I’m a little surprised that Noah sees a college degree as a way to weed out prospective cadets. Why not increase training, including some “Plato and math” (some sort of history of race riots might be more applicable, though), but keep it open to anyone?
Pretty sure plumber and nail technician don’t require a college degree, and neither does my profession: actuary. You *do* have to pass 9-10 notoriously difficult exams, each with approximately a 50% pass rate, so if someone had an Associate or Fellow designation, you can be pretty confident they know what they’re talking about. That’s the sort of thing you’re shooting for with police, college degree or not.
I agree; the skills to be an effective police officer seem pretty distinct from the skills necessary to get a bachelor's degree. Some sort of apprenticeship-like component to police training might also be worthwhile, since policing seems (to me, not a police officer!) to be tough to learn solely in a classroom.
Almost all police departments utilize this system, and I think we poorly track "training" hours compared to other countries (many of which require the equivalent of an associates degree in criminal justice and count all the hours to get that, including general ed, as "police training hours"). In the US this system is called Field Training (or FTO) and usually lasts 6-8 months following graduation from the academy. You work full time with an experienced supervisor who gradually lets you do more police work on your own, with the last month or two being semi-solo with the FTO just observing you. Then, most departments graduate you to a probationary status for 1-2 years where you are a full officer but you don't have union/state employment protection for firing, so if you perform poorly or screw up they can just cut you.
I don't think I've seen very many of the police training hours account for the 6-8 month FTO period even though it is required by law by most state POST organizations and represents, on the low end, 1,000 to 1,500 hours of hands on training.
It's worth noting that 2 of the 4 officers fired and arrested in connection with George Floyd's death were in their first week of field training following academy graduation (the first couple of weeks are basically police ride alongs where your FTO is in charge and you can't do anything).
This kind of training is probably not super productive at the moment because a lot of new officers are watching and learning bad behaviors, and like Noah points out a lot of the current training is "warrior mentality" BS that tells cops that being violent and bad at their jobs is actually good. A standardized classroom course would make police more consistent and hopefully have enough civilian oversight to get rid of those kinds of programs.
I think police needing to become more professionalised (similar to lawyers, doctors and plumbers) is something many voters should be able to get behind.
That said, I don’t think the article engages that fairly with activists who are opposed to the Atlanta training facility and the reasons why anti-police activists are arguing the USA is “over-policed.”
To begin with, whilst crime rates in Atlanta have dropped by 45% since 2009, there has been a mixed trend in the homicide rate since then. Despite this, around a third of the city’s budget in 2022 (~$250 million) was spent on its police force. To a lot of people, this has produced diminishing returns. They feel that there has not been a substantial reduction in homicides over the past decade that sufficiently justifies the enormous budget being spent on the police department every year. And that this could be better spent on programmes that reduce the underlying conditions that lead to high crime rates.
This isn’t just a thing in Atlanta either. “Defunding the police” activists observe (rightly or wrongly) that across the country, the overwhelming majority of police time is not spent on stopping violent crime, but rather; traffic stops for broken tail lights; issue citations for so-called “quality of life” offences like public drinking, “disorderly conduct,” and fare evasion; and arrest people for minor drug offences. And when police do respond to violent crimes, they often do a pretty bad job of it. I think it was around 50% of people killed by police had some kind of disability. I can’t imagine how unnecessary this would have been if they had the help they needed beforehand.
Funnily enough defunding police activists would actually agree with your suggestion that the police should be replaced with a highly specialised and professionalised organisation of public servants to respond to violent crime. Just that they also argue that the non-violent crime stuff should be handled by the community as a whole. There was an interesting leaflet made by one of said activists (also called Noah, heh) on the issue: http://www.irrelevantpress.com/store/police-abolition-101-a-collaborative-zine-project-nia-amp-interrupting-criminalization
I think the characterisation of the Atlanta activists as “environmentalist-NIMBYs” is unfair. Atlanta tree cover is an important defence against climate change and storm water flooding. But more importantly, some argue it would be better to construct environmentally friendly neighbourhoods, reducing the increasing cost of living across the city (opposite of NIMBYism). Overall, it’s a combination of the environmentalist concerns but just a general attitude that the cost of this project ($90 million of which a third is paid via taxes) is not sufficiently justified by the claimed benefits. A lot of the countries that you showed as having more training hours do not-to the best of my knowledge require massive $90 million training premises in each city in order to achieve this.
Overall this was a really insightful and informative blog post. I find that the central message of creating a more professionalised police force is something everyone can get behind. Just that I think the activist arguments could do with some more thorough engagement as you’ll find more common ground with them on this issue than you might expect.
Just a small note on the budget, but the American quirk of having schools be a seperate government entity from the city they serve often makes public safety funding look much larger than it is. The Atlanta Police budget is $245 million and the Atlanta Public Schools budget is $1.45 billion, but the latter doesn't come up in the city budget.
Ah fair point. Just out of curiosity, is there a reason for this? And are there other significant expenditures that are not typically included in American city budgets?
It's not uncommon to have different "districts". So you might have a water and sewer district that is run by a commission (which may be elected or appointed by elected officials in the "district) and self funded, so you don't see it as a city budget in one place where another city might have water and sewer costs on its budget (as well as the revenue from water and sewer service). Sometimes you have municipal electric utilities that are on budget, other times they are served by a electric cooperative that covers several counties, and other times they are served by investor owned utilities that cover even more area. Sometimes you have economic development commissions (or tourism commissions) that cover an entire county or multiple counties, again with commissioners appointed by elected officials, usually funded by some sort of ad valorem tax or special sales tax. Also can have self funded Port Commissions or Airport Commissions and also community hospitals.
Traffic deaths have shot up greatly since George Floyd, concentrated among African-Americans. You need traffic stops, though one could argue that's a separate responsibility from responding to 911 calls.
While I am fully on board with more training for police, the licensing requirements for cutting hair are just restraint of trade lobbied for by the industry and should be repealed. Until recently in NC you did not need ANY training to be hired by the local sheriff's department. The argument was that when a new sheriff was elected, all the old deputies would resign, so they needed a lot of flexibility to hire fast. The sheriff system needs overhauling too.
In states where they elect judges, I'm assuming that you have to have passed the bar to put your name on the ballot. (hope I'm right). If so, requiring the relevant professional qualification as a police officer to run for sheriff would be an equivalent requirement.
Unfortunately, as I recently discovered when looking through the bios of the people running for judge in my small town, this is definitely not a requirement everywhere.
Definitely. But that's not getting fixed. Funding for training can be done at the federal level (with strings attached), and degree requirements can be done at the state level, which is why these are attractive reforms!
The beatings and killings are usually done by local departments, often small but sometimes city-sized. The math is simple - every one of these departments has overhead to simply operate. That overhead is a high percentage of the budget in a small department. I thought it was bizarre when I read about the Uvalde school shooting and realized that there was a Uvalde school police force with its own police chief. I think there were 6 officers with a full-time police chief. It's not a surprise that they didn't react well to a difficult scenario.
In general, there should be state police only. It could make sense to have county sheriffs in counties with substantial populations (say 500k or more). So a total of 100-150 police departments across the entire country.
That would allow for both more efficient budgets with more training time. It would also allow for more rotation of officers to different duties, so not as likely to have cynical burned out officers in high contact urban areas.
Many of the officers in the other countries are essentially beat officers who do community policing because there are more of them. The neighborhoods know them. Also, the police aren't as afraid because there are far fewer guns and they are rarely going to encounter handguns in contact with citizens. These countries typically have about 10% of the guns per capita as the US and those are usually rifles and shotguns for hunting.
Leftie myself. I was always thinking this in the back of my mind but this post lays it out v thoroughly and in ways I hadn’t thought of. Not sure about the needing a bachelor’s degree though, as many cop-types simply aren’t the schooling type. Better they spend that time doing paid training in drills and training with active shooter/traffic stop/etc stuff surely
> as many cop-types simply aren't the schooling type.
I think the problem is that we have a "cop-type" to begin with. A degree requirement, plus longer and drier training in general, has the added benefit of making the job less attractive to anyone who just wanted in for the gun and authority.
The end result will be fewer police officers, overwhelmed by crime. They'll have to work lots of overtime to achieve the same number of working hours as a larger department, then screw up from being tired.
Only a minority of Americans have college degrees, and there's lots of demand for that minority in other jobs which don't entail all the hassles that being a cop does. Hence "The end result will be fewer policy officers", as I said, and the rest follows.
