From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: National Police Force (was Re: National Health Care)
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 20:05:05 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

In article <1992Aug14.183652.10205@igor.tamri.com> donb@igor.tamri.com (Don Baldwin) writes:
>In article <1992Aug14.033349.3458@infonode.ingr.com> pat@fitz.uucp
>>Here's what Clinton said about his National Police Corps, in his
>>economics speech:
>>
>>-----8<-----begin text-----8<----------8<-----begin text-----8<-----
>>Fight crime by putting 100,000 new police officers on the streets.
>>We will create a National Police Corps and offer unemployed veterans and
>>active military personnel a chance to become law enforcement officers
>>here at home. We will also expand community policing, fund more drug
>>treatment, and establish community boot camps to discipline first-time
>>non-violent offenders.
>>------>8-----end text----->8------------>8-----end text----->8------
>>
>>This is frightening.
>
>No kidding!

  I guess the first thing we should do is verify that this is 
  Clinton's precise proposal, and not some GOP reinterpretation
  of it.   Is the above a direct quote?

  Assuming it is, I agree it's frightening.    It actually raises 
  a larger political issue:  For years I've favored a more
  sophisticated voting scheme than what we have now.  Scientific
  American did an article on alternative voting methods based on
  research at MIT(??).   Among the ones I liked were preference
  voting and weighted voting.   In the former you list all the 
  candidates in order of preference and in the latter you assign
  weights of preference to your choices.  Both systems of course
  are too complicated for the mental skills of the average American
  voter so they won't fly.

  What does this have to do with a national police force?  Well,
  I wasn't going to vote for Clinton anyway so I can't respond to 
  this latest nonsense by not voting (withholding affection in 
  psychological terms:  "BAD candidate, BAD, no vote for you!)
  Weighted voting would give me a little control, since I could 
  reduce his weighting from say .2 to .1.   I thought I would vote
  for Andre Marrou as a sort of US equivalent of Lord Such, only
  without the funny hat.  But that doesn't significantly hurt the
  Bush or Clinton campaigns.   What I really need is a way to hurt
  their campaigns more directly like tying up their 800 numbers or
  ordering lots of expensive-to-mail literature and then sending
  it to the recycler, or something.


>>since 1951 the ratio of police officers to reported crimes has
>>reversed, from three-to-one to one-to-three.  We will create a
>>Police Corps, in which participants would receive college aid in
>>return for several years of service after graduation in a state
>>or local police department.  As we shift people and resources
>>from defense to the civilian economy, we will create new jobs in
>>law enforcement for those leaving the military.  

  A nutty idea.  Although I must confess I haven't heard any really
  good ideas about violent crime.  The 3:1, 1:3 figures above are
  for violent crime and were in the 1991 FBI stats.  Nobody knows
  why Americans are so violent or how to reduce it.  We already
  have 800K people in prison and a lot more who should be there.  


---peter



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