USA Political Discussion

Many cities are now considering ways to re-imagine public safety. Ideas in this space are wide ranging. Here are some of the possibilities I've been seeing so far:

• Clarify and reform departments' use of force guidelines (8 Can't Wait has 8 policy suggestions that appear to reduce police killings by 72% in cities that adopt them, for some ideas on what those reforms might look like)
• Shift some funding away from police departments and instead put it toward specialists. So, for example, instead of calling the police if you are sexually assaulted, you would call an agency that specialized in investigating sexual assault and in supporting victims with appropriate medical care, counseling, safety resources if necessary, etc. Or, if your neighbor was experiencing a mental breakdown, you would call mental health specialists rather than the police. The police would eventually only be called for situations that definitely require an armed response (for example: an active bank robbery)
• Shift some funding away from police departments and instead put it toward community investments that are known to reduce crime, such as housing, education, quality after school programs, etc.
• Repealing or altering laws that make it impossible to sue police officers for violating citizen's civil rights
• Increasing required training for police from 6 months to 4 years, so that training can include more topics, better understanding of the rights of citizens, what the laws actually are, etc.
• Creating laws that prevent officers fired for misconduct from being immediately hired by another department
• Making it possible to find out if an officer has been fired for misconduct (currently, the officer needs to consent to having their record examined, or a judge needs to order that the record be released)
• Mandatory investigations every time an officer's weapon is discharged

Likely, we're going to see a decade of different cities trying out different combos, and learn a great deal about what is effective.

What do you think of ideas like these? What else might you add to this list?

I agree with so much of this. Especially putting funding towards things that will lower crime rate that is caused by situations that money would solve a great deal, and there being options other than police officers when you call 911 or need help.


The police department specifically should not be send out to handle every single situation armed and prepared for violence even in situations where the most violence that might happen is a fist fight. I definitely think we need to set up more specific teams of people that calling 911 will route you to, to get help based on your situation.

As well as more serious training and consequences for police officers and all types of law enforcement and any new branches/teams that are created to aid in public safety; because at the moment it does not look like the goal is safety for all parties but rather submission of a party by any means and that is not good for anyone, on any side.

That seems like an amazing list.

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That's some good-sounding stuff.

I am skeptical on what you would call the "nuts and bolts" of this.

That could be good, as long as the suspect is already gone and not still an active threat to her.

Nuts and bolts! Nuts and bolts alert!

This is tricky, because if someone is a danger to themselves, and needs to go to, say, a mental hospital (I know from experience), but they refuse to go, you can't just have the paramedics come and physically take them there or sedate them against their will, or anything like that. What they have to have is a police officer that comes to assess the situation and see if it's legal to place them under arrest. Then, it's legal for them to be taken to the hospital.

So, if you have a team of people that is made up of medical professionals, you'd have to give one of those medical professionals police power, basically, and that opens a whole other can of worms.

Perhaps...a team that includes one police officer and one nurse, and one counselor, or something like that, would work. If they could get a team with a nurse practitioner, who can also prescribe sedatives, they could potentially do a lot better in cases like what happened with George Floyd.

It's clear -- so painfully clear, I think -- that Mr. Floyd was probably having some kind of panic attack triggered by claustrophobia when they were trying to arrest him. He says that, over and over again, in the video.

If there had been some way they could have called a nurse and had them administer sedatives, or had a counselor with them, to try to calm him down--it might not have escalated how it did, and there might have been a completely different result.

In fact, if police themselves could administer sedatives...

But that, too, opens a can of worms. I know that I, for one, would NOT be okay with police drugging people at their sole discretion to control them.

But I think there SHOULD BE an alternative to physically forcing someone who you believe is clausterphobic, who says they are, into the back of a police car by force. There should be another option.

There have also been cases of austistic people avoiding police commands and being arrested and injured because they don't comply. Some suspects don't comply because of drug-induced paranoia or psychosis.

Some are just schizophrenic and having hallucinations, so they don't comply, or they see police as a threat.

I think this is a major area that needs improvement somehow, because it's too often that we hear about this sort of thing going wrong.

Of course, on the flip side, if people know that claiming to have a mental illness will delay arrest, then you have to worry about suspects using that to buy themselves time to get away from the police, and then they're out there running into a crowd or a neighborhood, and if they injure someone out there, who will be blamed for not being able to keep the suspect in custody? In other words, it could backfire and cause more harm than good. But, honestly, if we could have some solution to this it would be half the battle, I suspect.


