Our police are spread too thin. They are asked to do difficult work with limited resources. As a practical matter, given these limited resources, they must prioritize, deciding which laws to enforce and which crimes to investigate, and how much time and money is devoted to each. Our police chi... more
Our police are spread too thin. They are asked to do difficult work with limited resources. As a practical matter, given these limited resources, they must prioritize, deciding which laws to enforce and which crimes to investigate, and how much time and money is devoted to each. Our police chief should focus our police on issues that are most important to us.
Top priority should be crimes against persons, violent crimes, and hate crimes. These are crimes which are committed by direct physical harm or force being applied to another person, those in which the offender uses or threatens to use violent force against the victim, and those which target a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group (e.g., murder, manslaughter, assault, battery, sexual assault, abduction, robbery, extortion, harassment, etc.).
As time and funding allow, second priority should be property crimes: those crimes which involve the taking of money or property (e.g., burglary, larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, shoplifting, vandalism, etc.). We look to police for assistance when one person takes something from another.
Victimless crimes should be at the bottom of the list. These are infractions of criminal law without any identifiable evidence of an individual that has suffered damage in the infraction. The idea of deprioritizing these often results in accusations of "being soft on crime". It's difficult to argue, however, that resources should be devoted to them while crimes [i]with[/i] victims go unsolved. When we have other crimes under control, then it will be time to discuss tackling victimless crimes. Crimes such as gambling, consensual sexual contact among adults for fee, and posession by adults of substances that our government says we should not posess, do sometimes lead to problems. Such problems should be dealt with on their own merit. Investigating these crimes may be fun and profitable for our police, but they are largely a waste of public resources.
Janos Antal Bognar
Sir, congratulation to your police. We need more police man, who know to use legal force. The girl on the video was provocative, and has the first step to the opened fight. She pushed the officer, to do impossible the peacefully police work. I hope the judge will use the video to show it, the police man has a right decision, and do it with so publically, that every one can see, teenager have to follows the rules also.
Just a normal US citisen