If you have no outstanding warrants, then pay the fine for the u-turn, and don't do it again.
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