Streamlining the existing process by disintermediating middlemen like politicians and police chiefs.
Law enforcement officers are, according to Peelian principles, agents of the state and members of the community.
If they can be rented then they are no longer police officers but mob goons. Hred guns. The same category as mercenaries (PMCs) and hit-men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
established around 1850
Oh rain on me dystopia.
This is taking advantage of Off-Duty officers and the way Extra Jobs work. You too can hire a police officer if you negotiate with that agency without this app. This is how some small towns are able to get police officers from other agencies to patrol their neighborhoods, and not just the rich ones, when they are short cops. This app is a shortcut to that and yes it is a problem because they are essentially offering a gig job to cops much like Uber or Doordash and seem to be bypassing a lot of the negotiating. But this is not at all a new concept. You know those cops working on the side of the road with their flashy lights on construction projects? Yeah they have been doing that for years.
You now how you fix this problem? You vote out the mayor, or whoever that agency’s top boss is in favor of someone that looks out for the public interest and not their own. Or you read your local laws on how to start legislation to outlaw apps that offer gig jobs to law enforcement.
Worth it to note that you don’t need an app to do this. It’s very common for cops to work off duty private security for retail stores, in uniform, with a full ability to make arrests.
Yeah they make BANK too.
So people can now hire a cop to actually prevent a crime, instead of waiting for it to happen so that they can report it afterwards? Crazy times.
This has been going on my entire life (since the 1960s and before) - maybe it’s a new twist that a “startup” put up a website explaining the process but the process has been around forever.
Example: ever see a cop hanging out at your grocery store, in uniform? Yeah, he’s not on duty, he’s been rented.
Can I rent one for our next protest?
Nothing new here. Private citizens and organizations have rented real cops, both on and off duty, since forever. I can drop a dozen examples off the top of my head.
Yet none are dropped?
just a reminder, mercenaries aren’t to be trusted as a military force due to weak loyalties completely dependent on financial compensation.
but hey, you rich folks do whatever you want to do.
That’s why they are pulling them from within the state apparatus.
You couldn’t pay me to let a cop linger on my property, off duty or not, I don’t want someone unbound by law hanging around.
I feel like, if the land’s law doesn’t bind them, the law shouldn’t protect them. But that’s crazy talk, that’d mean fairness for the average Joe
Sentences for anybody given such powers when they do get caught breaking the Law and are actually prosecuted and found guity, should be at least double the sentences that people who had no such powers and inside influence in the Law Enforcement process get.
If they have a priviledged position within the legal system with powers which others do not have (including, directly or indirectly the power to make it less likely that they are made accountable for their own crimes), the punishment for breaking the Law if and when they do get caught, prosecuted and found guilty (a big IF) should reflect their superior familiarity with Criminal Law, their lower probability of getting caugh, prosecuted and found guilty because they’re inside the very system that does it, and the fact that they abused the authority they were entrusted with.
Lawfare as a Service
You know all those Cyberpunk books and movies?
Apparently we thought those were a suggestion instead of a warning…
Cyberpunk is a critique and warning about hypercapitalism with cool aesthetics and technology. Somehow we ended up with zero aesthetics, meh technology, and we’re far down the road to actual factual shit down your throat hypercapitalism.
I always try to end depressing comments with something positive, but I can’t think of anything. Hug your favourites, and good luck in the Climate Wars.
I look forward to dying at your side.
The 15th Federated will remember our sacrifice at the Battle of the Erie. As long as there’s a Fifteenth, we’ll live on. o7
The tech is good… for overlords.
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.
Our reality feels superficial and degenerate.
I suspect it was ever thus. As long as wars are far away they won’t seem real.
I’m not talking about the part of close affect, that feels real today too if you read the news of the involved regions.
I’m talking about the reasons being hell knows what, a bit how WWI is remembered. About the public emotion around them being “trying to put paper fake feelings into flesh”. Same with the rest.
Tech bros actually think it’s something to aspire to. Saw some tech moron on Xitter say that cyberpunk is a utopia we can achieve. Then he started arguing with people who told him it’s a dystopia.
Fascist tech bros think they will be the elites in Harlan’s World and not some downtrodden servant.
I once thought it’s possible to build some kind of “idealized” Empire from Star Wars. Almost like the Soviet space dream.
The problem with these people is - they don’t know what they want to do. They have vibes.
I can relate to that very much, I too for most part have vibes and not understanding, and also executive dysfunction, so my life is vibe-driven.
They think they erode the oppressive mechanism (sometimes) or change the world so that the better would be on top (that’d be them in their opinion). These are actually similar in the sense of trying to slowly break what they consider to be chains. Except they don’t, they reinforce it.
You can’t build a cyberpunk world (no matter dystopian or utopian) without the technologies used being interoperable, replaceable, durable, and available to many people. That’s how those worlds exist, through a certain kind of technologies being as ingrained into the society as public domain works of literature.
While these platforms are not such. These platforms for me reminisce China before Opium Wars. A similar degeneracy, feeling of power and lack of feedbacks. (I hope the Chinese have this association too and something in their lives prevents a similar crash, but my hope isn’t very strong)
No thanks, I prefer to order one “Armed Militia” please 😉
Rather trust the neighbors than some random conservative mostly white dudes that aren’t even from the neighborhood.
In the Bay Area, cops in uniform and patrol vehicles are stationed outside Apple Stores. At least on weekends. I’ve seen them in Emeryville and Berkeley. Dunno about SF.
Isn’t this the origin of the police?