All good points - but I would also like to add one additional factor that needs to be addressed - 'qualified immunity'. As currently implemented - qualified immunity pretty much lets cops literally get away with murder. As part of the drive towards professionalism I think the laws behind qualified immunity need to be revised For example, congress can issue laws that waive qualified immunity if constitutional rights are violated. In addition, perhaps individual police need to have malpractice insurance, to protect cities from the behavior of a few bad actors. The inability to get insurance would help to eliminate police that don't behave professionally.
Qualified immunity protects individual cops from a federal civil lawsuit targeting them for violation of civil rights, unless the violation was clearly established. The current standing case law makes it a little hard to expand what constitutes "well established" civil rights violations, but it is not protection from murder charges, state criminal charges or lawsuits against departments at large.
It's worth noting that everyone in our legal system except cops gets total immunity. You cannot personally sue a judge or a lawmaker or a D.A. for violation of your constitutional rights the way you can sue cops.
If you don't want courts second-guessing whether you violated someone's constitutional rights, don't violate their constitutional rights.
And I'd honestly support allowing more personal liability for official acts that clearly violate the law or constitutional rights. People would respond to those incentives accordingly. No, that wouldn't drive everyone out of those professions: doctors exist despite malpractice lawsuits, because malpractice insurance.
That's the opposite of how qualified immunity works for police. QI is explicitly not waived upon determination that, most commonly, a §1983 violation has occurred.
I disagree entirely with requiring someone to have a BA to become a cop.
We've way overcredentialized the US workforce and actually we need to move in the other direction as several states are in eliminating BA degree for many state jobs.
But this is a bad idea especially for police work. BA acts as a kind of IQ filter and, as a matter of fact, in most parts of the US police work is far too boring and repetitive to be interesting to smarter workers.
More training is fine. But let's not do the BA as a prerequisite.
The bachelor's and training would be one and the same.
In unionized construction trades, the apprenticeship commitment is four years. After four years of practical jobsite work and classroom instruction, the apprentice achieves journey status. At least two more years of journey-class work, the worker can test for master status and be eligible for things like project management and training apprentices.
It's also not that unusual to require some sort of college level education for law enforcement to advance to test for sergeant duties. High command titles like captain or chief are now requiring master's degrees (usually in criminology or public administration) in some departments.
Classwork would go a long way, and universities already provide the relevant coursework (e.g., sociology, forensic sciences, prelaw, psychology, etc.). As Noah says, the U.S. armed forces already entrust men and women with guns to do brain work as well through the highly selective academies and scholarships to civilian universities.
There's no reason to expect universities to provide what's actually effective to becoming a better officer. Universities aim at prestige via selective recruitment of incoming freshmen. They are not evaluated based on how much their outgoing graduates have improved. See Bryan Caplan on education.
I've listed a series of classes that officers could or should take that would be relevant in their coursework (sociology, biochemistry, history, public administration, etc.).
Universities of any prestige levels, and especially community colleges for lower-level classes, already provide these classes. Most of them also have matriculation services geared toward uniformed service members. Public universities, much like civil service exams, give extra points for military and first responders in their applications.
We're not necessarily talking about the ivies or Stanford. This is all something that any multicampus state university system and any community college can accomplish literally now.
You've listed the names of courses which you believe to be "relevant", but haven't actually responded on effectiveness. One of Robin Hanson's regular points is that we could pay for results if we wanted effectiveness, but universities don't actually aim at that:
In public policy, you can't respond for effectiveness when you are demanding evidence for something that does not yet exist.
You have to enact a policy change first and design an evaluation with the appropriate controls.
I'll caution that evaluation methods, even when you want to statistically hypothesize that a better-educated workforce correlates with a reduction in officer-involved fatalities or even use excessive force, can be well-designed but still lead to misleading conclusions.
In this case, you can control for the behavior of police and universities, but you cannot control for behaviors of criminals. If excessive force still rises, but upon investigation many of the shootings are found to be justifiable, in this case the effect was well out of the bounds of the cause.
Alternatively, the policy would be successful by sheer dumb luck if you evaluated a police force whose jurisdiction is a favored quarter and the day-to-day interactions with the lawbreaking public are less frequent and less violent to begin with.
I'm also not following how this is a reflection on the quality or effectiveness of universities or their faculty. A college degree is not a factory warranty. Once the student is taught, it's upon them to draw upon their knowledge to put into use in real life. Universities are in no position to enforce knowledge or behavior once a student leaves.
"Black Lives Matter" got big as a result of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri. The DOJ investigated... and cleared the shooting but still slapped down the police for relying heavily on fines for revenue (I think Radley Balko may be right that after many taxpayers moved out it might no longer be able to afford its own independent government, though I also think it would have been like plenty of other jurisdictions which didn't get slapped down if it weren't for the protests over that ultimately-cleared shooting). As for the "effectiveness" of investigating the police in Ferguson for the people who actually live there, you can take a wild guess or you can read Roland Fryer on what generally happens in such cases of "viral" incidents.
Universities aren't even trying to be effective (like Yglesias says of the DOT regarding ridership). They're an institution dating back to the medieval era and its class system. Things like endowments & tenure all have the intent of insulating them from the kind of incentives other organizations might face.
I think Matt Yglesias's Police for America program would make more sense for getting young people with B.A.s to join the force. Cutting off the job to people without college degrees is a bad idea. Plenty of police departments, especially big city ones, require a combination of higher education, military service and/or relevant field work related to law enforcement these days. I know an agency I applied for required a B.A. or proof you conducted service and education that was an equivalent to mentally and physically prepare you for the police academy.
Did you use the wrong link? The article you linked deals with one police leader who sold an unsupported method to determine whether 911 callers were actually guilty of the crimes they reported. How does this have anything to do with police training?
He sells it by "training" police forces on to use this bogus science. A lot of police training, especially for small forces, is consultants coming in to provide training.
OK. But this "training" is not part of pre-service training. There are lots of people who make a living by offering lots of organizations training on many subjects, with no particular support behind this training. I don't think Noah's approach on more "professionalization" of police would address this particular problem at all.
I disagree. If police training in general were more professional, and accredited, then there would be less of this sort of thing. Currently most professions require continuing education, and to meet that requirement the training must meet certain standards. If police training were professionalized , it would include more than pre-service training, one would think,
As a military officer, I was required to spend about 20% of my total service time in training. The course of this training was pretty well defined, and many officers spent long assignments as instructors in these courses. Is this your model?
The other area I've read a little about is medicine. Doctors get Continuing Education credits for attending conferences and presentations. Some people describe these as little more than resort vacations with drug company marketing presentations. I'm not endorsing this characterization, but it illustrates the difficulties in defining standards.
I'll concede that some attention on continuing education could be valuable. But, how would it address Noah's identified problem of police violence?
Doctors have to complete hours of accreditation that are in no way similar to resort vacations with pharm marketing. There are conventions they can attend but the accreditation is usually completed in their office, online and in meetings.
I'm astonished that anyone would think the key to reducing police violence is requiring more educational credentials for police. I shouldn't be, since this is a standard approach toward any responsible position in any area.
The research I've read concludes that nearly all incidents of police violence, especially violence of questionable legitimacy, come from 5 to 8 percent of officers who push policies on use of force to the limit. This is an issue of temperament, not of training. Furthermore, officers' peers and superiors are generally aware of who the "problem" officers are, but are generally unwilling (in the case of peers) and unable (in the cast of superiors) to forcefully address the issue. Some police officers shouldn't be police officers, and police leadership needs to have the authority to remove them from the force. Civil Service procedures and contract provisions make it nearly impossible to remove a problem officer. For an example, I recommend this podcast: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2022/02/this-american-life-reveals-the-dark-depths-of-racism-in-the-us-police-force.
No amount of training, or education, or credentials, will address this issue.
It may be that more training for police officers would be a good idea. It would be interesting to see what additional material is covered in the nearly 3 full years of training that Finnish police receive. But I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that more training leads to less violence.
Noah does briefly mention the content of police training. I think this is a worthwhile topic. I have the impression (without data or firsthand experience) that, since 1990 or so, police training has put more emphasis on the risk of lethal attack that police officers face. This was driven in part by cold facts: killings of police officers rose from 1960 to 1990 along with violent crime in general. If we can believe Wikipedia, the video of the killing of Officer Kyle Dinkheller of San Diego has become a standard part of police training, which may lead to many officers having unrealistic expectations of the dangers they face. It would be worth looking at the content of training, and the lessons officers are expected to take from it.
