Civic honesty around the globe

Arguably not a good idea in the United States, where many people are justifiably reluctant to go anywhere near the police.

Then you have a chicken and egg problem. The cycle will be broken eventually; better to do it now in a controlled manner, even if it will be far from easy.

I was imagining the United States. I thought people would be more willing to approach a booth, which includes a physical barrier. While many people are afraid of the police, they nonetheless serve a necessary function, and many people are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the police in their communities.

It's more that the police are nearly always there to enforce punitive things rather than improve an actual public good.

Instead of designing things properly (large scale zoning, zoning laws that make sense, building codes to improve the quality of life) we make poor decisions based on cheep and fast; externalize the costs; then make living with those costs a fear/punishment based enforcement.

If "peace officers" were out doing only commonly agreed good things, improving lives rather than being 'tough on crime' then they'd be part of a solution rather than a problem.

It's not really a proper solution, but libraries serve as a kind of alternative "official authority" for things like that in the part of the US where I currently live (one of their many unofficial jobs that aren't properly accounted for or funded). People seem to drop off stuff in the library even if they didn't find it there, because it's a place you can easily enter, and librarians are perceived as having some kind of official status (being government employees), but compared to others are seen as approachable and pretty honest and benign. So people assume the librarian will probably know what to do with the wallet and probably won't just pocket the cash. And, many people are less apprehensive about walking up to a library front desk compared to walking into a police station.

Well then, welcome to my world. Where I live - provincial Denmark - these days our local police resides behind a desk ... at the library. Mind you, this is police of a variety radically different from just about any aspect of American police I've ever seen described. Our police structure and organisation is in shambles, but at the personal level, a police officer is first and foremost a service provider, and the ones I've interacted with over the years have been unfailingly professionel, non-threatening, and polite. Also: Fit and never, ever overweight.

Are people really that scared of police in the US that they wouldn't return some lost property to them?

I'm Australian and the idea of that blows me away. Like a third-world country. I've seen all the videos of shootings and disgraceful behaviour but I thought those were probably all rare incidents in bad neighbourhoods.

Here in Australia, I've had nothing but professional interactions with our police. I wouldn't hesitate to call them if there was a need or take a lost object to them.

Our laws are certainly heading more and more in a scary direction however.

> Are people really that scared of police in the US that they wouldn't return some lost property to them?

No, this seems like an unusual perspective in the US especially for something as simple as dropping off a wallet.

Some are and some aren’t. I wouldn’t call it an “unusual” perspective as the sibling commenter did here, but I would say it’s probably not the perspective of the majority. It’s also going to vary depending on who you are and where you are.

Because the cost of being arrested, shot, etc. is quite high, it’s arguably logical to avoid most if not all interactions with them even if the odds of something going wrong seem relatively low, particularly when you have little to nothing to gain from engaging.

Even if you calculate that you’re not at significant personal risk from engaging, it might make sense to do so for other reasons, e.g. in solidarity with others who are targeted unfairly, and/or (plausibility of this aside) to simply attempt to get along without them.