My thoughts on reforming the police:
(Disclaimer: I don’t work on policing or criminal justice policy. I do work on housing and health policy so a lot of my recommendations are based on what policy levers work in other sectors)
1. End qualified immunity.
2. Tie funds to the outcomes society wants. In healthcare this is called value-based payments. In general think of it as a performance-based contract. You pay a painter if they successfully paint the room. Not if 2 walls are done fine, 1 wall looks shaky, and the fourth wall looks messed up. Both you and the painter know he or she isn’t getting paid until all 4 walls look good. This can take many forms. For example, competitive federal grants from the Dept of justice can have sections on disparities in policing and if you have too high of a disparity, you get 0 points for that section of the grant. If you have no disparity between the Black arrest rate and the White arrest rate, you get the full 10 points for that section. Or another example, the state legislature approves a $500 million state budget for police but withhold 5% and they only get that last $25 million if they show improvements in metrics around racial disparities. Or you make certain jurisdictions ineligible for certain funds based on disparities or if they have too many complaints of misconduct from citizens. Give police forces two years before the ineligibility kicks in and you’d be amazed at how much entities change when they are properly incentivized.
3. Establish Local and national databases for police officers. This should discourage excessive force violations when those violations are public and easily searched. And police forces need to have strong negotiations with the unions. X number of violations and the officer is fired, no pension. Again, people respond to being incentivized.
4. Body cams are a requirement at all times for every police officer. It’s just like how an airline pilot, when they are in the cockpit that flight recorder is on.
5. You need to incentivize officers to police themselves. To try and break that wall of silence we need to incentivize officers to hold each other to the highest standards and not let “bad apples” remain. The mentality of officers cheering on two colleagues for breaking the head of a 75 year old man needs to get broken. I recommend bonuses per violations that officers report on their fellow officers. And also penalizing officers who should have reported a violation if a subsequent investigation found excessive force or another infraction occurred and no officer reported it. The police have to set the ‘snitching’ example for everyone.
6. Get rid of racist officers. I actually think because of the age we live in, this is much more easily doable than it was decades in the past. You don’t need to find someone at a klan rally or get 5 witnesses to agree someone said the n word. People just post things. Every officer needs to go through a background check just like a government contractor security clearance and investigators go back 7 years including social media and yes, if you posted that racist thing five years ago you lose your job.
7. Ban on chokeholds.
8. De-militarize the police. A lot of the militarization is based on two things: a belief from the 90s that cities would end up like war zones that never panned out (crime has fallen since early 90s) and contractors made too much gear in the war on terror for the military and selling it to the police was a way to keep the gravy train going. It’s a waste of tax payer dollars and it falsely puts officers in the mindset of what killed Breonna Taylor. If you want to do tactical missions join the military and get through special forces training. Besides that keep playing on your Xbox or join a paintball league. Don’t become a cop.
9. Policing by peers. The 6th and 7th Amendments to our Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, establishes the rights around public trials by juries of our peers. Sadly, Black people aren’t making it to a trial because of racism in policing. So we need to move the interaction with peers more upstream to the people making arrests. This means more local police departments, not huge entities, and incentivizing police officers from the area being policed. You can again tie this to funds, and get things like bonus points in competitive grants if 40% of officers either currently live in or had lived for 10 years in the communities they are policing. Yes, this should lead to a change in the demographics in who is doing the police work over time.