But requiring bachelors' degrees, or even masters' degrees, for police officers is an idea that could only appeal to people who like school. Obviously, Noah is one of them, and there's nothing wrong with that. I am also one of those people who enjoy school. But I've worked with enough people in enough situations to realize that school is not a useful proxy for general competence.
> The research I've read concludes that nearly all incidents of police violence, especially violence of questionable legitimacy, come from 5 to 8 percent of officers who push policies on use of force to the limit. This is an issue of temperament, not of training.
False dichotomy, I think? Mandatory training doesn't just upskill the existing pool of police officers, it changes the composition of the pool of police officers. At the margin, some would-be police officers would be repelled from becoming police officers by mandatory training, and it's plausibly that they would've been disproportionately the worst cops. (I suspect the effect would be small, but I'm highly skeptical it would be nil.)
Please explain your thought process. It seems to me that existing police officers have a pretty secure (if stressful and potentially dangerous) career. What sort of mandatory training do you think would so disgust them that they would resign?
Or are you suggesting that pre-service police academy training might cause some potentially bad cops to decide on a different career? What training would this be?
• people in various jobs complain bitterly about mandatory training generally (like training in cutting-edge new technology when the new technology's advantages aren't immediately clear, or team-building retreats, or anti-sexual harassment seminars, or DEI training), and
• any job is going to have some people on the fence about whether to pursue (or continue pursuing it), such that the tiniest extra bit of hassle will flip their decision to do that job.
Marginal employees opting out of a job could be a matter of disgust, but it doesn't have to be, and indeed most of the time I don't expect it to be. Probably most marginal employees who avoid/quit a (potential) job would call it a simple matter of hassle. Consider ex-teachers who quit because they could tolerate the level of paperwork when they began teaching but got fed up with doing more paperwork over time.
I was primarily thinking of pre-service training, but presumably there would be some impact on existing police officers if they too had to undergo additional training. Nor did I have a particular "sort" of training in mind. Of course the precise content of the training would make a difference, but Noah's talking about thousands of hours more training, so I expect(ed) sheer quantity to have most of the marginal impact.
So, your idea is to make training annoying, hoping to discourage potential police officers. Why would you think the ones who get discouraged are more likely to be the "bad" cops, and not the bright, articulate, ambitious ones with plenty of other opportunities?
No, I don't see that that's my idea. After all, part of my thinking is that training is already going to be at least a little "annoying" just because it's training; it's not clear it needs to be "ma[de]" annoying.
All sorts of people in various jobs complain about training, whether on the job or as part of onboarding, and in my experience it tends to be the less agreeable, and those who see training as Not Part Of The Real Job who find training more off-putting. I expect that bad cops tend to be more disagreeable and disinclined to understand the potential relevance of training to policing, and "the bright, articulate, ambitious ones" less so, hence I infer that bad cops would be more likely to opt out of policing in response to higher training requirements.
This is, of course, an empirical claim that could be disproven. Maybe it's actually "the bright, articulate, ambitious" cops who are actually the most disagreeable, the ones least likely to recognize the potential worth of additional training, and the ones most likely to be running around busting heads with a stack of complaints trailing behind them. I doubt it, but I could be wrong about that; I would welcome empirical evidence bearing on this.
It seems to work for other countries. The studies on training that Noah cited seem plausible.
Anecdotally, my experience with Australian cops are that they generally work to deescalate a situation whenever they can. From what I've seen of American cops, there seems to be a bit of an attitude thing going on there. Now part of it might just be culture, but I'm sceptical that it's all of it. The chart Noah showed on training hours would be very consistent with most people's impressions of American cops.
You will repel people from becoming police officers. The result will be fewer police, who will be overwhelmed by crime in cities that currently have a high rate, lots of overtime to make up for the shortfall in headcount, and then more screwups from tired cops.
I think the professionalized class are doing investigative work for law enforcement (including detectives themselves). A friend's husband is a cop (was SWAT when I met him but has done other types of police work since) and getting an advanced degree was necessary for promotion. And I think people broadly agree that we need a lot more people solving crimes, especially since technology allows them to be more effective than in the past.
A lot of the public conflict, though, involves patrol officers. I'm not sure how easy it will be to professionalize that job given other career options that don't involve dealing with the most troubled members of a heavily armed public. Yes, there are more dangerous jobs, but the risks here are less predictable because they involve human behavior. In high school I did mock trial and our advisor was a detective who became a lawyer. One of my friends (a Berkeley grad) wanted to follow the same career path and even started at the academy after college. However it became clear that spending time on patrol to even reach detective was just not worth it and he became a lawyer instead.
I do think patrol officers are asked to do too many things, especially under adverse or unpredictable circumstances. I also don't think there is a big enough applicant pool to maintain the high quality in all areas of the country. Officers are wasting their time on menial tasks while also doing difficult work that should be handled by other specialists, including mental health specialists. (Same problems we see in Medicine, really.) Beefing the ranks of law enforcement requires more public safety personnel, not just more sworn officers.
Of course this doesn't mean it's acceptable to have the least-educated, unpromotable assholes sort into the most public-facing jobs, but I understand how it could happen. And also why it's hard to get rid of them unless they're caught doing something truly egregious (like murdering unarmed civilians). And sometimes they sort into bad units like we saw with Tyre Nichols' killers. We need more people to do the work understanding that we aren't going to get perfect applicants. I think the biggest step to professionalization needs to be changing the job itself and THAT is going to be an uphill battle.
While I agree that more professionalism is badly needed, we need to stop thinking about this entirely at the individual level. The behavior of the Memphis Murderous Five shows quite clear how this is very largely cultural and group problem. Organized police forces have only existed for less than two centuries. Armies, with a vastly longer history, have evolved cultural institutions for using violence for political purposes while constraining and delimiting it. We should work to develop and establish cultural institutions for the management of police violence. Law enforcement cannot function without the potential for exercising violence, but our society cannot afford institutions that exercise it in a random and unfocused manner unrelated to political ends.
There's a very important distinction to be made and maintained between military and police, and members of each uniformed service stress this. The military are trained to defend and kill, while the goal of police is to capture their targets alive.
The latter is more challenging, because in law enforcement, they are also trained in lethal force, and if lethal force must be used, the goal is to kill the target instantly. The public often asks why don't police wound a suspect and keep them alive, like shoot them in a limb instead of the center of mass where all of the vital organs are. One, the bullets are more likely to miss a non-vital part of the body. Two, a wounded suspect could still pose a danger to others. Three, first responders might not be able to render aid in time; letting a suspect agonize in pain is considered torture.
With that said, I can't stress this enough but the above is *not a justification* for violence under color of law. It's a description of how law enforcement react in volatile situations and how police killings have unfolded.
The difference between armies and police is training. At any given point, a very small percentage of police are engaged in training. The rest are deployed. In the military, it's the opposite.
Not only does this lead to a lack of training, but I also believe it creates a mental health crisis among police, as they are never rotated out.
Neither the comments by Bobson nor those by Mark reflect any clear understanding of the nature of the military. (I have decades of military experience, both as an officer and as a civilian analyst.) First it is important to understand that the nature of the military in the US or UK, say, is fundamentally different from that in a poorly civilized and misgoverned society such as Russia. The key factor in any military service (or any manpower-intensive institution) is the culture, which is embedded within but distinct from that of the society at large. The military will propagate its culture through its own internal processes unless its leadership invests a great deal of thought and effort in nudging it in one direction or another.
Russia is an example of a country whose army's culture has always been brutal, corrupt and punitive, time out of mind. This seems to be more or less the default for army cultures generally, unless some definite action is taken to change it, and is not too greatly different from what we sometimes see in police forces. With some local exceptions this is at odds with the general societal culture in the US and the armed forces leadership has periodically taken action to better align military cultures with broader societal values. This is frequently quite difficult and can take a long time, but the whole the US military has done well at building forces which provide disciplined instruments for achieving the political objectives of our society with minimal collateral harms.
While training as the term is usually understood does play a key part in the acculturation of soldiers, the main processes of shaping and transmitting culture take place through experience under the supervision of senior soldiers, NCOs, and officers. This does not seem to be the case generally in the police where culture transmission seems to be more akin to the process in the Russian army, with slightly more senior peers acculturating their immediate juniors. The results are those we have recently seen in Memphis and countless other places.
