Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Is there a policy competency problem?

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Officers tried to call Ponte’s cell phone, but he was in a meeting and missed the call (and his voicemail wasn’t working anyway); and Ponte got a Zappos email asking him to contact detectives, but the call he made went straight to voicemail. Can we suggest something to both the public and the police if this ever happens again? Text! (“Rob. This is Metro. You alive?”)

Everybody has a bad idea now and then, an idea that won't work.... and in the case of this example from 1924, perhaps it's as well that it didn't get off the drawing board.

"By H[ugo] Gernsback", one of the pioneers of science fiction, and the one who coined the term. Not really surprised.

Those things would have been terribly "glitchy" too. Reed radios, a gasoline engine with -- most likely-- abominable radio suppression if any at all in its ignition, a "noisy" generator to charge the massive (by today's standards) battery pack-- I wonder that those robots could work at all more than a car's length from the transmitters. It wouldn't have taken much for the rabble to come up with something to jam those radios and turn the "police" into scrap.

Yeah, you're right-- it doesn't take much observation to see who's side the "police robots" are on, and that this was an oppressive thing-- rather like the Roman legions placing their shields together and marching forward against unarmed civilians in one of the territories.

What the cities need are humans as policemen or have the aliens already infiltrated? 

Britain has an idiosyncratic in fact unique policing system that is a triumph of western civilisation and the envy of the world. The light touch is its trademark, the unarmed bobby its symbol. Britains streets have for decades been orderly by western standards. It was the kind of order that ruled in the household paternal and protective, not sadistic and authoritarian. The past few days of urban riots have revealed the British policing system as untenable. It is too weak to confront the society that has grown up around it. Britons of all persuasions were disappointed in the police this week. Home secretary Theresa May told parliament the police response was not sufficiently robust. Tariq Jahan father of one of the men murdered by marauders in Birmingham while protecting his street said: If the police had handled the matter, if they could have stopped the escalation and the violence across Birmingham and other areas, this would not have happened. Light-touch policing was never as light as it looked. The bobby always had behind him as firepower the authority of societys prejudices. A consensus across classes that certain behaviours will not be tolerated is a powerful deterrent. But Britains police have had no such authority at their disposal for a long time now. British culture at least its urban culture has grown too diverse for common agreement on what is unacceptable public behaviour, short of violence. Even where such agreement exists, the authorities have been reluctant to enforce it. British culture has always been individualist, but in the last 50 years it has become radically anti-authoritarian. This disposition has to do with the project of dismantling the class system. Reformers have thrown out the baby of authority with the bath water of privilege. And this is a tragedy. Britain has chosen a different kind of liberty, one that does not rest on shared values. That is, it has chosen an American-style liberty, and this will have to be safeguarded in an American way. If violence is the only kind of behaviour police are permitted to counter, then they will be outfitted for countering violence, not for talking to children about keeping the sidewalks tidy. The alternative to maintaining order through consensus is through fear. While Britons are fond of their police, Americans are generally scared of theirs, and go to great lengths to avoid coming to their attention. In 2006, I joined two constables patrolling a rough street in the London neighbourhood of Spitalfields. It shocked me to see a gang of kids shouting insults out of an upper-storey flat. The officers told me that was nothing sometimes those kids threw things. In almost any neighbourhood in the US, the police would ensure that those kids would look back on having done that as the biggest mistake of their lives. Perhaps because Americans fear their police so much, they have great confidence in their efficacy. Any encounter with police is marked by an understanding that one party represents the legitimate authority of the state and one party does not. In recent years, British policemen have been groping for ways of instilling that in the public. Sometimes they have done so irresponsibly, as in the death of Ian Tomlinson, who wandered into the G20 protests in London in 2009 and died after being thrown to the ground by police. When fear-based policing triumphs, the need disappears for sensitivity to local conditions and legitimate gripes. A watershed moment in US policing came in 1968 when Chicago police brutalised hippies protesting outside the Democratic convention polls showed Americans backed the police overwhelmingly. For most Americans, the revelation that Mark Duggan had a real gun when he was killed by Tottenham police last week would have ended any discussion of justice and injustice. It will be clear to any US observer that this draconian vision of policing is in the process of triumphing in Britain. The only serious debate is over how much more leeway the police require. David Cameron has said he does not want to hear about phoney human rights concerns when using CCTV to arrest perpetrators. Whatever tactics police feel they need to employ, they will have legal backing to do so, he says. Public approval of vigilantism e.g. the bat-wielding Turks of Dalston is another sign of this shift. The new consensus is that erring on the side of caution is as dangerous as erring on the side of brutality. Once that is agreed, the police become a different type of organisation. The bobby will not totally disappear. The old style of policing will be maintained for tourists, much as you can still see mounted police on Boston Common. But the real work of the police will henceforth be done through kettling, electronic surveillance and weaponry.

With constant police shootings in multiple bullets not to stop but kill

.......... Has tolerance overstayed it's welcome?

...the larger issue for gun advocates is one of our liberties. For them, the right to bear arms trumps any attempt to dilute the Constitution’s Second Amendment with restrictions on who bears arms, for what purpose, and exactly what sort of arms they’re bearing. Any attempt to encroach on it, even by an iota, will ultimately lead to our enslavement by a federal tyranny. If we have to suffer an occasional mass murder, it is a necessary price we must endure to insure our freedom.

But what does the Second Amendment actually say? Here it is, in full: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

By lopping off the first half of the sentence, the pro-gun lobby and its apologists have eliminated the Founders’ rationale for this amendment: That those who bore arms did so as members of a well-regulated militia. This was never a license for freelance vigilantism.

Just months before the Constitution was forged, our new nation endured Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, in which a militia had to be called out in Massachusetts to suppress an uprising against the government’s fiscal policies before order was restored. The purpose of the Second Amendment was to subdue violent dissent, not enhance it. At the time, we hardly had an army to speak of, so the safest way to ensure the security of the federal and state governments against subversion was “a well-regulated militia.” It derives from Article One of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” The Second Amendment says nothing about administering personal justice or taking the law into one’s own hands.