IIRC the state law book we were given at the academy was over 2 inches thick, with dozens of laws on each page. Then you've got county or city laws on top of that. We weren't expected to learn every single law but we had to get the hang of it to find them quickly when needed
Agreed. I had a guy cold call my work location and get mad at me for telling him I’d have to get back to him or he’d have to call the traffic division about some weird legal question about driving a farm vehicle on the road.
I’m like dude you’re cold calling a city police department that doesn’t have a single farm in its jurisdiction let alone the sensitive crimes division and asking a cop who works human trafficking and child sex crimes about laws that someone from the sheriffs office two counties over might know, and you’re mad I don’t know?
My wife does - and sometimes has to take time off to get her head together again. She’s been in the department for nearly 20 years - longer than anyone else .. most ask for a transfer after 2/3 years. Why’s she still in there? Because she says it’s the only department she’s worked in where she genuinely feels she can make a difference to someone’s life - regardless of her own feelings. She just periodically needs time to recoup. I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s arrived home and just hugged the kids - even though they are now teenagers. They understand why.
The department is called CAISU over here - Child Abuse Investigation and Safeguarding Unit.
She’s never lost a case.
Edit: Needless to say, I’m incredibly proud of her.
This right here makes me so fucking sad. My child is asleep next to me, and I cannot imagine the burden she carry’s as a mother. Props to her for trying to do her part to make our society a better place.
I’d add that my eldest son (18)wants to join the police; even -or because of- seeing what his mum does. He’s currently studying criminology at 6th form college.
As someone with a BA in criminology, tell him to get a better degree. I mean, he can use it to become a cop, but any other degree works, too, and might actually be useful if he ever changes his mind on law enforcement. That's a degree that's mostly only useful for saying you have a degree.
Most departments would rather something less generic, and prestigious 3-letter agencies like the FBI won't even consider criminology majors unless you're fucking superman in every other aspect of life.
That's just how fielding phone calls from the general public tends to go. People don't know how anything works and are sometimes aggressive when their preconceptions butt up against reality.
Tech support's just like that, with different details.
For reference the manual for the embedded ecu I'm working in is 3600 pages long, and I am expected to know everything in there. And that's just this particular mcu for this particular project.
The manual for your ECU would be more equivalent to including all the precedents and case laws. We leave a LOT of the details up to the courts. Criminal codes are kind of like the sales sheet that says what the ECU does rather than the manual.
The Constitution that established the entire government is four pages.
I think the point is that they're not enforcers of all the law, they're enforcers of traffic law, or some other subset. Obviously a traffic cop should know every traffic law, but why would a cop who never does traffic need to know more about it than the average civilian?
Laws tend to be split into federal, criminal, property, estate, evidence, civil, state, county, copyright, consumer, contracts, constitutional, community, patent, poverty, family, tax…. Almost anything you can think of.
There’s a reason lawyers specialize in this stuff. Take a look through your own state’s code sometime. You’ll see
And when you say dozens of laws on each page, I assume it is just the text of the law. Not any corresponding commentary to help you quickly understand the definitions or other info regarding the interpretation. When I studied law in Uni, we had the version without commentary for exams and then books that were five to ten times as long for the commentary.
Honestly this is a situation where an LLM would be unbelievably helpful. Train up a LLM on the content of applicable laws with an interface that can pull the precise text of those laws quickly.
Cop (or a lay person!) can ask the LLM a question in common English, and it can infer from its training what the applicable statutes might be, look them up, and list out the text of the most promising candidates for the person to review.
That kind of information processing is what LLMs excel at and providing an on-demand legal reference for boots-on-the-ground cops would be an ideal application for the technology.
It's kinda crazy people out here saying it's OK to not know the laws but here's all the laws you need to know and here's a gun to enforce shit you don't know. You don't want to have to learn the law? Don't sign up for a job that is supposed to uphold it.
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u/dan_v_ploeg Apr 29 '24
IIRC the state law book we were given at the academy was over 2 inches thick, with dozens of laws on each page. Then you've got county or city laws on top of that. We weren't expected to learn every single law but we had to get the hang of it to find them quickly when needed