Whether longer and more intensive training at the individual level, as Noah Smith appears to believe, could be depended upon to override the negative cultural forces in the police I very much doubt. I do think that better and more professional training would be quite valuable but I doubt that it can be sufficient.
Overthinking the problem is a fundamental flaw. Look at the simple profile picture of todays cops. They look like, dress like, paramilitary. They are armed with military gear. Receive military type skill training. Since 9/11 we have militarized local police. Bush Obama did it well. It was surplus equipment they said.
It is policy. At local state and federal levels.
What you see is what you get. Seeing is believing.
This is no surprise to many as it was called out by senior policy folks in early 2000’S. We did this to ourselves. The swamp was sent there by us.
Yes!! The lack of training really struck me during a "ridealong" with the police department of an East Coast city.
But it's not just training/investment up-front. It's all about continuous training. I'd estimate that at least 20% of our time in the Navy was spent training. Staffing had to account for this--the reactor plant would have 5 shifts worth of people, but only 4 shifts were "working" the plant. The other shift was dedicated to training. All shifts rotated through a training week, and there was an expectation of some "on shift" training even if your shift was assigned to the plant.
Meanwhile, in the police department I was tagging along with, they'd have like...2-3 days of training per year. So like 1% of their time. We trained ~20x in the Navy.
One problem that’s obvious to anyone with a background in “combat sports” (wrestling, MMA, etc) is that the cops in the Tyre Nichols video had absolutely no clue what they were doing. Their attempts to restrain him looked more like drunk high schoolers boxing in a basement than an actual attempt to control the situation. This is the reason cities like St. Paul have seen such success after implementing regular Brazilian Jujitsu training for the officers. The theory is very straight forward. If a cop has little or no skill in grappling(physically controlling another person without a weapon), he's going to be extremely stressed when going hands on and he'll be more likely to escalate if the suspect is anything other than perfectly compliant.
Salary levels and training are indeed inconsistent for law enforcement across the country. I am a public school English teacher licensed to teach grades 7-12. I was required to have my bachelor's degree (and within three my master's) and to pass teaching certification exams. To teach in another state, I must either have reciprocity or undergo their state exams to receive certification. It seems to me that we need state qualifications for police officers rather than only local civil service exams and municipal requirements. Effective law enforcement requires integrity, ethics, education, and a commitment to civil service, qualities that our best officers embody. These should be required of all and all should be trained to carry on their duties in the most professional manner. As a mother of a LEO, I applaud Mr. Smith's proposal to invest in better training and professional standards for our police. It is our country and all of its citizens who will benefit from doing so.
Why does America have a death penalty? From what I have heard through the news channels in the USA, most people who are convicted of murder in the first degree, are usually given a life sentence for each life they take. It seems more logical to apply the maximum penalty, for the maximum crime, such as murder in the first degree, than to keep a person alive for thirty + years, locked up in a cage. BKBC
Noah Smith, you have made all the arguments that most level headed people are making at present. I cannot understand, why the American people cling to this belief that they have a right to bear arms. Surely, there have been more than enough deaths from gun related crimes? Kids take guns into their schools, and before anybody knows they are present, they are opening fire on class-mates; causing death and misery to families that will live with them forever. BKBC.
Determinism is not an easy term to understand with one sentence. This gives an entry into how it sorta works: Determinism argues that all actions and interactions here and now are the consequence of all actions and interactions before it (cause), and whatever action and interaction takes place here and now will cause consequences in the future. Possibility, probability, randomness, chance, and free will are illusions.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines explanations and the controversies associated with the idea of causal determinism. There are as many good arguments against determinism are there are for it. Settle in, because it's long and tedious:
Causal determinism is also applied to social constructs. Culture is one of them. In a loose definition, culture is a social arrangement. So, cultural determinism argues that here and now, our behaviors and thoughts are the consequences of long-dead social arrangements groups made to solve pressing problems.
For instance, a cultural determinist will argue that Americans' proclivity toward violence stems from the historically successful effort to establish a settler-slaver civilization. Such violence is heritable, transmitted across generations through cultural constructs like narratives, institutions, laws, economics and hierarchies.
To be a determinist is to say things have to be this way because they had to be this way.
The line of reasoning you propose, Bobson, will result in a denial of human agency and, ultimately, of any deteminative role for consciousness. It is a mechanistic portrait of existence based on Newtonian billiard-ball models that trace all material events to the vector motions of subatomic particles from any instant of past time one chooses.
This reasoning can be (and has been) addressed by models of "emergence" or "supervenience," which, most basically, claim that complexity beyond the level of subatomic particles can be an independent causal source. For example, that atoms behave in ways that cannot be predicted by the behavior of their simple components, or that sentient organisms behave in ways that cannot be predicted by an inventory of their constituent atoms.
As an example, a complete inventory of the atoms of a batter in baeball hitting a ball will not explain why that mass of atoms will always move to the right after making contact. The rules of baseball emerge at a level that atomic inventories cannot account for. Since cultural determinism is predicated on the basis of Newtonian models of material causes, these types of arguments can be used to counter it.
In my view, "cultural determinism" has about as much validity as a theory as "social Darwinism," which transplanted theories valid for the level organism/environment interaction into smart-sounding and highly toxic invalid theories about human individuals/social environment interactions.
(I don't want to compete with the Stanford Encyclopedia--it's a very good resource. However, I'm not ready to devote that time tonight, and I doubt Mr. Crease is either.)
I have no idea why Mr. Crease finds it hard to understand the grip of the Second Amendment on America. It seems pretty obvious to me, although I wish it were otherwise. But I don't think the answer lies in cultural determinism. I think it lies in historical experience and the role of the Constitution, the values of rural culture and the threat urban liberalism appears to pose to them, political manipulation, and economic opportunism. If a replacement of the amendment with statutes protecting recreational and hunting weapons had been proposed in, say, 1933, during a pre-NRA era fresh out of the age of Prohibition crime, I think it might well have succeeded.
Wow, this is insightful, Robert. This is the first time I've ever read human behavior linked to Newtonian physics.
Deterministic arguments for social constructs/the human condition have been rooted in claims of the divine. Religions predate scientific method, and religions generally have provided answers to practical problems with cosmological or supernatural causes or justifications (i.e., caste, hierarchy, gender roles, membership or evangelizations, etc.)
Thank you for your understanding Mr. Eno, I live in Thailand , but I am British by birth. As I'm sure you are aware, the British Police Force has always had a strong resistance toward being armed. My Grandfather, was a police officer in Britain, he always said; " the day you give the police guns, you give the criminal an excuse to carry guns." This to me, seems a perfectly logical argument. It is a well known fact that no matter what country you live in your money; is what will buy you what ever you require in life. Look at TRUMP! His money has bought him the Presidency of America, the most powerful country in the world. And that is the problem within all countries, it is the wealthy who have the power because they buy it. The current Prime Minister of Great Britain is a multi-millionaire as was Boris Johnson before him.
Personally, I think Mr. Eno has partially hit the nail on the head when he says quote:- " political manipulation, and economic opportunism." End quote. BKBC
Trump spent less than Hillary. He won because he was a TV celebrity.
Britain had much lower homicide rates than the US at the beginning of the 20th century, before guns were very restricted. But if you want to know how Britain got such low rates, you should read Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".
I’m a little surprised that Noah sees a college degree as a way to weed out prospective cadets. Why not increase training, including some “Plato and math” (some sort of history of race riots might be more applicable, though), but keep it open to anyone?
Pretty sure plumber and nail technician don’t require a college degree, and neither does my profession: actuary. You *do* have to pass 9-10 notoriously difficult exams, each with approximately a 50% pass rate, so if someone had an Associate or Fellow designation, you can be pretty confident they know what they’re talking about. That’s the sort of thing you’re shooting for with police, college degree or not.
I agree; the skills to be an effective police officer seem pretty distinct from the skills necessary to get a bachelor's degree. Some sort of apprenticeship-like component to police training might also be worthwhile, since policing seems (to me, not a police officer!) to be tough to learn solely in a classroom.
