28 Comments
Oct 29, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Good post, but I think it's going to be hard to adjust police behavior without regaining civilian control of police departments, which itself requires weakening the power of police unions, and probably repealing or weakening police officer bill of rights legislation. Otherwise it's very difficult to effectively discipline bad actors and change the warrior culture mentality. But I think this is a pretty difficult task politically, especially for a Democratic party eager to dispel the notion that it is anti-police. So I'm somewhat pessimistic that this story has a happy ending.

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If anyone wants a really good analysis of policing and policing issues, I recommend https://grahamfactor.substack.com/

He is a regular commentator over at slow boring, a former policemen and does a pretty good job of explaining the intricacies of policing.

One of the thing that these police reform articles fail to mention is the role of prosecuting in addressing police reform.

1. Police already know who the shooters are. For instance, my wife was at the mall in Boise when the shooting started last Monday. She is ok, but it really hit home. The shooter turned out to be a convicted felon from Chicago who was well know to police. In fact he had even posted YouTube videos taunting the police about having a gun. They had even attempted to arrest him, but via some quirk of Idaho Law and possible a mistake, he wasn’t charged.

In Chicago and other cities with high rates of gun violence there is a revolving door of people who get arrested for possession of weapons, but who aren’t prosecuted or get light sentences.

One of the biggest complaints among police in these cities is that even when they arrest people, the charges are pled down or not prosecuted at all. When police do catch shooters it’s very rare for them to have had no previous records.

Of course this gets into the issue of funding for prosecutors and of our high prison rates. It’s hard to both convict more people and to simultaneously reduce the prison population.

Now of course, all the reforms Noah talks about will reduce and prevent crime, lowering the number of shooters, but crime prevention needs to have a carrot and stick approach.

I’m rather skeptical that police detectives will have on solving murders and reducing crime alone. Matt Yglesias had suggested having a second track for Police Detectives separate from patrol officers, but many people pointed out that Police Detectives mostly solve crimes because they know the players from their time as patrol officers. Policing is a relationships game.

I am however very optimistic that more beat police walking around would have an excellent effect on crime. I am currently working in Argentina and you can’t walk a few blocks without seeing police milling around.

The issue is always going to come down to money though. The neighborhoods that need the most police funding are always the ones that have the least amount of resources.

Perhaps policing, like education needs to be one of those things where funding is performed at a higher level. The state or federal level. It occurs to me that this morning s one of those areas where the US is always at a disadvantage. Much of the world, policing and education and social programs are funded at the federal level, whereas in the US, it’s more local, which of course means unequal.

Also… public sector unions are bad. It’s fun to pick on police unions, but that’s because the negative influence is just more visible. Sometimes you hear about teachers unions, but Not m going to wager that any public union is going to have a net negative impact on services.

Note, I support private unions because they give workers leverage against private companies. Public employees are effectively their own bosses, since they also vote. This skews the checks and balances.

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Police unions are a serious problem. The craziest people have taken control of them, instilled a ”with us or against us” mentality, and now hold many cities hostage. Where I live, the police union held a vote and issued a public statement of “no confidence” against the (democratically elected) mayor.

I believe that unions are a net good for workers, but they can slip into dysfunction and can cause harm when poorly led. Not sure what the solution is here. It may not be a legal change, but a moral change coming from within the police community.

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Oct 29, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Graham ( a politically very liberal ex-policeman with a very good substack) has a couple of good posts on police militarization that are worth reading.

https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/police-militarization-is-not-a-thing

https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/yes-policing-is-dangerous

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Slogans are always problematic. In my newsletter, I discuss the problems with the slogan Black Lives Matter and then the problem with slogans in general. Please subscribe if you think they are interesting.. https://fracturedrelationships.substack.com/p/slogans-can-get-in-the-way

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You mention traffic-stop-centric policing as a problem, but there's scope for more fundamental reform here than just greater emphasis on foot patrols. Traffic stops seem like a pretty major site of overpolicing: police use them as excuses to go fishing for other reasons to detain the stopped person, e.g. outstanding warrants unrelated to traffic enforcement, and many currently legal causes for traffic stops probably don't involve significant threats to public safety-- as an extreme example, take the egregious Minnesota law allowing police to pull someone over for having an air freshener or fuzzy dice hanging from their rear view mirror. So narrowing the scope of when a traffic stop is allowed, using automated camera-based ticketing instead where possible, and having specialized, unarmed traffic officers do the stops that are genuinely necessary rather than police officers, could put a big dent in police violence.

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>those vastly expanded police departments are the same ones that became militarized and violent in later decades

I just want to point out that Black Americans' problems with police violence have gone back a lot longer than just the past couple decades.

However, I would also suggest that the nature of police violence against PoC has changed due to militarization and the toxification of police culture: Originally, police regarded themselves as "boys in blue", protectors of the social order, and the problem was mainly that the social order was explicitly racist and demanded police violence against PoC. As that became unfashionable, the police had to start rationalizing just how dangerous the communities of color that they were policing, were.

Sixty years ago, less even, a cop was just as likely to just say he was putting a Black man "back in his place" or some other racist shit, as he was to say "I saw a gun".

But today's cops (and their professional legal defense complex) will get up on the stand and sit there giving you all kinds of bullshit statistics about reaction times against charging assailants. They'll complain about how they were traumatized by the event. They'll cite all kinds of horror stories they've been trained with, and what the "proper responses" are.

There's a mountain of rationalization to go along with that toxic culture and those military uniforms.

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Please consider the effects of the elimination of cash bail. Criminals are let back on the streets so there is almost no sanction for criminal activity. Homicide is a problem but rampant petty crimes trigger a citizen's sense of injustice, are corrosive to our society, frustrate the police, and can act like a gateway drug for more violent crimes.. Elimination of cash bail has been on the progressive wish list too. Bad idea.

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End qualified immunity.

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