Dystopian Startup Lets the Wealthy Rent Off Duty Cops on Demand

The police in the United States teaches the Peelian principles but it's heart is in its origins as hunters of escaped slaves. In the 20th century, there are two notable shifts in police trends:

The first was Prohibition and the rise of the booze-runner gangs. This is where Cosa Nostra got a foothold here in the states and even after Prohibition was repealed, it was already installed, and this pushed law enforcement to start identifying civilian neighbors as other. Anyone not law enforcement was on the outside. By the time of the International War On Terror (and the PATRIOT Act) then the people were not just suspect but enemy on the pretense that terrorists were among us.

(There was a similar sense of this during the cold war, in which we were encouraged to suspect our neighbors as communists or Soviet spies, but since they didn't really blow things up - ...yet... - it became a running joke among us civvies, especially after the McCarthy scare ended.)

As a note, the whole Saints Row series of video games is based off the gang myth, and that street kids in the urbs unable to afford new Nikes could rise up to become bosses of international syndicates.

The second was Nixon's war on drugs, essentially a war on blacks (which -- it can be argued -- is a war on the poor). It started with cannabis. Then the DEA was formed which had easy license to do SWAT raids on houses (rather than knocking with a very specific warrant). This is also the era when gang myths rose. Not that gangs didn't exist -- they most certainly did -- but the police gang experts claimed they were simultaneously feral teens that could not be reasoned with, and international crime syndicates that command all the drug trafficking with an iron fist and an AK47. Mostly it was teens doing mischief with little to do with the drug shipments blended in with all the other freight.

(And the gangs didn't really have guns until the police started selling confiscated firearms on the cheap in back-alley deals. I'd like to think those were an illegitimate racket, but it wouldn't surprise me when they were endorsed by department admin.)

Anyhow, the brutality of US law enforcement became evident after the Furguson unrest of 2014 (the killing of Michael Brown, where we saw officers pointing military weapons with poor trigger discipline.) At that point the public realised that BLM had been right about Trayvon Martin. Videos of officer involved killings became ubiquitous, and we were supposed to see reform after George Floyd and the 2020 unrest nationwide. (We were also supposed to abolish ICE as well, and are FOing what happens for not pushing the matter).

So yes, absolutely this is an old, old problem. Another one of dozens that our national failure to address is coming back to haunt us.

I look forward to dying at your side.

Cyberpunk is not only a critique and warning, but what's important is that even its dystopian part explores the human diversity, just projected onto reality in a very different way. It feels deep, scary, cruel, but not degenerate.

Our reality feels superficial and degenerate. As if everything were turning fake. Even today's wars feel almost fake. That is, the ruin and murder parts are very much not. But they are not surrounded by much of any sincere emotion or ideology. Not even the kind central powers had in WWI (disgustingly bland propaganda about French and British negro soldiers, our good land with oaks and rivers versus their land of pesky republican ashen, barbaric Russian hordes and so on ; well, the Entente side wasn't much better, but better).

I mean, there's such cyberpunk as this too, and there's always depth. It's just different from how in books you feel as if the depth were coming itself to you, while IRL you have to remove distractions and forget everything and drop your hands, and then you might see.

Hug your favourites, and good luck in the Climate Wars.

That's too slow a thing to lend its name to actual wars.

Late Rome was influenced a fair bit by climate change, yet nothing about its wars is usually called by that association.

In my experience firefighters are alright. Cops like shooting people but firefighters just want to put fires out and otherwise be the hero, they want nothing more than to be pictured saving a cat for a house fire. If you want to be the hero you can't be the villain, cops don't care though because they get off on bullying people.

The big deal is intentional homicides, which we have at a higher rate than most industrialized nations. The US used to have a rate comparable to slavic, post-eastern block countries but they've gotten worse and the US is catching up to Russia.

Similarly, US suicide rates.

Gun access facilitates this, as does recreational drug access (specifically alcohol). However desperation and precarity (food, housing, family, etc.) are all factors.

The US would solve the majority of its crime problem (based on harm: death, destruction, cost) by investigating and prosecuting white collar crime (and mandating businesses / government pay amble restitution to survivors)

Regarding petty crime (including intentional homicide) most of those would be solved with welfare programs and drug rehab.

There will still be serial killers, but they'll be rare enough that we can write true-crime books about the handful in a given era.