Almost all police departments utilize this system, and I think we poorly track "training" hours compared to other countries (many of which require the equivalent of an associates degree in criminal justice and count all the hours to get that, including general ed, as "police training hours"). In the US this system is called Field Training (or FTO) and usually lasts 6-8 months following graduation from the academy. You work full time with an experienced supervisor who gradually lets you do more police work on your own, with the last month or two being semi-solo with the FTO just observing you. Then, most departments graduate you to a probationary status for 1-2 years where you are a full officer but you don't have union/state employment protection for firing, so if you perform poorly or screw up they can just cut you.
I don't think I've seen very many of the police training hours account for the 6-8 month FTO period even though it is required by law by most state POST organizations and represents, on the low end, 1,000 to 1,500 hours of hands on training.
It's worth noting that 2 of the 4 officers fired and arrested in connection with George Floyd's death were in their first week of field training following academy graduation (the first couple of weeks are basically police ride alongs where your FTO is in charge and you can't do anything).
This kind of training is probably not super productive at the moment because a lot of new officers are watching and learning bad behaviors, and like Noah points out a lot of the current training is "warrior mentality" BS that tells cops that being violent and bad at their jobs is actually good. A standardized classroom course would make police more consistent and hopefully have enough civilian oversight to get rid of those kinds of programs.
Noticing that plumbers & nail technicians require more credentials than police should imply that the former be lowered, not that the latter be raised.
Dümmer als die Polizei erlaubt. (German for: dumber than the police allow.)
I think police needing to become more professionalised (similar to lawyers, doctors and plumbers) is something many voters should be able to get behind.
That said, I don’t think the article engages that fairly with activists who are opposed to the Atlanta training facility and the reasons why anti-police activists are arguing the USA is “over-policed.”
To begin with, whilst crime rates in Atlanta have dropped by 45% since 2009, there has been a mixed trend in the homicide rate since then. Despite this, around a third of the city’s budget in 2022 (~$250 million) was spent on its police force. To a lot of people, this has produced diminishing returns. They feel that there has not been a substantial reduction in homicides over the past decade that sufficiently justifies the enormous budget being spent on the police department every year. And that this could be better spent on programmes that reduce the underlying conditions that lead to high crime rates.
This isn’t just a thing in Atlanta either. “Defunding the police” activists observe (rightly or wrongly) that across the country, the overwhelming majority of police time is not spent on stopping violent crime, but rather; traffic stops for broken tail lights; issue citations for so-called “quality of life” offences like public drinking, “disorderly conduct,” and fare evasion; and arrest people for minor drug offences. And when police do respond to violent crimes, they often do a pretty bad job of it. I think it was around 50% of people killed by police had some kind of disability. I can’t imagine how unnecessary this would have been if they had the help they needed beforehand.
Funnily enough defunding police activists would actually agree with your suggestion that the police should be replaced with a highly specialised and professionalised organisation of public servants to respond to violent crime. Just that they also argue that the non-violent crime stuff should be handled by the community as a whole. There was an interesting leaflet made by one of said activists (also called Noah, heh) on the issue: http://www.irrelevantpress.com/store/police-abolition-101-a-collaborative-zine-project-nia-amp-interrupting-criminalization
I think the characterisation of the Atlanta activists as “environmentalist-NIMBYs” is unfair. Atlanta tree cover is an important defence against climate change and storm water flooding. But more importantly, some argue it would be better to construct environmentally friendly neighbourhoods, reducing the increasing cost of living across the city (opposite of NIMBYism). Overall, it’s a combination of the environmentalist concerns but just a general attitude that the cost of this project ($90 million of which a third is paid via taxes) is not sufficiently justified by the claimed benefits. A lot of the countries that you showed as having more training hours do not-to the best of my knowledge require massive $90 million training premises in each city in order to achieve this.
Overall this was a really insightful and informative blog post. I find that the central message of creating a more professionalised police force is something everyone can get behind. Just that I think the activist arguments could do with some more thorough engagement as you’ll find more common ground with them on this issue than you might expect.
Just a small note on the budget, but the American quirk of having schools be a seperate government entity from the city they serve often makes public safety funding look much larger than it is. The Atlanta Police budget is $245 million and the Atlanta Public Schools budget is $1.45 billion, but the latter doesn't come up in the city budget.
Ah fair point. Just out of curiosity, is there a reason for this? And are there other significant expenditures that are not typically included in American city budgets?
It's not uncommon to have different "districts". So you might have a water and sewer district that is run by a commission (which may be elected or appointed by elected officials in the "district) and self funded, so you don't see it as a city budget in one place where another city might have water and sewer costs on its budget (as well as the revenue from water and sewer service). Sometimes you have municipal electric utilities that are on budget, other times they are served by a electric cooperative that covers several counties, and other times they are served by investor owned utilities that cover even more area. Sometimes you have economic development commissions (or tourism commissions) that cover an entire county or multiple counties, again with commissioners appointed by elected officials, usually funded by some sort of ad valorem tax or special sales tax. Also can have self funded Port Commissions or Airport Commissions and also community hospitals.
Ah I see, makes sense. Cheers.
Traffic deaths have shot up greatly since George Floyd, concentrated among African-Americans. You need traffic stops, though one could argue that's a separate responsibility from responding to 911 calls.
While I am fully on board with more training for police, the licensing requirements for cutting hair are just restraint of trade lobbied for by the industry and should be repealed. Until recently in NC you did not need ANY training to be hired by the local sheriff's department. The argument was that when a new sheriff was elected, all the old deputies would resign, so they needed a lot of flexibility to hire fast. The sheriff system needs overhauling too.
In states where they elect judges, I'm assuming that you have to have passed the bar to put your name on the ballot. (hope I'm right). If so, requiring the relevant professional qualification as a police officer to run for sheriff would be an equivalent requirement.
Unfortunately, as I recently discovered when looking through the bios of the people running for judge in my small town, this is definitely not a requirement everywhere.
Part of the problem is how hyper local police systems are https://www.liberalcurrents.com/liberal-democracy-and-the-federal-system/
Definitely. But that's not getting fixed. Funding for training can be done at the federal level (with strings attached), and degree requirements can be done at the state level, which is why these are attractive reforms!
Texas has more than 2,000 different law enforcement agencies.
For comparison the UK, with twice the population, has ~50.
Spain has 5
Finland has 1
I think it *can* be fixed by investing in building state level policing administration and supplanting the local ones. But I agree it’s unlikely.
The beatings and killings are usually done by local departments, often small but sometimes city-sized. The math is simple - every one of these departments has overhead to simply operate. That overhead is a high percentage of the budget in a small department. I thought it was bizarre when I read about the Uvalde school shooting and realized that there was a Uvalde school police force with its own police chief. I think there were 6 officers with a full-time police chief. It's not a surprise that they didn't react well to a difficult scenario.
In general, there should be state police only. It could make sense to have county sheriffs in counties with substantial populations (say 500k or more). So a total of 100-150 police departments across the entire country.
That would allow for both more efficient budgets with more training time. It would also allow for more rotation of officers to different duties, so not as likely to have cynical burned out officers in high contact urban areas.
Many of the officers in the other countries are essentially beat officers who do community policing because there are more of them. The neighborhoods know them. Also, the police aren't as afraid because there are far fewer guns and they are rarely going to encounter handguns in contact with citizens. These countries typically have about 10% of the guns per capita as the US and those are usually rifles and shotguns for hunting.
Leftie myself. I was always thinking this in the back of my mind but this post lays it out v thoroughly and in ways I hadn’t thought of. Not sure about the needing a bachelor’s degree though, as many cop-types simply aren’t the schooling type. Better they spend that time doing paid training in drills and training with active shooter/traffic stop/etc stuff surely
> as many cop-types simply aren't the schooling type.
I think the problem is that we have a "cop-type" to begin with. A degree requirement, plus longer and drier training in general, has the added benefit of making the job less attractive to anyone who just wanted in for the gun and authority.
The end result will be fewer police officers, overwhelmed by crime. They'll have to work lots of overtime to achieve the same number of working hours as a larger department, then screw up from being tired.
I dont see why?
Only a minority of Americans have college degrees, and there's lots of demand for that minority in other jobs which don't entail all the hassles that being a cop does. Hence "The end result will be fewer policy officers", as I said, and the rest follows.
All good points - but I would also like to add one additional factor that needs to be addressed - 'qualified immunity'. As currently implemented - qualified immunity pretty much lets cops literally get away with murder. As part of the drive towards professionalism I think the laws behind qualified immunity need to be revised For example, congress can issue laws that waive qualified immunity if constitutional rights are violated. In addition, perhaps individual police need to have malpractice insurance, to protect cities from the behavior of a few bad actors. The inability to get insurance would help to eliminate police that don't behave professionally.
