[Sir_Substance]

If it's ok for us to deal with violent people by:

a) gunning them down in the streets

b) beating the shit out of them

c) injecting them with hilarious overdoses of drugs and crossing our fingers

then why would we pay for police?

If that's ok, we might as well go back to old west times and just have everyone carry revolvers, possibly calling the town apothecary with his bottle of ether if we think we need it. It'll be way cheaper than maintaining a standing police department.

The whole point is that police are supposed to be trained and equipped to handle disturbances without harming the person being detained. There are options for this, including that so rarely used tactic, defusal.

Like, we pay police overtime. Cordon the person off, give them space but don't let them leave, wait until they get hungry even if it takes 12 hours, and then bribe them with pizza to come quietly. Build rapport with them over the entire incident. How often do we see that strategy deployed before we fall back to injecting ketamine?

[nemo44x]

Almost every police encounter event ends without incident. There really seems to be an issue right now with selection bias of these events.

I agree there is always room to consider other ways of handling outlying incidents. Injecting drugs into people violates so many principles of freedom it seems hard to justify it.

The pizza idea could work in some cases but I think we also have to realize that some people being taken into custody are irrational either from mental illness, and/or drug use, could be armed and/or violent, and cordoning them off may work or it may not. And then a potentially armed, violent, and irrational person is a threat to innocent people. The police have many objectives and one of those is to take suspects into custody safely so they can have just administrated. However, the safety of the public might be of higher priority and if asked to make a choice between hurting a suspect that appears irrational and violent so as to not risk the liberties of the public or respecting their liberties but putting the liberties of the public at risk, they’ll choose to optimize for the former.

Policing will never be perfect and there is a reasonable amount of error we should tolerate. And there should be accountability. I do agree that it would appear, at least from the stories that tend to make the news, that diffusion could be employed more.