Already, police do this exact shakedown on cities. There are numerous incidents (anecdotal) of US police threatening city officials to reduce enforcement during election cycles, demanding increases in police force budget.
Broadly, the US needs to eliminate corruption. There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.
The SF Police Department bombed the mayor's house in 1975:
"In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike...
The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands."
> The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Riot, also known as the City Hall Riot, was a rally organized and sponsored by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of the City of New York (PBA) held on September 16, 1992, to protest mayor David Dinkins' proposal to create a civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. Approximately 4,000 NYPD officers took part in a protest that included blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping over police barricades in an attempt to rush City Hall. Rioters were observed to be openly drinking, damaging cars, and physically attacking journalists from the New York Times on the scene. Rioters also chanted racial epithets towards the African-American Mayor Dinkins. The nearly 300 uniformed on-duty officers did little to control the riot.
Federal law enforcement (FBI etc) has a tiny amount of manpower compared to local police. In theory the national guard could have been called in but that would be a huge escalation and I doubt the elected officials wanted to go there.
The Supreme Court is responsible for a lot of this, it has institutionalized immunity for law enforcement and prosecution and unlimited corporate money in politics so that it would require overriding that lever of power which doesn’t seem likely since democrats just rolled over when the gop wouldn’t allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice.
They could have changed the rules when they got the majority and they could have pushed for alternatives with some random ideas off the top of my head a.) just putting their appointed justice on the court while Obama was still President since the constitution does not specifically say approval just consent so with the anything goes interpretation of original intent that the current supreme court uses why not, b.) packing the court after they got the majority, c.) deciding to make term limits for supreme court justices - the forever a justice is not in the constitution.
It like the current situation where one senator Tuberville can block the mass appointment of military leadership, they could change the rules or do it one by one but the leadership is too afraid of changing the way things have always worked around here.
I'm not one to ever defend the institution of policing or the court system that feeds and protects it, but cops do not have general immunity. They have qualified immunity from civil cases in some places. The primary friction from prosecuting police for criminal behavior has been and will continue to be DAs unwilling to prosecute (for various reasons, some reasonable, and some nefarious).
There are many reasons why police serve the role they do in society. Neglecting other reasons other than blatant racketeering—the role they play in preserving the institution of private property, the role they play in filling prisons, the role they play in preserving the illusion of justice—serves nobody.
The genius of American political life is in defining problems out of existence with ever more complex legal and rhetorical terminology, while working overtime on training people to affirm that they are the freest country in the world.
It’s widely believed in New York (I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether it’s true, but it’s at least widely believed) that the police have been on a “soft strike” since 2020 and have been refusing to deal with anything but the most egregious situations, for political reasons.
Anecdotally, my camera system alerted me and I witnessed someone enter my neighbors vehicle. I got my neighbor and we got the dude out of the car and I asked him unkindly what the hell he was doing and if he had stolen anything.
When police arrived much later the perp actually showed back up down the street and I pointed him out. It was a struggle to get them to go see who he was and investigate, even though I had photo and video evidence of the crime.
Later that night, that same guy broke into another neighbor's house and they came in much hotter, with shotguns to clear the house and they were able to arrest him not far down the street.
>It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.
The George Floyd protests were huge. I don't think it's a simple matter of the public being too complacent.
I'd say that insofar as the protests were unsuccessful, it's because their energy wasn't being directed strategically. There was so much discussion of "defunding the police" without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime.
From a systems-level perspective, telling everyone that police officers are jerks seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice people place a high priority on being well-regarded by others; jerks enjoy opportunities to abuse their power. The "ACAB" slogan exacerbates the problem it describes.
One question I wonder about is whether jurisdictions where the chief of police is elected tend to function better than jurisdictions where they're appointed by the mayor. There are so many dimensions along which mayoral performance can be evaluated, and public safety is just one of those. By squeezing all the dimensions into a single vote, we're limiting the amount of signal that voters can send to their government.
I don't think policing inherently needs to be a malicious activity. My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance, and that police quality changes depending on which US municipality you look at. One wild idea I sometimes dream about: Imagine if each city had multiple competing police departments, and every cop wore the logo of the department they worked for prominently on their shoulder. Then for each local election, voters vote for one or more logos, and police work + funding gets distributed to the competing departments accordingly. Every time you call to report a crime, it gets assigned semi-randomly to one of the departments, and you're told which department got the assignment. Basically, make police brutality and police corruption into a customer satisfaction issue. The very best police chiefs could make millions of dollars starting police companies which effectively served and protected cities across America.
Yeah, I know HN dislikes capitalism. But it's interesting that policing as an industry has very little capitalist competition -- it's entirely organized by the government -- and yet no one seems satisfied with it. I'd argue capitalist competition can work great if companies are competing to succeed at the correct metric. Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.
> without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach
A minor gripe: asking protesters of a utterly shitty, but long standing, complex and entranched situation, to come up clear, simple and compelling alternatives is generally unfair.
In particular the political process should work in reverse: people voice issues, and their governing bodies come up with viable solutions. That's their job.
