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jghnyesterday at 2:59 PM0 repliesview on HN

Where I live this has also created a secondary debate. Due to union laws, when these jobs are handed off to non-police, the municipality must still pay the prevailing wage, aka what the cops were getting paid.

Here it's required to have a police detail at every road based construction site. They get paid overtime to sit there playing candy crush in case maybe something happens requiring them to direct traffic. So it seems like a win-win to replace them with citizen flaggers as it'd remove the cops from that role but also drastically lower cost to the city. But no, it'd mean taking what should be a minimum wage job and paying someone $50-100+/hr to do it.

And then the secondary debate is that some people see this as a bad thing and others see it as a good thing.