They were basically the medieval version of cops. We’re still trying to figure out how to give people the power to protect others without giving them the power to abuse others to this very day.
The trouble is that there seems to be a very blurry line between the two on both an institutional and internal psychological level. To quote Twitter user @meganamram (from before it for completely fucked as a website): “You can’t be nice to everyone because being nice to certain people is inherently cruel to others.” For every case that appears to be an obvious case of good versus evil there’s fifty more that are weird muddy bullshit where there’s no winner and the closest you’ll ever get to justice is deciding who should lose harder.
And unfortunately the loser usually just defaults to whoever doesn’t go to church with the cop, which was probably also true in medieval times.
This is a good answer, one of the best even, but I would argue it still lacks the necessary nuance.
As an example I’m more personally familiar with I think one of the things that would help human services be more… well. humane, is if more people were encouraged to get involved and actually witness the realities are of some of these people’s daily lives but also you have to pick at what point you protect people’s privacy.
I have several patients who will literally physically fight tooth and nail to be left in their own bodily fluids long enough to cause chemical burns and I really wish more people understood what both the person and everyone in their immediate vicinity is going through, but also idk if it would be really fair to them to let just anybody watch them play in their own poo. But it can also be violent (I’ve been straight up swung on) and someone should be out there making sure people are reacting to that as safely as possible.
Our hospital security actually do have bodycams now that they have to turn on during codes and it’s easy to say those should be auditable by anyone except a few months ago we had a pt yank their pants down during a code and run screaming at the officer. People shouldn’t just be able to look up the video of that person’s junk from when they were sick.
…and I’m sure in law enforcement powerful people would love to punish someone for speaking up by aggressively publicizing intricate details of their victimization. Or even to intentionally allowing someone to be victimized with the goal of publicizing some part of their life. In fact the purpose of HIPAA isn’t actually privacy, the true purpose is to make your own records available to you. The privacy thing is just an extension of it needed to keep the organization from retaliating by making the documents you request public.
There’s no one law that will ever fix anything. They’ll have to be continually updated as shitty people find workarounds. There’s never going to be a right answer that doesn’t involve a continuing supply of fucks given by people who have at least the barest sembalance of altruism. Unfortunately the fucks to give economy is not primarily motivated by altruism.