Posted: 2026-02-04

🔗 Split The Police

When interacting with the public, officers of Victoria Police consistently have two problems: an attitude problem, and a violence problem. If we look at the structure of the system, both are entirely predictable, and turn out to be intimately entangled with the death sentence on their hip, and the reasons might be unexpected.

This is not an expert pitch, it's a systems-level pattern argument.

🔗 Dominance Security

Among people who experiment with power as a hobby, we pay a lot of attention to secure vs insecure dominance.

Secure dominance doesn't announce itself, because it does not need to. It doesn't arise in response to threat — it arises from mastery. It is a natural product of genuinely not fearing others, and you cannot fake it. It is as much about what's not there as what is.

What we usually see from Victorian Police officers in uniform is the exact polar opposite.

When someone performs dominance to cover their fear, their body language is loud. Their word choice is loud. Their voices are loud. They escalate quickly and refuse to justify their actions. They go hard and fast on intimidation at the first sign of conflict. In the US they call this "command presence", and while that phrase is less common here, the concept is no different.

🔗 Chunks of Lead

The reason that the gun directly leads to insecure dominance behaviours is not obvious to most people: it sets the stakes of every interaction. When every conversation and every person they walk past (by definition) has the potential to escalate into lethal violence every single time, the limbic system doesn't discriminate about the fact that they are the origin. It just knows that lethal violence is always on the table.

When the stakes are always that high every time, insecure dominance is as much a self-regulation strategy as it is a genuine tactical choice. This is why better training can't fix the problem, why officers who are personally "nice" still behave this way, and why we consistently see armed beat cops pointlessly escalating situations that didn't need it: because the equipment has created an inherent affective bias which is distorting their behaviour.

🔗 Change

What's really dumb about this problem is that large swathes of the world's population are not exposed to firearms in everyday life. In most cases this is because of specific programs to reduce carry rates, but I would argue we can steal an idea from the French/Canadian split profession and create two entirely separate branches, with the tweak being one of ours is armed and the other not.

A critical component of this design is that the armed/paramilitary police are not empowered to dispense petty justice. They are there for situations where there is a very high risk of violence, and that's it. Everything else is handled by someone whose nervous system isn't calibrated for "life or death".

Ideally, the average person should have as much to do with the armed police as they would with, say, the military. Might walk past them once in a blue moon, but unless your family is integrated into them, you might go your whole life without speaking to one. If they are engaging with you then something has gone very wrong.

Split or unarmed policing models are extremely prevalent worldwide, covering large sections of Europe and Asia. Each example is different, and analysing them individually is out of scope, but between them these models have already solved common objections like how it would work in rural areas. Each system is different, and none map exactly to what I'm describing.

If you do minimal digging it'll rapidly become clear that this is not a crazy fringe pipe dream, but a very normal and successful category of system which is mature, scalable and generates materially better outcomes.

In countries which successfully transitioned from a monolithic police force to a split one (the Balkans transitioning out of communism are a high profile example), the common factor was that the existing force was excluded from civilian roles, rather than being rolled into them. Importing or rebranding the existing culture will not solve anything.

These aren't pilot programs or marginal or experimental. These are large scale systems which cover a swathe of the world's population. This is a normal mainstream answer to a well-known problem.

The behaviours of police officers are not evil or malignant; they are a predictable function of the system they are embedded in.

I am going to make no comment about the private lives of police officers or which of the above behaviours tend to carry over into personal relationships. I will say that something very, very serious needs to change.

🔗 Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2026-02-03

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11

Mental health was: very poor - estimate 15% brain