Qualified immunity protects individual cops from a federal civil lawsuit targeting them for violation of civil rights, unless the violation was clearly established. The current standing case law makes it a little hard to expand what constitutes "well established" civil rights violations, but it is not protection from murder charges, state criminal charges or lawsuits against departments at large.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/what-qualified-immunity-does-and
It's worth noting that everyone in our legal system except cops gets total immunity. You cannot personally sue a judge or a lawmaker or a D.A. for violation of your constitutional rights the way you can sue cops.
If you don't want courts second-guessing whether you violated someone's constitutional rights, don't violate their constitutional rights.
And I'd honestly support allowing more personal liability for official acts that clearly violate the law or constitutional rights. People would respond to those incentives accordingly. No, that wouldn't drive everyone out of those professions: doctors exist despite malpractice lawsuits, because malpractice insurance.
> congress can issue laws that waive qualified immunity if constitutional rights are violated
I’m pretty sure qualified immunity is automatically waived if constitutional rights are violated. I think that’s what “qualified” means.
That's the opposite of how qualified immunity works for police. QI is explicitly not waived upon determination that, most commonly, a §1983 violation has occurred.
I disagree entirely with requiring someone to have a BA to become a cop.
We've way overcredentialized the US workforce and actually we need to move in the other direction as several states are in eliminating BA degree for many state jobs.
But this is a bad idea especially for police work. BA acts as a kind of IQ filter and, as a matter of fact, in most parts of the US police work is far too boring and repetitive to be interesting to smarter workers.
More training is fine. But let's not do the BA as a prerequisite.
The bachelor's and training would be one and the same.
In unionized construction trades, the apprenticeship commitment is four years. After four years of practical jobsite work and classroom instruction, the apprentice achieves journey status. At least two more years of journey-class work, the worker can test for master status and be eligible for things like project management and training apprentices.
It's also not that unusual to require some sort of college level education for law enforcement to advance to test for sergeant duties. High command titles like captain or chief are now requiring master's degrees (usually in criminology or public administration) in some departments.
Classwork would go a long way, and universities already provide the relevant coursework (e.g., sociology, forensic sciences, prelaw, psychology, etc.). As Noah says, the U.S. armed forces already entrust men and women with guns to do brain work as well through the highly selective academies and scholarships to civilian universities.
There's no reason to expect universities to provide what's actually effective to becoming a better officer. Universities aim at prestige via selective recruitment of incoming freshmen. They are not evaluated based on how much their outgoing graduates have improved. See Bryan Caplan on education.
I've listed a series of classes that officers could or should take that would be relevant in their coursework (sociology, biochemistry, history, public administration, etc.).
Universities of any prestige levels, and especially community colleges for lower-level classes, already provide these classes. Most of them also have matriculation services geared toward uniformed service members. Public universities, much like civil service exams, give extra points for military and first responders in their applications.
We're not necessarily talking about the ivies or Stanford. This is all something that any multicampus state university system and any community college can accomplish literally now.
You've listed the names of courses which you believe to be "relevant", but haven't actually responded on effectiveness. One of Robin Hanson's regular points is that we could pay for results if we wanted effectiveness, but universities don't actually aim at that:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/payforresults
In public policy, you can't respond for effectiveness when you are demanding evidence for something that does not yet exist.
You have to enact a policy change first and design an evaluation with the appropriate controls.
I'll caution that evaluation methods, even when you want to statistically hypothesize that a better-educated workforce correlates with a reduction in officer-involved fatalities or even use excessive force, can be well-designed but still lead to misleading conclusions.
In this case, you can control for the behavior of police and universities, but you cannot control for behaviors of criminals. If excessive force still rises, but upon investigation many of the shootings are found to be justifiable, in this case the effect was well out of the bounds of the cause.
Alternatively, the policy would be successful by sheer dumb luck if you evaluated a police force whose jurisdiction is a favored quarter and the day-to-day interactions with the lawbreaking public are less frequent and less violent to begin with.
I'm also not following how this is a reflection on the quality or effectiveness of universities or their faculty. A college degree is not a factory warranty. Once the student is taught, it's upon them to draw upon their knowledge to put into use in real life. Universities are in no position to enforce knowledge or behavior once a student leaves.
In public policy we should be doing RCTs regularly:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/uncontrolled/
It's not an RCT but here is someone looking at evidence on the effects of education across countries:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/why_is_the_soci.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/10/international_e.html
"Black Lives Matter" got big as a result of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri. The DOJ investigated... and cleared the shooting but still slapped down the police for relying heavily on fines for revenue (I think Radley Balko may be right that after many taxpayers moved out it might no longer be able to afford its own independent government, though I also think it would have been like plenty of other jurisdictions which didn't get slapped down if it weren't for the protests over that ultimately-cleared shooting). As for the "effectiveness" of investigating the police in Ferguson for the people who actually live there, you can take a wild guess or you can read Roland Fryer on what generally happens in such cases of "viral" incidents.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html
Universities aren't even trying to be effective (like Yglesias says of the DOT regarding ridership). They're an institution dating back to the medieval era and its class system. Things like endowments & tenure all have the intent of insulating them from the kind of incentives other organizations might face.
I think Matt Yglesias's Police for America program would make more sense for getting young people with B.A.s to join the force. Cutting off the job to people without college degrees is a bad idea. Plenty of police departments, especially big city ones, require a combination of higher education, military service and/or relevant field work related to law enforcement these days. I know an agency I applied for required a B.A. or proof you conducted service and education that was an equivalent to mentally and physically prepare you for the police academy.
I agree training is woefully inadequate, and also poorly vetted/regulated. For example see this terrifying Pro Publica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/911-call-analysis-fbi-police-courts
Oversight and accountability are also extremely for much of local law enforcement, as you note.
Did you use the wrong link? The article you linked deals with one police leader who sold an unsupported method to determine whether 911 callers were actually guilty of the crimes they reported. How does this have anything to do with police training?
He sells it by "training" police forces on to use this bogus science. A lot of police training, especially for small forces, is consultants coming in to provide training.
OK. But this "training" is not part of pre-service training. There are lots of people who make a living by offering lots of organizations training on many subjects, with no particular support behind this training. I don't think Noah's approach on more "professionalization" of police would address this particular problem at all.
I disagree. If police training in general were more professional, and accredited, then there would be less of this sort of thing. Currently most professions require continuing education, and to meet that requirement the training must meet certain standards. If police training were professionalized , it would include more than pre-service training, one would think,
Can you tell me some details on these standards?
As a military officer, I was required to spend about 20% of my total service time in training. The course of this training was pretty well defined, and many officers spent long assignments as instructors in these courses. Is this your model?
The other area I've read a little about is medicine. Doctors get Continuing Education credits for attending conferences and presentations. Some people describe these as little more than resort vacations with drug company marketing presentations. I'm not endorsing this characterization, but it illustrates the difficulties in defining standards.
I'll concede that some attention on continuing education could be valuable. But, how would it address Noah's identified problem of police violence?
Doctors have to complete hours of accreditation that are in no way similar to resort vacations with pharm marketing. There are conventions they can attend but the accreditation is usually completed in their office, online and in meetings.
I'm astonished that anyone would think the key to reducing police violence is requiring more educational credentials for police. I shouldn't be, since this is a standard approach toward any responsible position in any area.
The research I've read concludes that nearly all incidents of police violence, especially violence of questionable legitimacy, come from 5 to 8 percent of officers who push policies on use of force to the limit. This is an issue of temperament, not of training. Furthermore, officers' peers and superiors are generally aware of who the "problem" officers are, but are generally unwilling (in the case of peers) and unable (in the cast of superiors) to forcefully address the issue. Some police officers shouldn't be police officers, and police leadership needs to have the authority to remove them from the force. Civil Service procedures and contract provisions make it nearly impossible to remove a problem officer. For an example, I recommend this podcast: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2022/02/this-american-life-reveals-the-dark-depths-of-racism-in-the-us-police-force.
No amount of training, or education, or credentials, will address this issue.
It may be that more training for police officers would be a good idea. It would be interesting to see what additional material is covered in the nearly 3 full years of training that Finnish police receive. But I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that more training leads to less violence.
