A trenchant reminder that some social workers are actually part of the problems they are supposed to be solving:

 Lately we hear that they can do better than police at certain tasks that are now regularly assigned to police. That their profession can expand to do more things and that those things will be done with better results than now.

Is that actually true? Or in both cases, both social workers and police, rather, could it be it's a tough job, messing with other people's lives,and it's not really a science but a complicated art? So you will get better results with an artful/skillful practitioner? And lousy results with those that are mediocre or bad at their job?

And also that within both professions, it might be a pretty similar percentage of people incompetent and lousy at their job and wrecking people's lives as opposed to improving them?

Over a lifetime, I've had only like 3 or 4 interactions with social workers.

 But I've had a lot of interaction with M.D.'s. M.D's do practice their professions with tools just as deadly as police's guns. And I do sense that there's an equal number, percentage wise, of lousy M.D.'s who wreck people's lives or kill them as there are bad cops. They just do their damage more slowly and torturously than bad cops. I sense that bad social workers are the same.