Progressive Futurism 3: The Gig economy may eventually scale down police departments
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Gig Economy, Police, Social Justice, Technology

A while back I was getting my Gillian Anderson fix by watching The Fall. In it, Scully plays a cop in the UK, and spends a lot of time waiting for (basically)SWAT to show up. Over the pond the average cop and even detectives don’t carry firearms, most of the time they have to call in the gun toting Calvary when things get hairy.

I don’t know if it’s practical to do the same here because this country is armed to the teeth. It’s also strange to say that we have a right to bear arms but not if you’re a cop. But what happens if we had less cops but automated snitching?

The police unions should start to worry. We currently have the technology to get rid of patrolling officers and privatize that part of policing with citizens snitching on each other by creating apps that would allow drivers to report traffic and parking violations as they drive around. You can even double dip by doing it while driving for Uber or Lyft.

One way corrupt cops have been busted on body cameras is because they don’t start recording when turned on- instead they are on all of the time but start saving what it records starting 30 seconds BEFORE they push the button. So specifically one cop planted some evidence then turned on his body cam after planting it.

A car mounted traffic snitch system would work in a similar way. When someone drives dangerously, push a button on your dash, then the system would upload 30 seconds before and up until you stop recording. If it leads to a ticket drivers would be some sort of commission.

There could also be a passive system that scans parked cars as it rolls by while checking with parking meters to see if everyone is paid up. Because, fuck meter maids.

The other inspiration for this article was I read about a trend of dash cams in Russia because so many people fake being hit there that a large amount of drivers installed cams to disprove con artists. So insurance companies would also benefit form these systems being installed because accidents would me much more likely to be recorded.

I don’t see this as an aspirational idea so much as it could be an inevitable one as soon as the markets find it viable. Midsized cities like the one I live in will be sold on the idea that they can cut their police forces down and replace them with the gig economy. The pitch will be something like “Sure a few cops will lose their jobs but dozens of people can make a little extra money on the side”.

A good side of this is that police work will not wear cops thin the way it does now. Instead of constantly being at alert pulling people over, they will only be deployed when they are called. Some departments might even start to look more like fire departments where most of the time they are sleeping through their shifts only occasionally being deployed.

I would normally be worried that police would become bored and increase the tendency to escalate situations instead of de-escalating, but look around. The number of police shooting unarmed people is truly disturbing. Police Departments keep increasing no knock warrants and deploying SWAT in situations where they used to just send the local Sheriff.

Another possible benefit is that it could cut down the racial bias. Some described the number of tickets written in Ferguson Mo as a black tax because of the absurd amount of tickets being given to black people. Cops often patrol black neighbor instead of their assigned beats because they have too many influential people they don’t want to cross. In a gig system people are much more likely to drive in their own neighborhoods and with the system being largely automated the incentive of influence shouldn’t be as much of a factor.

With all that said, I think we’d probably be better off with shorter shifts for the same pay for police and having the police answer to citizen panels instead of politicians. But no one is going to get rich from that so privatized snitches seems the more likely course.