Social work isn't law enforcement as much as it's a role thrown onto police like so many other things because it's an easy hit for voters.

Social workers call in cops all the time.

That’s not quite the same thing. And here in Philly if you are going into situations where you expect or want the cops to bail you out of an emergency you are going to be very very very very quickly disabused of that notion.

I think I understated the quickness with which you would be disabused of this notion.

The biggest problem: the police unions, which are usually tightly connected to the local Republican Party apparatus & thus very powerful. Camden got around this in 2013 by axing its police department & transferring its functions to the county sheriff's office: www.camdencounty.com/ccpd-buildin...

In a lot of places, it doesn’t make sense for every town and city to have a police department simply from an efficiency standpoint. It’s also significantly cheaper for municipalities to arrange agreements with county police departments and sheriff’s offices.

Absolutely. I think policing should be unified at no lower than the state level.

That is, what do you think cops are doing now that could be replaced by social workers who aren't just going to call in the cops?

Many many things. Dealing with unsheltered, dealing with drug users, dealing with people having health or mental health emergencies. Various forms of traffic accidents.

And probably a good number of disputes and civil interactions besides.

I’m not even sure this is in dispute as it’s essentially one of the most common critiques of the use of cops there is.

It may be common, but it's misdirected. Nobody has ever actually explained who is supposed to do these things, other than "cops but with no guns," and I see no evidence that there are people lining up to take jobs as unarmed cops.

Cities tend not to function well this way. And there’s every piece of evidence that it’s not necessary. Shit. In the UK. The vast majority of cops aren’t armed.

OK but that just goes back to their original point re: the prevalence of guns in the US.

Uh. Ok.

Most traffic enforcement should be done by cameras I don’t love the surveillance state vibes of that but I like armed cops patrolling roadways even less

I think the issue is, what do you do about people actively threatening public safety by their driving? Issuing a camera ticket to someone doing 35 in a 30 is fine, but someone doing 95 in a 45 needs to go to jail.

Yeah you have someone arrest them At that point it’s pretty clear someone has to arrest them and the sort of person who does that might be violent, so cops Ideally they’d be doing that though rather than more minor things

Yeah, precisely, I just think the idea that that means "we can get rid of cops" is silly. We aren't going to need fewer traffic cops just because most enforcement is put on cameras. Most cops aren't traffic cops to begin with.

There are 392 state police highway patrol officers in all of Nevada. My entire county only has one.

In the long run the solution is probably computer-enforced speed limits. Which is even more "big brother" but I have to admit the idea has merits.

Anecdotally I hear first responders in many of those instances do end up just calling the cops the second it seems like there’s a possibility the person is physically dangerous

And is this in every instance? There just seems to be a complete denial about the nature of these interactions. I pass homeless people every day. I have somehow managed to survive until his day without even a sour word. I’ve been in a traffic accident (luckily only two) but I somehow managed to

Survive without waving a gun in face of the person driving the other car.

if someone presents a possible threat of physical danger, yes. Like by all means, wherever we can, let’s get first responders best equipped for the problem at hand to respond, and that’s not always cops. But also I don’t expect social workers to physically restrain people who get dangerous.

I’m not sure anyone proposed this. I asked very clearly why this is being treated as all or nothing. The other side seems to be agreeing but then saying we have to be armed for every public encounter.

I don’t even know what to do with the idea that all police responses are assumed to include law-breaking.

I also wouldn’t expect social workers to clear encampments in public spaces of all the people who specifically refused housing assistance. You actually do need cops for that.

There is no one in the threads that I am included in that says there is never a need for cops or armed cops. That’s just a complete strawman. The argument WAS made that you couldn’t have unarmed people doing anything related to what cops do. Because no one would ever take the job.

I really don’t know how much you could safely shift the balance of responses right now; I am willing to give it a shot but I don’t trust the loudest advocates to do it with the care and deliberation I think making those changes requires.

This seems a very reasonable opinion.

The nature of the interaction of a call for police service is inherently adversarial, because the assertion is that some law has been broken.

Which is a problem! Homelessness shouldn't be criminalized. That's the problem, not that people who are showing up to deal with criminal law are armed.

