• Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 hours ago

    How many people could one cop realistically know?

    Presumably somewhere around Dunbar’s number (or some other number with a similar goal likely calculated in a better way), which is wildly unrealistic from a practical perspective.

    What problem would this “knowing people” actually solve?

    They likely believe that police that are “members of the community” are much less likely to react based on vague heuristics built up over time because they are more likely to directly know the people involved and thus be less likely to need to rely on a snap judgement of strangers. It’s right up there with “maybe we should train them better”, except training is several orders of magnitude more manageable from a practical standpoint than having more law enforcement per capita than Bible belt small towns have churches per capita.