Back in the day, non-violent crimes were handled by peace officers and violent crimes handled by specialists.
But budgeting, training, progress, and influx of war abundance has merged and blurred the two.
We could end up with a Judge Dredd scenario.
Or we could end the war on terror, which in turn reduces the urgency we have now of eroding privacy, and we can also end the war on drugs, which in turn reduces the incentive for police forces to invade homes and seize property for profit.
I firmly hold the belief all that will happen when the current crop of crappy old people in power die.
Isn't that just as likely to mean that the cycle will produce more of the same? Why do the Baby Boomers have a monopoly on self-serving, harmful policy? "The old generation got it wrong. We'll get it right" is a very common refrain. Pretty much every generation has said it. And with each cycle, you get the same sorts of people in political power.
The sorts of qualities that attract someone to a life in politics, if not the very qualities that make someone successful in politics, tend to be the same qualities that lead to corruption, pandering, opportunism, and all the other vices. It's not a generational thing; it's a human-nature thing. Before long, the next generation will be looking at us and hoping things get better when we finally get off the stage.
I don't mean to be cynical. I'm just attempting to be realistic. I'm hopeful we can do better -- and if I didn't believe that, I'd be pretty damned depressed -- but I'm not basing that hope on the idea that we'll break a mold as old as politics itself.
Why do the Baby Boomers have a monopoly on self-serving, harmful policy?
What's kind of funny is that a good many of the Boomers were of the peace-and-love dope-smoking hippy '60s. They saw first-hand the results of Vietnam.
You'd think they would be the ones to spearhead gay rights and legalization of drugs and avoiding wars of interventionism. But by the '80s is was clear that all that youthful optimism and charity was but a phase.
As the saying goes, people become conservative the minute they have something to conserve.
It's because it is not about generation. It's a matter of social classes, if I may call it that. Most HN's folks are not going to do politics. The ones who end up in political power groups have been through different education and developed mindsets closer to the ones already there, who became their models.
tl;dr: time won't make thing better, we need refactoring
Have a look at the documentary "Growing up in America".
It is about the activists of the 60s, how they thought they could change the world, and what had happened by the 80s.
There was also this idea that everything would improve once the old generation would be dead, but it did not happen.
Right, but this crop of crappy old people will have learned that the wars on terror/drugs were mistakes bred of fear and ignorance. They'll sweep them off the board and clear space to make new and interesting mistakes out of fear and ignorance.
The war on drugs has been around since the 1930s; there have been MANY crops of crappy old people keeping it going. The police constitute a concentrated interest group in favor of the power they get from the various Wars so the policy survives for much the same reason crop subsidies survive. Any policy that bestows concentrated benefits to a small group and widely distributes costs to everyone else is hard to stop once it gets started.
But budgeting, training, progress, and influx of war abundance has merged and blurred the two.
We could end up with a Judge Dredd scenario.
Or we could end the war on terror, which in turn reduces the urgency we have now of eroding privacy, and we can also end the war on drugs, which in turn reduces the incentive for police forces to invade homes and seize property for profit.
I firmly hold the belief all that will happen when the current crop of crappy old people in power die.