There'll never be a day so sunny It could not happen twice Where is the man with all the money? It's cheap at half the price!

I'm reminded horribly of both how the Catholic Church shuffled child molesting priests between parishes rather than defrocking them and turning them over to police, and how police officers get fired in one jurisdiction (but not charged) and then hired somewhere else. Moving a problem doesn't fix it.

You must live in a much different city than I do, if you "often" have laws passed through referenda. The overwhelming majority of city laws where I live are written and passed by an elected city council. I don't think I've ever lived in a city that passed a law through a referendum.

I don't think I understand the point you're trying to make, or how it is a reply to the point I was making. What do you mean by "scaling guttering law would make it meaningless?" What does it have to do with the feasibility of having millions of laypeople writing coherent laws?

Righting transgressions isn't the task of law enforcement, though. It's judicial. The whole reason why we can have a jury system is that you're right: righting wrongs isn't a specialist task. Law enforcement is a different thing entirely.

Can you be more specific?

And, again, I just don't see how that system scales. I live in a city of a million people. Asking a million laypeople to agree upon laws for them to be subject to, that aren't riddled with loopholes, that reflect the needs of every community... As I've said, there's a reason humans specialize.

And if they exploit that system and the cops end up "in charge," then yes, I agree: it's our collective responsibility to fix that. 3/3

Specialization of law enforcement presents risks, but it also allows (in theory) for more even-handed enforcement of laws, which respects people's rights. And if that doesn't happen, then it gives us a target to hold accountable. If mob justice goes wrong, everyone is accountable, so no one is. 2/

I wouldn't say that law enforcement is an abdication of responsibility, any more than having someone else grow my food for me, or compound my prescriptions is. Specialization is one of our superpowers as a society. I like technology and don't want to return to being a hunter-gatherer. 1/