Sixty-one

5. You no longer need to carry a translation app on your phone. If there’s someone to speak with, they’ll have one on theirs.
7. A white male travelling alone in interesting places, will always need to disprove they are a spy. Thanks Hollywood.
8. It is easier to deflect demands for a bribe when your paperwork is in order.
9. The art of successful borderland travel is to know when to pass through (and be seen by) army checkpoints and when to avoid them.
10. Borders are permeable.
11. There are parts of the world where empires go to be bloodied and die.
15. Everything is fine, until that exact moment when it’s obviously not. It is easy to massively over/under estimate risk based on current contextual conditions. Historical data provides some perspective, but it usually comes down to your ability to read undercurrents, which in turn comes down to having built a sufficiently trusted relationship with people within those currents.
20. When a fixed price culture meets a negotiation culture, fun ensues.
40. In order to size up the tribe/sub-tribe you’re part of, any group of young males will first look at the shoes on your feet.
50. The first time you confront a leader, never do it in front of their followers, they’ll have no way to back down.
56. To what extent does cultural continuity, and societal harmony comes from three generations under one roof?

61 Glimpses of the Future (via Kottke)

9 Principles

  1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
  2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
  3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
  4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
  5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
  6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
  7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
  8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
  9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Definition of policing by consentvia