In fairness, part of the idea of using professional cops and not soldiers, was originally that professional cops were from the community and would be better able to interact, or "liaise" with community members. It's just that over the centuries we kind of forgot about that part. In the US we moved to the current system where many of the police may not even live in the communities they serve. Heck, they may not even live in the municipality at all.
It's a better idea to try to make the cops community liaisons by going back to hiring your police from among the people who live in your municipality. You would get more familiar faces out there, and I think you'd get rid of the weekend warrior types from the suburbs or whatever.
But there must be some reason they don't do that because that idea is just way too obvious. Maybe they have data that shows more corruption if the police are from the municipality being served? Or actually probably, the police unions don't allow it? Or something. There's probably a reason.
Police often don't want to live in the community they patrol because they don't want to be recognized with their family while off duty by gang members they interact with, making their families targets.
I have close family who had to move to a different city because of direct specific threats to their family made by gangsters.
I would be shocked if that is effective (although I'm not an expert, so I'm open to being shocked).
Tracking someone who relocates without creating a new identity seems trivially easy even for unorganized crime. Facebook or Instagram alone makes a social engineering attempt easy. Then there are the sites that aggregate public record, which I would think could pick up on the move relatively quickly. Lexus Nexus has terrifying amounts of information on everyone.
This is without even moving into the realm of things that require organized crime. I would assume organized crime groups would have someone in the government paid off that could run a query through driver's license databases.
That seems more like security theater than actual security. It's also of note that organized crime exists outside the US, and other countries that do community policing don't seem to have the same level of concern.
I agree with you that organized crime is not a US-only problem. The example I shared is not in the US - so you have at least one counter example to your statement about other countries. Concerns and awareness about issues with policing in the community where they live isn't isolated to just a few individuals.
You seem to easily dismiss someone else's experience - why would you think that you have enough information from a short anecdote to judge their difficult decision to uproot their entire family, as useless security theatre? How effective something like that is depends completely on the specific circumstances, people involved, and the nature of the threat. I assure you that the decisions they made for themselves were done with appropriate advice.
My point was that organized crime changes the nature of policing and the relationship with police and their community. Organized criminals have a much greater sense of power and immunity, so they are more likely to be involved in confrontation with police and to take things further past the line (threatening family is just one example) than an 'average' crook who commits crimes out of desperation (for example).
> The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent in the United Kingdom and other countries including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.[1][2][3][4]
> In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
Minneapolis removed residency requirements for police officers a while back. Now, less than 10 % of our police force lives within the minneapolis city limits. There is a lot of discussion happening about the cultural ramifications of this.
>In the US we moved to the current system where many of the police may not even live in the communities they serve. Heck, they may not even live in the municipality at all.
Some will take out-of-state applicants as well. This is when they need bodies over liasons. And the hiring standards adjust accordingly, too.
It's a better idea to try to make the cops community liaisons by going back to hiring your police from among the people who live in your municipality. You would get more familiar faces out there, and I think you'd get rid of the weekend warrior types from the suburbs or whatever.
But there must be some reason they don't do that because that idea is just way too obvious. Maybe they have data that shows more corruption if the police are from the municipality being served? Or actually probably, the police unions don't allow it? Or something. There's probably a reason.