Ok. That seems to be precisely the point that I was making.

Yep. The reality is that my life safety comes first. If nothing else, for the practical reason that if I get hurt, I'm now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The difference is that they are not "dealing with" these situations from a law enforcement perspective. The merit of non-law enforcement interventions does not contradict the point that enforcing the law against a heavily armed populace is very fraught.

Probably good that I didn’t make that argument then.

You did, though. You brought up social workers as evidence that there is a broad willingness to do unarmed law enforcement work in the US.

I never claimed they were or should be doing law enforcement work. The exact opposite. I have to believe you understand fully well what I was saying as it is a pretty commonly held and a waiver view as well as described in detail further in the threads. And one that both the OP and others

Basically all agree with except for some weird semantic or circular discussion point people want to pretend to have.

I know that. I'm just saying you're fundamentally missing the original point about people's unwillingness to do *law enforcement work* in the US while unarmed. If you want to say that social workers should be called before cops in many situations, that's fine, but it's a separate argument.

You're arguing "if social workers can deal with these situations without guns, why can't cops", and I'm pointing out that they're not dealing with the situations in the same way at all, so the risks (real and perceived) are not the same.

I’m absolutely not arguing this and didn’t say I was. Take your bad faith elsewhere.

bsky.app/profile/bana...

This is precisely what I said. You’re choosing to nitpick in order to have an argument. I don’t tolerate that shit here. The moose outside Bluesky should have told you.

Any of those situations could involve people with firearms and the willingness to use them to avoid consequences for their actions. As a volunteer EMT, we are specifically trained *not* to engage in situations where our safety could be compromised, until police have secured the scene.

So the vision of America is that since every single solitary interaction could include people with firearms no one should ever engage with anyone in public until all the participants have been violently detained, handcuffed and are sitting in jail. That’s pretty dark.

No, but if I'm called to a report of someone having a mental health crisis, I'm certainly not going to engage with that person until I have police on scene, because the reality is that lots of people with mental health problems have guns here!

Sounds like you’ve identified the problem quite well.

The problem is not the people, it's the fucking guns, and until we recognize that the Second Amendment is an obsolete relic which needs to be written out of the Constitution just as the three-fifths compromise was, we're all just pointlessly tinkering at the edges of the problem.

You’ll get no argument from me. I’d be rid of the 2A and almost all guns in a hot second if I had the chance. You’d still be doing the wrong thing by relying on police to do what it does, at least in the north-eastern cities I’ve lived in.

This true but 2% or so of police interactions involve a subject with a firearm. This is probably lower than 7/11 clerks in Texas. It’s just not reasonable concern- or- if it is, then a much larger portion of service workers should be armed.

This is M&M analogy territory, though. A 1-in-50 chance that the person I'm about to engage with in an adversarial manner has at his instant disposal a device that could easily kill me is enough to make any reasonable person want an equally-powerful means of self-defense equally easily at hand.

I wouldn't get on an airplane if there were a 1-in-50 chance it was going to crash into the side of a mountain. If it's your job then let's say you engage in one of these interactions that has a 1-in-50 chance of going bad every day. 200 working days in a year, .98^200 = 0.018

So that 2% chance of any given interaction means that, even with this (very conservative) estimate, there's a 98.2% chance you'll encounter at least one of these 1-in-50 interactions in a given year. I'm not taking those odds.

This all insane. My mistake. I should have backed out of this right at the beginning.

Well, “interaction” just means the person detained had a gun- not that they’re going to use it- the probability of the interaction going violent is way lower. But I thought this was the whole point of police hero worship, so yea I mean if you’re a coward you probably shouldn’t do public safety work

Furthermore, you take those odds every time you get into a car- which has a very high likelihood of crashing

Yes, you take that chance when you're a cop, and with that, you receive the ability to respond with lethal force yourself. You don't just sign up to be target practice.

The key difference is that the social workers are *calling in backup*, so there’s a layer between the cops getting involved and more scope to scale back armed patrols

Like having some non-cop third party in a position to say “does this require people with guns” is still a net good.

I can’t even actually believe someone would dispute this.

Because of mandatory reporting laws.