Citizen Policing

Once more the police are in the news whining about how respecting people's rights makes thier job too hard.  My solution--sack the lot of them.  The police didn't always exist the way they did now, and there's no reason to think that the current state should be the final one.

Complete police aboliton, however, is a bridge too far for many people; but what if we could keep the function, policing, but do away the the identity/group, police, by spreading the function out evenly over the population.  I'm not suggesting a return to the days of the hue and cry, we can be a bit more organised than that.

In the quarter that each person turns 35, say, they would leave their job, and attend a three month training programme.  Following this, they would serve the community as patrol officers for another six or nine months.  At the end to that period, they would be released from their service and return to private life.  This would result in somewhere in the region of 30-45k active officers in NZ, depending on how long the service was; even at the low end this is a more than doubling of current police cohort, let no one accuse me of being soft on crime! Specialised functions, most obviously that of detective, would remain professionalised, shuffled off into some other part of the civil service.

Such a system would have many advantages over the current way of doing things.  First, of course, it is democratic: it takes seriously the idea that the people, all the people, may govern themselves.  It takes one of the roots of the modern soverign state, the monopoly on legitimate force, and spreads it out over the entire polity.  It involves people in thier own governance, and recognises that democracy entails not just the right to govern oneself, but the responsibility.  And by making everyone a cop, instead of restricting it to a self selecting subset of society, we might just see a reduction in racist and class based abuses.

More practically, it breaks the police's esprit de corps, it destroys their separation from society, knocks down the blue wall of silence.  Certainly there will be abuses of power, but we have those now, and by making policing a fleeting part of life instead of an identity, the IPCA might actually grow some teeth.  The citizens patrols could be organised into overlapping jurisdictions, with bonuses available to anyone who arrests a fellow officer, pending successful prosecution.

Besides all that, it will break up careers, and so harm both careerism and productivism, the terrible scourges of capitalism.  It will mix up society, bring people together who would otherwise not have interacted, maybe even increase our understanding of each other.  These last may not eventuate, it's hard to know without trying it, and really, could it be that much worse than the current system? The police here in New Zealand are not as powerful, or psychotic, as those in the US, but with their constant calls to be armed, and to have more powers, they do seem to be headed in that direction, we would do well to stop them now.