> police quality is higher in Europe
It can be utterly shitty too. The difference could be that they're not armed with military grade material and protestors aren't willing to let things slide, even as pretty gruesome confrontations happen (people killed, losing eyes, limbs etc.)
> In particular the political process should work in reverse: people voice issues, and their governing bodies come up with viable solutions. That's their job.
I get what you mean but the governing bodies of the people are the people. In a democracy, we are in charge of our own institutions, at least in theory.
I agree that we can't lay the full burden for solving injustice on the people affected by that injustice, and I think finding solutions for injustice is something that everyone should take part in, and there is a particular responsibility for those with the most amount of power to act. But often the people most affected by injustice are the ones who can see the flaws in the existing system best, and who have the best ideas as to where a solution might come from.
> Local police are mostly controlled by local institutions, no?
No, they are mostly not controlled by anyone except themselves, and aren't accountable to anybody, because they can disobey and/or corruptly coerce and/or retaliate against people, including elected government officials, who try to hold them accountable, with no repercussions.
I see your point that it's the role of governing bodies to find solutions to complex issues raised by the public. However, isn't there also some responsibility on the part of the protestors to articulate what specific changes they'd like to see, rather than resorting to extreme actions like property destruction? After all, clear demands can make it easier for those in power to act effectively.
while not everyone agreed on everything, there was unambiguous consensus to end the invincibility of corrupt cops engaging in police brutality (and to end the police brutality itself)
that's a pretty clear problem for government officials to figure out how to solve
> My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance
My impression is that that’s because in Europe it’s a skilled job that requires a degree. In the US it’s where everyone that can’t get another job goes.
I think your idea has many flaws, but I am very surprised and happy to see novel approaches here, and it absolutely represents my favorite part of HackerNews.
Probably the reason policing is sub optimal is due to the fact that it is funded by the city, so more prosperous areas can pay more, and recruit the best cops, while the areas with less income often can't pay as well, (or enough to offset the risks).
Compare this to schooling, where it's largely funded through the county, so the county often pays less in the nicer areas, knowing the job is easier.
sorry I don't see what the links have to do with what I said. In my area of CA, school funding is provided by the county and police is funded through the city.
> I think your idea has many flaws, but I am very surprised and happy to see novel approaches here, and it absolutely represents my favorite part of HackerNews.
Really appreciate the words of encouragement here!
If you want to encourage me further, you should give details about the flaws and challenge me to address them :-)
sure. I'm not at all thinking my flaws are insurmountable, but I think the problem is you are unlikely to get enough data to draw many conclusions, at least in places that aren't incredibly dense and crime ridden.
I'm thinking of the suburb outside of LA I live in. It's somewhat spread out, and some areas have small amounts of violent crime, while some neighborhoods are incredibly rich and most neighborhoods are gated or have private security etc. Having 3 departments be able to serve such a large land area to ensure that response types are evenly distributed seem challenging.
But, maybe in a place like San Francisco (more dense, also more crime) this could work?
Sure, if an area is low crime, I'd say your policing strategy doesn't matter a ton, assuming your cops don't engage in police brutality or corruption. Probably in a low crime neighborhood, competing departments would focus on friendly interactions with the public and making really sure that none of their officers look bad in viral videos.
I know I mentioned randomization, but I don't think uneven distribution is necessarily a problem. Ultimately, a voter who looks at 3 different logos on the ballot is going to think back to interactions they had with the cops, and what their friends tell them about the cops, in order to figure out which logo to vote for. Different voters are going to see different distributions of police presence, but that's probably fine. In the same way people tend to vote for the incumbent candidate, I would guess that voters will tend to vote for the logo they see the most in their neighborhood, assuming that logo seems to be doing an OK job.
Another way to approach it is that each competing department could have a different service area, and the service areas grow or shrink every election based on election results. This could be done algorithmically by splitting the city in to precincts and finding an assignment of precincts to departments that approximately conforms to the election results, while also keeping service areas for any given logo contiguous through time and space as much as possible (minimize travel and switching costs).
All this stuff could work for schools too btw. It achieves the "skin in the game" aspect of charter schools while reducing the ability/incentive to shuttle problem students elsewhere in order to juice your school's numbers (potentially, depending on implementation).
> Compare this to schooling, where it's largely funded through the county, so the county often pays less in the nicer areas, knowing the job is easier.
Most school funding comes through property taxes - it’s a nice way to avoid saying “we’re funding schools in poorer areas using fewer resources” while saying absolutely that.
> it’s a nice way to avoid saying “we’re funding schools in poorer areas using fewer resources” while saying absolutely that.
This is not true in California. Property taxes are collected by the county in CA, and then distributed to the cities most in need. Beverly Hills doesn't get more school funding than East LA just because their property tax revenue is 10x higher.
The quality at the end of the day may be a bit better, but overall it's the same system. You can only speak for specific country. I know someone from France that was pulled out of a car for having an Arab name.
When Floyd died paris pd changed policies and the police broke the law in order to protest. Lets not look at Europe through rose colored glasses. This can be quite hard to do on HN, because you are often silenced.