Noah does briefly mention the content of police training. I think this is a worthwhile topic. I have the impression (without data or firsthand experience) that, since 1990 or so, police training has put more emphasis on the risk of lethal attack that police officers face. This was driven in part by cold facts: killings of police officers rose from 1960 to 1990 along with violent crime in general. If we can believe Wikipedia, the video of the killing of Officer Kyle Dinkheller of San Diego has become a standard part of police training, which may lead to many officers having unrealistic expectations of the dangers they face. It would be worth looking at the content of training, and the lessons officers are expected to take from it.
But requiring bachelors' degrees, or even masters' degrees, for police officers is an idea that could only appeal to people who like school. Obviously, Noah is one of them, and there's nothing wrong with that. I am also one of those people who enjoy school. But I've worked with enough people in enough situations to realize that school is not a useful proxy for general competence.
> The research I've read concludes that nearly all incidents of police violence, especially violence of questionable legitimacy, come from 5 to 8 percent of officers who push policies on use of force to the limit. This is an issue of temperament, not of training.
False dichotomy, I think? Mandatory training doesn't just upskill the existing pool of police officers, it changes the composition of the pool of police officers. At the margin, some would-be police officers would be repelled from becoming police officers by mandatory training, and it's plausibly that they would've been disproportionately the worst cops. (I suspect the effect would be small, but I'm highly skeptical it would be nil.)
Please explain your thought process. It seems to me that existing police officers have a pretty secure (if stressful and potentially dangerous) career. What sort of mandatory training do you think would so disgust them that they would resign?
Or are you suggesting that pre-service police academy training might cause some potentially bad cops to decide on a different career? What training would this be?
Sure. My thought process is simply that
• people in various jobs complain bitterly about mandatory training generally (like training in cutting-edge new technology when the new technology's advantages aren't immediately clear, or team-building retreats, or anti-sexual harassment seminars, or DEI training), and
• any job is going to have some people on the fence about whether to pursue (or continue pursuing it), such that the tiniest extra bit of hassle will flip their decision to do that job.
Marginal employees opting out of a job could be a matter of disgust, but it doesn't have to be, and indeed most of the time I don't expect it to be. Probably most marginal employees who avoid/quit a (potential) job would call it a simple matter of hassle. Consider ex-teachers who quit because they could tolerate the level of paperwork when they began teaching but got fed up with doing more paperwork over time.
I was primarily thinking of pre-service training, but presumably there would be some impact on existing police officers if they too had to undergo additional training. Nor did I have a particular "sort" of training in mind. Of course the precise content of the training would make a difference, but Noah's talking about thousands of hours more training, so I expect(ed) sheer quantity to have most of the marginal impact.
So, your idea is to make training annoying, hoping to discourage potential police officers. Why would you think the ones who get discouraged are more likely to be the "bad" cops, and not the bright, articulate, ambitious ones with plenty of other opportunities?
No, I don't see that that's my idea. After all, part of my thinking is that training is already going to be at least a little "annoying" just because it's training; it's not clear it needs to be "ma[de]" annoying.
All sorts of people in various jobs complain about training, whether on the job or as part of onboarding, and in my experience it tends to be the less agreeable, and those who see training as Not Part Of The Real Job who find training more off-putting. I expect that bad cops tend to be more disagreeable and disinclined to understand the potential relevance of training to policing, and "the bright, articulate, ambitious ones" less so, hence I infer that bad cops would be more likely to opt out of policing in response to higher training requirements.
This is, of course, an empirical claim that could be disproven. Maybe it's actually "the bright, articulate, ambitious" cops who are actually the most disagreeable, the ones least likely to recognize the potential worth of additional training, and the ones most likely to be running around busting heads with a stack of complaints trailing behind them. I doubt it, but I could be wrong about that; I would welcome empirical evidence bearing on this.
It seems to work for other countries. The studies on training that Noah cited seem plausible.
Anecdotally, my experience with Australian cops are that they generally work to deescalate a situation whenever they can. From what I've seen of American cops, there seems to be a bit of an attitude thing going on there. Now part of it might just be culture, but I'm sceptical that it's all of it. The chart Noah showed on training hours would be very consistent with most people's impressions of American cops.
Those "other countries" didn't have our crime problem.
You will repel people from becoming police officers. The result will be fewer police, who will be overwhelmed by crime in cities that currently have a high rate, lots of overtime to make up for the shortfall in headcount, and then more screwups from tired cops.
Which would confirm my point that there's almost surely a compositional effect of requiring additional training, not just an upskilling effect.
I think the professionalized class are doing investigative work for law enforcement (including detectives themselves). A friend's husband is a cop (was SWAT when I met him but has done other types of police work since) and getting an advanced degree was necessary for promotion. And I think people broadly agree that we need a lot more people solving crimes, especially since technology allows them to be more effective than in the past.
A lot of the public conflict, though, involves patrol officers. I'm not sure how easy it will be to professionalize that job given other career options that don't involve dealing with the most troubled members of a heavily armed public. Yes, there are more dangerous jobs, but the risks here are less predictable because they involve human behavior. In high school I did mock trial and our advisor was a detective who became a lawyer. One of my friends (a Berkeley grad) wanted to follow the same career path and even started at the academy after college. However it became clear that spending time on patrol to even reach detective was just not worth it and he became a lawyer instead.
I do think patrol officers are asked to do too many things, especially under adverse or unpredictable circumstances. I also don't think there is a big enough applicant pool to maintain the high quality in all areas of the country. Officers are wasting their time on menial tasks while also doing difficult work that should be handled by other specialists, including mental health specialists. (Same problems we see in Medicine, really.) Beefing the ranks of law enforcement requires more public safety personnel, not just more sworn officers.
Of course this doesn't mean it's acceptable to have the least-educated, unpromotable assholes sort into the most public-facing jobs, but I understand how it could happen. And also why it's hard to get rid of them unless they're caught doing something truly egregious (like murdering unarmed civilians). And sometimes they sort into bad units like we saw with Tyre Nichols' killers. We need more people to do the work understanding that we aren't going to get perfect applicants. I think the biggest step to professionalization needs to be changing the job itself and THAT is going to be an uphill battle.
While I agree that more professionalism is badly needed, we need to stop thinking about this entirely at the individual level. The behavior of the Memphis Murderous Five shows quite clear how this is very largely cultural and group problem. Organized police forces have only existed for less than two centuries. Armies, with a vastly longer history, have evolved cultural institutions for using violence for political purposes while constraining and delimiting it. We should work to develop and establish cultural institutions for the management of police violence. Law enforcement cannot function without the potential for exercising violence, but our society cannot afford institutions that exercise it in a random and unfocused manner unrelated to political ends.
There's a very important distinction to be made and maintained between military and police, and members of each uniformed service stress this. The military are trained to defend and kill, while the goal of police is to capture their targets alive.
The latter is more challenging, because in law enforcement, they are also trained in lethal force, and if lethal force must be used, the goal is to kill the target instantly. The public often asks why don't police wound a suspect and keep them alive, like shoot them in a limb instead of the center of mass where all of the vital organs are. One, the bullets are more likely to miss a non-vital part of the body. Two, a wounded suspect could still pose a danger to others. Three, first responders might not be able to render aid in time; letting a suspect agonize in pain is considered torture.
With that said, I can't stress this enough but the above is *not a justification* for violence under color of law. It's a description of how law enforcement react in volatile situations and how police killings have unfolded.
The difference between armies and police is training. At any given point, a very small percentage of police are engaged in training. The rest are deployed. In the military, it's the opposite.
Not only does this lead to a lack of training, but I also believe it creates a mental health crisis among police, as they are never rotated out.
Neither the comments by Bobson nor those by Mark reflect any clear understanding of the nature of the military. (I have decades of military experience, both as an officer and as a civilian analyst.) First it is important to understand that the nature of the military in the US or UK, say, is fundamentally different from that in a poorly civilized and misgoverned society such as Russia. The key factor in any military service (or any manpower-intensive institution) is the culture, which is embedded within but distinct from that of the society at large. The military will propagate its culture through its own internal processes unless its leadership invests a great deal of thought and effort in nudging it in one direction or another.
