Defunding police?
“Defund the police” is a terrible slogan and would be counter-productive policy. According to the concept of compensating differentials, if you make a job more difficult, you will have to pay more to attract workers. Holding police to a higher standard and getting the sorts of people who we want to be police to be willing to work will require paying them more. Trying to improve any governmental service by lowering the amount we pay for that service is counterproductive, and there’s nothing about police work that would suggest it is an exception. If budgets and pay are cut, don’t be surprised when the only people who still want to be cops are those who think the biggest perk is getting to beat people up and break the law with impunity. Qualified immunity should not be a job perk, let alone a major one.
The police do too much. They are not equipped to handle many of the things they are asked to do, such as dealing with mental health issue and animal control. There’s no reason why the same group that handles traffic tickets should be solving murders. There should be separate unarmed social workers who deal with non-violent disputes and mental health issues should be dealt with by specialists. These new departments will all cost money to operate, but they are worth the price for improved public safety.
Ending the War on Drugs should be the absolute #1 priority for anyone looking to reform the police. Throwing someone in prison for drug use does not help them, it does not help anyone else, it does not reduce the rate drug use, it make recovery from addiction more difficult, and prohibition increases secondary crime. Drug enforcement creates the mentality that anyone can be a criminal. If you take a completely normal person going about their day, not bothering anyway, but they’ve got a joint in their pocket, now all of a sudden, they are a criminal. Something like 70% of Americans have tried pot, and 22% are regular users. That means if police were doing their jobs perfectly, 77 million Americans would be behind bars.
The mentality of “everyone is a criminal” is a cancer in policing. Police see everyone who is not a police officer themselves as a potential enemy and since drug dealers are often well armed and violent, the drug war makes police more likely to be shot and thus more afraid of being shot. The 4th amendment, the 5th amendment, due process, the Takings clause, every other value and principle society holds dear is sacrificed to the all consuming goal of continuing the drug war. Without the drug war, all of that goes away. Police could focus on victimed crime. People who are victims of crime could go to the police asking for help, instead of having police out looking for trouble.
There should be a fee for calling the police over a non-crime to discourage nuisance police calls. If police get called and there is no law broken, maybe the caller could pay a hundred dollars or so for bothering the police. This would discourage people from calling the police over every little thing. Police/civilian interaction should be minimized to avoid police shootings.
Studies have shown that for discouraging crime, the odds of getting caught are far more important than the harshness of the punishment. A well functioning society does need police to catch criminals, but it doesn’t need to throw those criminals behind bars for years to discourage them. Non-violent crime punishment should focus on reforming criminals and doing community service. Having more police investigating things like shoplifting, bicycle theft, petty property destruction and things like that would do more to help society than having an equivalent amount of money spent on prisons extending the sentence of someone caught for said crimes from 1 year to 5 years.
By the time a criminal comes out of prison from a 10 year sentence, that is the only life they know. They are cut off from getting a job. They have no friends or family to support them. Most of the time, they go right back to a life of crime. The Scandinavian countries show that reform minded policies are far more effective for lowering the crime rate than lengthy prison sentences.
It might be cathartic to shout “abolish the police” and “ACAB”, but at the end of the day, we need to live in the society we create for ourselves. You can’t have a breakdown of (real) law and order. People need to go to their jobs, buy groceries, take care of their families, and get on with their lives and without police, none of that can happen with any assurance of safety. Having said that, when police are allowed to commit crimes with impunity, they undermine the trust of society and likewise destroy societal order. Conservatives pretend that having cops act like the mafia, dealing drugs, killing, raping, etc. is “Law and Order”, but nothing could be further from the truth. We need to hold cops to at least the same standards we hold everyone else to, and right now, their standards are far lower.
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