Your reply has a big claim, namely that they have had a "wild success". Instead of giving sources for this claim you provided us with contextual information that proves nothing
I don’t have sources readily available but several programs across the country have reallocated parts of their police budgets to mental health crisis services, among other things, to seemingly good success.
There are also places that tried defunding and then quietly voted for _more_ budget for policing.
> The program is producing paradigm shift results. In its inaugural year, STAR has successfully responded to 1,396 calls. Of those, there were no arrests, no injuries and no need for police back up. We've learned from these calls that expanding the program can help further reduce the need for law enforcement and emergency medical services to respond to 911 calls in certain crises, like intoxication, welfare checks, indecent exposure and more.
>Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success.
That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities?
Suppose someone is suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill -- does Denver now call a mental health or EMT professional for that person?
>Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1]
The severity of Goodhart's law depends on the mismatch between what you want and how you measure it. If you're able to measure what you want very accurately, Goodhart's law is not as much of an issue.
Goodhart's law doesn't just apply to capitalism, it applies in many social domains -- including the political domain. The grandparent comment states:
>There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming.
Lobbying, campaign finance, price fixing, bribery, and police-ran protection rackets only relate to free-enterprise competition in the vaguest possible sense ("they all involve money").
I brought up the logo police idea for discussion because I think it's possible that it could align feedback loops better than the status quo. I invite you and everyone else to shoot holes in the idea, and guess how specifically it could fail. It could be that it fails in predictable ways, yet is still an improvement on the status quo.
One of my hot takes is that it's good to rotate your metric on a regular basis, in order to flush out actors who are purely optimizing for the current metric and nothing else.
Unfortunately, any beneficiary of the status quo has a strong incentive to maintain it even if it's flawed, and random members of society only have a weak incentive to fix it. That creates friction that prevents rotating metrics.
From an incentive engineering perspective, this meta problem seems like the highest-leverage thing to solve. If we could fix that public goods problem, we could keep tweaking incentives on a regular basis and hopefully outrun Goodhart's Law faster and better than we are currently able to do.
I wonder if mechanisms for solving public goods problems, like dominant assurance contracts, could be helpful here.
Ultimately standard left/right debates sound pretty tired to my ears. In an ideal world, "incentive engineering" would be just as rich of a discussion as "software engineering" is today. The current situation is like if every HN post about software engineering was either an argument for why static typing sucks, or an argument for why static typing rocks. There's a much bigger world out there people. The heroes vs villains frame that people want to apply to every problem is often an impoverished one, IMO.
> That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities?
Since we’re talking about defunding, not abolishing, what’s your point?
And that fraction depends on the municipality - it varies from program to program.
>Since we’re talking about defunding, not abolishing, what’s your point?
Is there a difference? If you defund the police completely, isn't that basically the same as abolishing?
If protesters just wanted to reduce police funding, their slogan should have been "reduce police funding" instead of "defund the police". "Reduce police funding" is much less ambiguous.
This ties into my point about how energy wasn't being directed strategically. "Defund the police" is great as an edgy slogan, but that's about it.
>And that fraction depends on the municipality - it varies from program to program.
> Is there a difference? If you defund the police completely, isn't that basically the same as abolishing?
It’s hard to believe you’re being genuine only because, since the beginning, “defund the police” meant reallocating funds to reduce the amount going to cops. I’d understand if this were the first time you’ve heard of this, but it’s been a slogan for years and has been implemented in enough places that a cursory look into it would’ve explained it.
I’m not here to defend the language used (fwiw I’m fine with it), any movement requires nuance once you get past the flashy slogan.
> What's the rough average?
From what I recall, and this is very rough from the top of my head, one such program to use mental health advocates fueled around 1,000 calls in a year. Out of those I think they in turn requested police backup under 10 times.
This video from Some More News goes into detail about what defunding has looked like, for better and for worse, https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg
>It’s hard to believe you’re being genuine only because, since the beginning, “defund the police” meant reallocating funds to reduce the amount going to cops.
Why so many hits for "defund and abolish?" on e.g. Twitter then?
>So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space - if these are vital ideas that everyone has to adopt for moral reasons, how do you defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces? You don't understand these ideas completely, because you absorbed them through social proof and not by convincing arguments. But they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured there's mass consensus behind them.
>When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do?
>I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".
...
>From what I recall, and this is very rough from the top of my head, one such program to use mental health advocates fueled around 1,000 calls in a year. Out of those I think they in turn requested police backup under 10 times.
Not the number I was asking for. I want to know what % of total police activity has been replaced by counselor/paramedic activity.
>your example is someone committing a non violent crime that the federal government handles anyway?
Are you saying that people suspected of counterfeiting should not be arrested? Or do you believe it's fine to arrest them, as long as the arrest is performed by federal employees rather than city employees? If so, why is that supposed to make a difference?
>Do an ounce of research into the existing programs and ideas.
If you make a claim the burden of proof is on you to support it.
No. SAG-AFTRA members, with the notable exception of Alec Baldwin, can't shoot people and get away with it. Police have special privileges, and should be snapped back into last century before we allow them to abuse them.
Broadly, the US needs to eliminate corruption. There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.