Russia is an example of a country whose army's culture has always been brutal, corrupt and punitive, time out of mind. This seems to be more or less the default for army cultures generally, unless some definite action is taken to change it, and is not too greatly different from what we sometimes see in police forces. With some local exceptions this is at odds with the general societal culture in the US and the armed forces leadership has periodically taken action to better align military cultures with broader societal values. This is frequently quite difficult and can take a long time, but the whole the US military has done well at building forces which provide disciplined instruments for achieving the political objectives of our society with minimal collateral harms.
While training as the term is usually understood does play a key part in the acculturation of soldiers, the main processes of shaping and transmitting culture take place through experience under the supervision of senior soldiers, NCOs, and officers. This does not seem to be the case generally in the police where culture transmission seems to be more akin to the process in the Russian army, with slightly more senior peers acculturating their immediate juniors. The results are those we have recently seen in Memphis and countless other places.
Whether longer and more intensive training at the individual level, as Noah Smith appears to believe, could be depended upon to override the negative cultural forces in the police I very much doubt. I do think that better and more professional training would be quite valuable but I doubt that it can be sufficient.
Police leaders don't have the kind of training to change culture, and if they did, how would they implement it?
I'm sure the military doesn't change culture while in-theatre on the battlefield.
Overthinking the problem is a fundamental flaw. Look at the simple profile picture of todays cops. They look like, dress like, paramilitary. They are armed with military gear. Receive military type skill training. Since 9/11 we have militarized local police. Bush Obama did it well. It was surplus equipment they said.
It is policy. At local state and federal levels.
What you see is what you get. Seeing is believing.
This is no surprise to many as it was called out by senior policy folks in early 2000’S. We did this to ourselves. The swamp was sent there by us.
It’s in the legislation. Vote them out.
Police killed people at a higher rate in the midcentury era, prior to the militarization look.
Yes!! The lack of training really struck me during a "ridealong" with the police department of an East Coast city.
But it's not just training/investment up-front. It's all about continuous training. I'd estimate that at least 20% of our time in the Navy was spent training. Staffing had to account for this--the reactor plant would have 5 shifts worth of people, but only 4 shifts were "working" the plant. The other shift was dedicated to training. All shifts rotated through a training week, and there was an expectation of some "on shift" training even if your shift was assigned to the plant.
Meanwhile, in the police department I was tagging along with, they'd have like...2-3 days of training per year. So like 1% of their time. We trained ~20x in the Navy.
One problem that’s obvious to anyone with a background in “combat sports” (wrestling, MMA, etc) is that the cops in the Tyre Nichols video had absolutely no clue what they were doing. Their attempts to restrain him looked more like drunk high schoolers boxing in a basement than an actual attempt to control the situation. This is the reason cities like St. Paul have seen such success after implementing regular Brazilian Jujitsu training for the officers. The theory is very straight forward. If a cop has little or no skill in grappling(physically controlling another person without a weapon), he's going to be extremely stressed when going hands on and he'll be more likely to escalate if the suspect is anything other than perfectly compliant.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/is-brazilian-jujitsu-making-policing-safer-for-everyone/amp/
Salary levels and training are indeed inconsistent for law enforcement across the country. I am a public school English teacher licensed to teach grades 7-12. I was required to have my bachelor's degree (and within three my master's) and to pass teaching certification exams. To teach in another state, I must either have reciprocity or undergo their state exams to receive certification. It seems to me that we need state qualifications for police officers rather than only local civil service exams and municipal requirements. Effective law enforcement requires integrity, ethics, education, and a commitment to civil service, qualities that our best officers embody. These should be required of all and all should be trained to carry on their duties in the most professional manner. As a mother of a LEO, I applaud Mr. Smith's proposal to invest in better training and professional standards for our police. It is our country and all of its citizens who will benefit from doing so.
Why does America have a death penalty? From what I have heard through the news channels in the USA, most people who are convicted of murder in the first degree, are usually given a life sentence for each life they take. It seems more logical to apply the maximum penalty, for the maximum crime, such as murder in the first degree, than to keep a person alive for thirty + years, locked up in a cage. BKBC
Noah Smith, you have made all the arguments that most level headed people are making at present. I cannot understand, why the American people cling to this belief that they have a right to bear arms. Surely, there have been more than enough deaths from gun related crimes? Kids take guns into their schools, and before anybody knows they are present, they are opening fire on class-mates; causing death and misery to families that will live with them forever. BKBC.
Are you familiar with cultural determinism?
No I have never heard the expression used; maybe you can enlighten me Bobson.
Determinism is not an easy term to understand with one sentence. This gives an entry into how it sorta works: Determinism argues that all actions and interactions here and now are the consequence of all actions and interactions before it (cause), and whatever action and interaction takes place here and now will cause consequences in the future. Possibility, probability, randomness, chance, and free will are illusions.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines explanations and the controversies associated with the idea of causal determinism. There are as many good arguments against determinism are there are for it. Settle in, because it's long and tedious:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
Causal determinism is also applied to social constructs. Culture is one of them. In a loose definition, culture is a social arrangement. So, cultural determinism argues that here and now, our behaviors and thoughts are the consequences of long-dead social arrangements groups made to solve pressing problems.
For instance, a cultural determinist will argue that Americans' proclivity toward violence stems from the historically successful effort to establish a settler-slaver civilization. Such violence is heritable, transmitted across generations through cultural constructs like narratives, institutions, laws, economics and hierarchies.
To be a determinist is to say things have to be this way because they had to be this way.
The line of reasoning you propose, Bobson, will result in a denial of human agency and, ultimately, of any deteminative role for consciousness. It is a mechanistic portrait of existence based on Newtonian billiard-ball models that trace all material events to the vector motions of subatomic particles from any instant of past time one chooses.
This reasoning can be (and has been) addressed by models of "emergence" or "supervenience," which, most basically, claim that complexity beyond the level of subatomic particles can be an independent causal source. For example, that atoms behave in ways that cannot be predicted by the behavior of their simple components, or that sentient organisms behave in ways that cannot be predicted by an inventory of their constituent atoms.
As an example, a complete inventory of the atoms of a batter in baeball hitting a ball will not explain why that mass of atoms will always move to the right after making contact. The rules of baseball emerge at a level that atomic inventories cannot account for. Since cultural determinism is predicated on the basis of Newtonian models of material causes, these types of arguments can be used to counter it.
In my view, "cultural determinism" has about as much validity as a theory as "social Darwinism," which transplanted theories valid for the level organism/environment interaction into smart-sounding and highly toxic invalid theories about human individuals/social environment interactions.
(I don't want to compete with the Stanford Encyclopedia--it's a very good resource. However, I'm not ready to devote that time tonight, and I doubt Mr. Crease is either.)
I have no idea why Mr. Crease finds it hard to understand the grip of the Second Amendment on America. It seems pretty obvious to me, although I wish it were otherwise. But I don't think the answer lies in cultural determinism. I think it lies in historical experience and the role of the Constitution, the values of rural culture and the threat urban liberalism appears to pose to them, political manipulation, and economic opportunism. If a replacement of the amendment with statutes protecting recreational and hunting weapons had been proposed in, say, 1933, during a pre-NRA era fresh out of the age of Prohibition crime, I think it might well have succeeded.
Wow, this is insightful, Robert. This is the first time I've ever read human behavior linked to Newtonian physics.
Deterministic arguments for social constructs/the human condition have been rooted in claims of the divine. Religions predate scientific method, and religions generally have provided answers to practical problems with cosmological or supernatural causes or justifications (i.e., caste, hierarchy, gender roles, membership or evangelizations, etc.)
Thank you for your understanding Mr. Eno, I live in Thailand , but I am British by birth. As I'm sure you are aware, the British Police Force has always had a strong resistance toward being armed. My Grandfather, was a police officer in Britain, he always said; " the day you give the police guns, you give the criminal an excuse to carry guns." This to me, seems a perfectly logical argument. It is a well known fact that no matter what country you live in your money; is what will buy you what ever you require in life. Look at TRUMP! His money has bought him the Presidency of America, the most powerful country in the world. And that is the problem within all countries, it is the wealthy who have the power because they buy it. The current Prime Minister of Great Britain is a multi-millionaire as was Boris Johnson before him.
Personally, I think Mr. Eno has partially hit the nail on the head when he says quote:- " political manipulation, and economic opportunism." End quote. BKBC
Trump spent less than Hillary. He won because he was a TV celebrity.
Britain had much lower homicide rates than the US at the beginning of the 20th century, before guns were very restricted. But if you want to know how Britain got such low rates, you should read Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".