From FoxLA.com:
By Mary Stringini
LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved the first step in a plan to replace Los Angeles Police Department officers with community-based, unarmed emergency responders for non-violent calls for service. …
The motion instructs the LAPD to work with the county’s Department of Mental Health, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and other government agencies to respond to non-violent incidents, such as drug abuse and incidents related to mental health.
It would include diverting nonviolent calls for services, such as neighbor disputes and others from the LAPD to the appropriate non-law-enforcement agencies.
My wife’s black friend from the office who became a Chicago policewoman told us that she was amazed by the number of calls they went on to adjudicate really stupid domestic disputes, such as the time a man and woman were having an argument over which TV show to watch, so they called 911 to send out a police officer to tell them who was right about which show was better.
So, there are a lot of calls, especially from the black community, demanding the police come out and resolve inane disputes that shouldn’t require a policeman.
On the other hand … the kind of people who call 911 over which TV show to watch may be nonviolent right at this moment, but it’s not like Professor Pinker and Professor Goldstein are the ones calling 911 over TV arguments and thus will be perfectly happy to listen to the sweet light of reason as dispensed by a social workers. No, the callers tend to be unreasonable people.
So if you just dispatch a nice lady social worker to adjudicate which show to watch, well, much of the time it will work out okay, but every so often everything goes wrong and you wind up with the nice lady social worker being taken hostage.
So then Our Leaders will come up with a better idea: send an armed policeman along with the social worker to protect her.
But, my guess would be that, a lone policeman is more likely to shoot an assailant more often than a pair of policemen are, because a pair tends to feel that they can win a fair fight nonlethally, while a lone policeman who is attacked is in risk of losing his life.
So then you send the social worker and two policemen and …
