In this paper, I intend to address the problems I posed in the assignment, “Problems 1.” There, I mentioned a number of social issues associated with policing. Namely, these were zero-tolerance policies, youth incarceration, and stop-and-frisk procedures. Here, I suggest a number of solutions to these problems.
First, I will run on the assumption that the members of a community are responsible for the well-being of their society and for protecting everyone in the community from harm. The existence of the police does not exempt community members from this responsibility.
The issues I mentioned earlier, while well-intended, are harms to the community. Zero-tolerance policies provide disproportionately heavy consequences for fairly trivial crimes. Youth incarceration punishes youths, who are emotionally and intellectually immature, vulnerable, and prone to make bad decisions by taking away their childhood and destroying their future. Stop-and-frisk practices have been demonstrably racist and ineffective. All of these entities antagonize the community, harm the futures of such community members, are ineffective, and waste time and money.
My suggestion is that we entirely do away with zero-tolerance policies and stop-and-frisk. As an alternative to stop-and-frisk, I suggest installing magnetometers at various subway stations. They can be as inexpensive as $10 but require many staff to run. I suggest innovations in developing a less-costly security system for integration into the subway system. Maybe the structure of the subway entrance and exit system can be improved. I would still recommend that police be stationed to look for suspicious behavior and to check their power, I suggest body cameras and an unrelated officer to oversee that there is no discrimination. I suggest encouraging officers to engage in friendly discussion with the community members and ensure both proper and continuous retraining. I would support legislation that permits easier reemployment for past criminals and sets the minimum age at which one may go to jail to 20 years old as an adult. I would reset the maximum time in prison to 1 year. I would instead increase the number of corrections facilities (focusing on counseling and therapy) to diagnose whether a person can be released or not, determine the condition of the person, provide counseling to rectify unfavorable behavior, reminding them of their role in the community as citizens and providing encouragement to live life in a societally beneficial way. Every effort should be made to rectify the mentally disabled, psychopaths, and pedophiles even though the last two are thought to be uncorrectable. If it is demonstrated they are mentally well enough, they should be let free. If they commit the same crime again, they should be executed because they pose a threat to the community, were falsely thought to be rectified, and will likely fail to be rectified if given a third chance.
http://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/what-works-in-policing/research-evidence-review/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/police-reform/
http://changethenypd.org/community-safety-act
http://www.nyclu.org/news/nyclu-applauds-ny-city-councils-passage-of-community-safety-act
https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice-immigrants-rights/working-end-racial-profiling-aclu-testify-senate-judiciary
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2009/12/29/magnetometers-x-rays-airport-security-technology/
I disagree in the point that you claim the three policies you mentioned are well-intended, but ironically harms to the community. It just happens to be “harms” in the subjective sense where civilians feel like they are harmed emotionally or physically by the police officers. I completely agree with your reasoning as to why those three policies are not exactly the best thing out there. What will these magnetometers detect and what about false detections? What if there are undetectable threats? This is another post with the idea body cameras and I really enjoy that idea being a solution to be able to get rid of discrimination at an everyday life level. I do believe laws that enable past criminals to acquire jobs easier, but maximum time in prison to 1 year is way too little. Prison provides many jobs as well as keeping criminals in check. But 1 year for a murder or severe crimes will be too little. You claimed one year to be maximum time to be prison, but you posed the idea of execution if repeating a crime? You went from soft to maximum punishment too quickly, I feel.
I agree that stop and frisk policies need to be eliminated because, as you mentioned, are ineffective and continues to create distrust between the people and police. However, I disagree with your proposed solutions. Magnetometers, which I am assuming are like metal detectors, will not work well in a subway system. In massive rush hours coupled with the frequent MTA delays, there will surely be opposition among the fast paced New York City community. Everyone nowadays carries metallic objects such as keys and cellphones and detection would go off for nearly everyone. Magnetometers will not be able to detect drug substances and makes their use very limited to possible weapons, which are rarely ever found on people anyway. While legislation to help the formerly incarcerated find jobs will help the cause, it is difficult to convince an employer to hire an ex-convict in an applicant pool of other qualified people, even with proper legislation. Our society teaches us to not trust criminals and it will be difficult to change that position. Instead, the government should have more organizations like “Milk not Jails” to hire ex-convicts. I believe that your execution solution is too harsh to be inflicted on all crimes. Many criminals commit the same crime because they do not have a choice. When faced with a society that is biased towards criminals, they resort to re-commiting crimes to survive. Execution also creates a moral issue among the opposition and such life and death decisions require lengthy judicial review and expensive methods to ensure the person does not suffer.