Yeah

I'd also be worried about response times...it's one of those things that it will be good to have several cities try out, to see how it works for them.


I think the key word here is "some" funding. Looking at what happened at C.H.O.P., the problem with the idea that some people have suggested to abolish the police, is that any time you have people interacting with one another, you're going to have problems. When there's no police, people police themselves. The way it played out in CHOP, they made their own armed Security force. But in only a few weeks, that ended with members of the security force shooting up a van with two unarmed people inside. In other words, they ended up doing the very thing the police shouldn't do--shoot first, and ask questions later. At least that was the story from the media reports I read. There are conflicts about exactly what happened there too. But for sure some people ended up dead.

But the point I'm trying to make is that it seems like power corrupts.

One solution is to just have a police force without guns. That's, I believe, what they do in the UK?

I think the reason it's not that way here, though, is because many citizens have guns or access to them, so it would allow criminals an edge over police.

And with that, you're back to the good ole gun control debate.


I really really like this one. Or require them to have malpractice insurance so that a certain amount of recklessness prices you out of policing because you can't get your insurance renewed.

Bernie Sanders likes these kinds of ideas. Have a more professional police force. Don't pay them less, pay them more, but make sure they're professionals.

I'm skeptical, because I don't think police officers not knowing citizen's rights is the problem. I think the problem is that there are few meaningful checks and balances that incentivize police officers to always respect those rights.

Yes. Just yes.

Unsure.

Definitely. Police will get less trigger happy just to avoid the extra paperwork and questions.

Reason to be hopeful.

Make restraining a suspect on their stomach on the ground illegal. Even one of the police officers at the George Floyd killing suggested to the veteran officer that they should turn Mr. Floyd on his side, because it helps prevent problems like what happened, but Chauvin didn't do it.

I forgot to add--another thing that could deescalate tension between the police and the community, which would lead to fewer fight or flight reactions on both sides, would be reform of the entire criminal justice system.

Right now so many of our policies are based on politics ("tough on crime" campaigns and such), not on science. If that could change, the whole system would change.

For example, when I studied criminal justice in school, we learned about the deterrent effects of various punishments. The research helps us answer questions like:

* Does the threat of a long prison sentence make a would-be criminal change their mind?
.
* Does physically seeing a police officer standing on the corner deter them better?

* What about security cameras? Do those work? What about Neighborhood Watch? What about giving tickets?

All the research comes down to this:

There are 2 main factors involved in deterrence: the certainty of punishment and the severity of punishment.

Daniel Nagin's research has showed that certainty matters a lot more than severity if you want to deter crimes.

Link to a government source that talks about research on deterrence

Why I think that matters is...

If you decrease the severity of punishment for nonviolent crimes (short rehabilitation-focused programs instead of prison sentences, for example), then...maybe you won't have suspects reacting so desperately when they realize they're about to be arrested, right? The fight or flight reactions are often what precipitate the police officers' overreactions and unnecessary use of lethal force.

So I guess my suggestion would not directly address the police brutality behavior that is troublesome, but it would be an attempt to stop more of the encounters from ever reaching that level of escalation.

Criminal justice reform that replaces long, punitive prison sentences (severity of punishment) with restorative justice programs and spends the tax money you save on that to buy technology that makes it easier to detect and solve crimes swiftly (certainty of punishment). Then, you'd have 1. Less crime, 2. Fewer tense police-citizen encounters, and 3. More tax dollars to put towards prevention.

It would be interesting to hear how other people's countries do policing (and policing alternatives), and how well it works.

I absolutely agree that, in addition to shifting resources from an all-policing-all-the-time approach to a more community support based one, that the justice system itself needs massive reforms. But I disagree that changing the long-term punishments for crime would meaningfully impact the number of injuries, killings and general abuse that happens at the point of arrest or custody.

I think this is a too-rosy view of when and why police killings are happening. For example, routine traffic stops and minor misdemeanors are a major source of police killings and brutality. The punishments involved in routine traffic stops are generally extremely low, and do not result in fight or flight because people are afraid of getting a ticket. MANY people are afraid of the police themselves, not (just) the system behind them.

I'm glad you agree that the criminal justice reform part is important. I worry that if the problems get oversimplified it will be difficult for us to solve them.