That depends entirely on how much power you give them, and how much accountability you impose upon their use of it. The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Trying to give them duties that conflict with those objectives is simply always going to fail. Personally I wouldn’t want my children receiving civics instruction from somebody who has to hedge against the possibility that one day they’ll be trying to put them in jail.
> The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline.
Only if your idea of a perfect society is one where everybody is incarcerated. I'd rather have one where as few people as possible need to be incarcerated to keep order.
Providing the police with conflicting responsibilities isn’t going to solve that problem. At best it’s a waste of resources, and at worse it makes everything worse. You can’t expect the police to earnestly participate in improving a community when at any moment their responsibilities may obligate them to decide that it’s the community members who are the problem, and that they need to go to jail.
The very nature of the justice system is adversarial, and the police are it’s enforcers. Attempting to burden them with responsibilities that directly conflict with their role in the system isn’t going to fix anything.