My city, which is not exemplary by any means, after a fuckton of political backlash about the "policing" that happens at protests and parades switched to having a small group of unarmed cops specially trained in deescalation (which is mostly marketing but eh, sure) and comprised of almost entirely minorities, women, and older folks. They're not at all shy about this unit being visibly nonthreatening and they just walk with the people, sometimes joining them. We haven't had any "riots" ever since. It's allllllmost like the police had been instigating them, funny that.
That's their job. "Preventing harm" is acting _before_ crime happens. It's politicians and citizens job to prevent harm.
The one thing that police consistently and effectively do is themselves act as a criminal organization outside the law. They cause destruction and mayhem regularly on very flimsy premises and see little to no oversight for it.
And to add: shooting a guy in an abuse of force during a traffic stop on an empty highway leaves no witnesses. A crowd will have a hundred eyewitnesses and dozens of phones recording.
" Values
In partnership with the community, we pledge to:
Protect the lives and property of our fellow citizens and impartially enforce the law.
Fight crime, both by preventing it and aggressively pursuing violators of the law.
Maintain a higher standard of integrity than is generally expected of others because so much is expected of us.
Value human life, respect the dignity of each individual and render our services with courtesy and civility."
It occurs to me that the concept of fighting crime is as much of a misnomer as the war on drugs, providing the wrong primer for the mind. One cannot fight a concept or object. I think it's important to retire the phrase. They see everything they do as fighting, they're trained to see threats, and so threats they will see regardless. (Just the wrong ones)
At least ideally. It doesn't always work that way but it's a misnomer to blame the police for a neighborhood being unsafe and you're going to be disappointed if you expect them to.
I think it would be great to set up competition to Police forces: Cities should create and staff an unarmed "Helper Force" who gets deployed to non-emergencies, to help people in distress, investigate "Karen's" complaints of this and that, to defuse mental health episodes (maybe bring a social worker), incidents involving children, rescuing cats out of trees, and so on. Carry on for a year, and then have both the Helper force and the Police force summarize in writing how they benefitted the community over then last 12 months, and have them fight for funding on the basis of that report.
I think taxpayers would decide that they'd rather have the helpers.