Better policing may someday make it into the “Big Ideas” section of this blog, but I have not yet given it enough study and thought. For now, here are some ideas and links.
This video from the Institute for Humane Studies argues for a return to community policing, where the citizens know the officers and the officers know the neighborhood. This sounds right to me. In time of war, an invading army cannot count on local cooperation and must suspect that everyone they encounter is an enemy. Our police should not have to act like an invading army. Effective policing is impossible without community cooperation and the only two ways to get that cooperation—trust and fear—are mutually exclusive. In “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” fear is not a practical option, so police who have not earned the trust of their community are condemned to being ineffective. We regularly see this ineffectiveness being played out in cities all across America.
The video also explains how federal and state incentives can tend to turn even community police forces against the communities they serve.
This article at Big Think argues for discretionary non-enforcement of laws. I strongly disagree. We have so many laws that no one can know even a tenth of them, and most are already not consistently enforced. Discretionary non-enforcement allows officials to prosecute people they dislike while letting friends who commit the same crime walk free. If a law does not need to be enforced consistently, it should not be a law in the first place. I suspect we could eliminate at least 80% of all laws and be better off as a society for doing so. Reducing the number and complexity of the laws would make it easier for Americans to obey the law and for police to enforce it.
The same article argues for elimination of bad financial incentives like civil asset forfeiture. I agree. Civil asset forfeiture is a federal program that allows state and local police to seize and retain someone’s property without having to even prove that the owner broke the law. To take someone’s property without first proving beyond reasonable doubt that the owner has committed a crime is pure theft. Even if the owner has been convicted of a crime, the prosecution should have the burden to demonstrate by a preponderance of the evidence that the property was used in or obtained as a result of the crime. For property used in a crime, the value of the property forfeited should not be excessive in relation to the seriousness of the crime. If property is seized that the criminal obtained as a result of his crime, the value of that property should be used to compensate victims, not to fund police departments.
There has been recent discussion of elimination or narrowing of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is based on a Supreme Court decision from long ago that has since been reinterpreted and expanded to make it next to impossible for a citizen to win a lawsuit against a government official, no matter how egregious or illegal the official’s actions have been. Police sometimes have to make split-second, life-or-death decisions, and it would be inappropriate to require them to defend against lawsuits for every such action. On the other hand, people should be able to collect reasonable judgments from officers who have injured them by knowingly violating the law or department procedures. There is no reason for any public officers other than police or prison guards to be afforded immunity from lawsuits. So perhaps some very-narrowly-crafted qualified immunity should be afforded for officers directly encountering dangerous criminals, but none should be available to other officials or in other situations.
Finally, we need to think about the purpose of our police. Do we employ them it to keep citizens safe or to arrest as many citizens as possible?
Posted 2021/08/07