One of the many, many complaints about the white nationalist rally in Virginia a few days ago, and the subsequent violence, was that the cops just sorta stood on the sidelines. Interestingly, the same complaint was made some months ago in Berkeley, California, after Antifa and similar types went on a rampage, committing acts of vandalism and violence.
A complaint against police in the US over the last couple decades is that they’ve become militarized. When I was a kid, a SWAT team would be called in when there was a terrorist takeover, or a heavily armed bank robbery, or supervillains stealing City Hall… you know, *big* crimes. These days SWAT teams and tactics are used to kick in the doors of people suspected of having a few ounces of ditch weed. Small police departments are proudly getting MRAP armored personnel carriers. And of course, groups such as BLM have spent several years screaming about cops just hauling off and shooting unarmed folk for no reason whatsoever.
So you’d think with a record like that, the cops would be *all* *over* violence in the streets, wading in swinging billyclubs while armored up like Lancelot. And yet, when it *finally* makes sense for the cops to go in wielding excessive force… they’re not, apparently.
I highly doubt that there’s any sort of coordinated strategy among police departments all across the land. Instead, I think it’s not unreasonable to suppose that after taking a beating in the press for a few years police are seeing situations with a million cell phone and TV cameras and deciding that discretion is the better part of avoiding a police brutality claim.
But since nobody can ever find and maintain the middle ground, since moderation is simply seen as being just as bad as The Other Guy, I suspect the pendulum will, sooner or later, swing back and the police will deal more directly with violent protests:
Or maybe they’ll jsut go that one extra step…
I still think that *eventually* we’ll see robot cops. So long as the source codes are open for public examination, they are (somehow) unhackable, and they’ve proven capable, robocops should make great ways to deal with riots and violent protests and the like. Heck, Dubai apparently already has one, though it’s minimally useful.
Science Fiction has already shown that robot cops are a technology with no apparent down sides.
