Right there with you on that one. If I had it my way, I’d let them all quit, then divert funding from police to social workers and incorporate them into the first-responders network.
Of course, if I had it my way, police would also (at a minimum) have similar training requirements as EMTs, would belong to a union who answered to voters, not other cops, and a whole bunch of other changes to limit their power and militarization.
I say let most of the cops quit and put that funding into training social workers to be first responders to pretty much everything except armed robberies and up.
We tried that when Biden was in office and all these new body cam laws were passed. So many cops threatened to quit, politicians backed down and let police unions retain control of the cameras and recordings.
You’re right, there’s no expectation to privacy in public.
HOWEVER, if I follow you around in public, every time you leave your house, all day, every day, and record all of your public activities when I do so, that’s still a crime, and it’s called “stalking”.
Furthermore, when there is no reasonable suspicion a crime has occurred, merely investigating that public footage would be akin to following that person in public, which is defined as a “search” in the eyes of the law.
So, the sticky legal issue is, you can legally record it. But, unless you have a reasonable suspicion someone has committed a crime, the fourth ammendment prevents you from watching it. If all one needs to do is watch a video to violate our rights, its perfectly reasonable to expect us not to want that video watched.
It’s not difficult to understand.
We hate the idea of only our government and the police benefitting from and having control over that surveillance. We hate the idea of being taxed so we can be constantly monitored, then prevented from accessing the surveillance footage we paid for when it could exonerate us or hold police accountable.
Surely you can understand it’s more about who controls and benefits from the surveillance than the surveillance itself?
Don’t speak the words our corporate oppressors demand. They want you to believe concepts like sex, murder, drugs, and suicide are too adult, too dirty to be discussed explicitly in public.
Don’t believe them. Say the words you mean. Use language that’s accurate, not what’s preferred by oligarchs for “marketing reasons”.
It’s the standard naming convention for all US police unions.
Yeah, I could see that working, IF training requirements matched the authorized use of force.
The big problem in the US is that most local PDs look more like SWAT teams, but lack the appropriate training to make responsible choices with the power they’ve been given. My vision involves both de-militarizing the police, along with increasing training requirements for the ones remaining.
It’s absolutely absurd that we give gear and equipment to military soldiers with years of training, send them to an active war zone on the other side of the world, and tell them they have to follow rules when they use that gear and equipment in an act of force against an enemy combatants.
Then, we take that same gear and equipment, give it to police officers with 6 weeks of training, and tell them they’re immune from any prosecution resulting from an act of force against a US citizen.
Literally, enemy combatants fighting a war against our military have more rights and protections than tax-paying, law-abiding citizens on US soil simply interacting with police.