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The Epic Inefficiency of Secret Police
Apr. 13th, 2015 03:29 pmOkay, so, I’ve been meaning to type this up for a while. I got down my sociology textbook for this. It’s two inches thick and a foot tall and I think removing it has done terrible things to the structural integrity of the book piles so it is possible some accident investigator will find this as the last thing I typed before bookalanche took me. Plus I’d forgotten what an absolute pigging pain it is to take notes out of that thing, I’d need to clear the full size desk to put it down next to a keyboard and no, that’s not happening any time soon. And the book itself is like a dozen years old? Haralambos and Holborn 6th edition. Huh, Amazon remembers things forever, I apparently purchased mine on 9th December 2005. They’re up to 8th edition in 2013. And the bit of research I wanted to dig out a cite for is from 1986, so, you know, classic.
Also I’m going to apply it all to Torchwood and S.H.I.E.L.D. , which is sort of far from the original intention.
The thing I was looking for: Losing the Fight against Crime (1986) Richard Kinsey, John Lea and Jock Young, Blackwell, Oxford, p.42 “The vicious circle of the collapse of consensus policing”.
As it turns out, not something I can pry out of google. So, y’all will have to imagine the little diagram:
Economic decay, deprivation, racial discrimination etc -> Rising level of street crime -> drift towards ‘military’ policing’ -> Alienation of the community -> Reduced flow of information to police -> collapse of consensus policing -> more military policing, rinse and repeat… er, I mean the arrows go around in a little feedback loop around there.
( Read more... )
I mean, once people know that aliens fall out of the sky, they’re going to be sold on the idea of police specific to deal with aliens falling out of the sky. It’s going to be a pretty good thing if there’s people who know what they’re doing. The public could be all reassured about it. It’s just, that doesn’t work if they act like Torchwood or movie SHIELD does. Because those are not reassuring agencies. Those are in fact acting like the bad guys. They just got that way because they know there are threats out there but they’ve left themselves less than 10% of the tools to find them, and it’s scaring hell out of them, so they crack down harder. Vicious circle.
This is why openness and accountability actually work better, and the more secrets you pile up the less effective people can be.
Well, one why. Another is to do with getting used to nonsensical orders, relying on authority to have more data than you do, because that breaks feedback mechanisms. But that's a whole other bit of writing.
Also I’m going to apply it all to Torchwood and S.H.I.E.L.D. , which is sort of far from the original intention.
The thing I was looking for: Losing the Fight against Crime (1986) Richard Kinsey, John Lea and Jock Young, Blackwell, Oxford, p.42 “The vicious circle of the collapse of consensus policing”.
As it turns out, not something I can pry out of google. So, y’all will have to imagine the little diagram:
Economic decay, deprivation, racial discrimination etc -> Rising level of street crime -> drift towards ‘military’ policing’ -> Alienation of the community -> Reduced flow of information to police -> collapse of consensus policing -> more military policing, rinse and repeat… er, I mean the arrows go around in a little feedback loop around there.
( Read more... )
I mean, once people know that aliens fall out of the sky, they’re going to be sold on the idea of police specific to deal with aliens falling out of the sky. It’s going to be a pretty good thing if there’s people who know what they’re doing. The public could be all reassured about it. It’s just, that doesn’t work if they act like Torchwood or movie SHIELD does. Because those are not reassuring agencies. Those are in fact acting like the bad guys. They just got that way because they know there are threats out there but they’ve left themselves less than 10% of the tools to find them, and it’s scaring hell out of them, so they crack down harder. Vicious circle.
This is why openness and accountability actually work better, and the more secrets you pile up the less effective people can be.
Well, one why. Another is to do with getting used to nonsensical orders, relying on authority to have more data than you do, because that breaks feedback mechanisms. But that's a whole other bit of writing.