Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

Jan 27, 2020, 7:19 AM (1) police are expensive and patrol large territories in expensive vehicles with expensive equipment. (2) because police are expensive they do not travel in groups, and do not practice european policing of de-escalation- europe is small and densely populated. (3) Therefore officers rely on manipulation, deception, intimidation, and force, to subdue an individual and ‘drag him into the system’. Whereas you or I only need to break contact, they have to bring people into the system. The reason is that they don’t have discretionary power (as do sheriffs and judges.) This is because they can get sued if they are forgiving but you do something stupid. So their only defense is to get you into the system. (4) Revenue for a police department and justice system is funded by taxes, tickets and fines, and worst of all, property seizures. This has produced the malincentives we predicted. (5) Police are in a position of high risk, high responsibility, and under multiple conflicting incentives for which they can lose job and pension for any normal human error. This is a no-win situation for them. So they tend to develop procedures that are the safest for them and their careers, by choosing processes that put the officer in the position of making THE FEWEST DECISIONS. This is the problem. (6) The police do not control the bad laws that they operate under. Their job is to bring people into the system and let the system and system processes do the work – thereby (mostly) using time and isolation for heated afraid or excited people to calm down. (7) The data is what it is and the cops know the data: Black americans are disproportionately impulsively violent and will run, drug users are disproportionately unpredictable and dangerous even with bodily fluids or needles, and hispanic americans are disproportionately involved in gangs and dangerous, and white americans are disproportionately cunning and dangerous. (8) Police will not stay in the job if they have IQ’s over 105, so they hire average people for the job, because frankly it’s a lot of paperwork, and a lot of putting up with unpleasant people, and a lot of very high stress followed by very boring procedure. So for an average guy it’s a high income high status job – with decision making above his pay grade. (9) Some police forces are run well and others not, and there is no requirement that police come from the area nor stay in an area and learn the ‘crook book’ for the area. Instead, better police forces hire and train better officers, who then take positions that pay more money in less ‘prime’ territories. So there are just a lot of things going on. Where instead, we should probably have three classes of officers, at three pay grades, the top being criminal lawyers (proto-judges), the middle being today’s armed officers, and the bottom being de-escalation officers, and we should try to use numbers rather than concentration of force to deescalate and bring people in.

Jan 27, 2020, 7:19 AM (1) police are expensive and patrol large territories in expensive vehicles with expensive equipment. (2) because police are expensive they do not travel in groups, and do not practice european policing of de-escalation- europe is small and densely populated. (3) Therefore officers rely on manipulation, deception, intimidation, and force, to subdue an individual and ‘drag him into the system’. Whereas you or I only need to break contact, they have to bring people into the system. The reason is that they don’t have discretionary power (as do sheriffs and judges.) This is because they can get sued if they are forgiving but you do something stupid. So their only defense is to get you into the system. (4) Revenue for a police department and justice system is funded by taxes, tickets and fines, and worst of all, property seizures. This has produced the malincentives we predicted. (5) Police are in a position of high risk, high responsibility, and under multiple conflicting incentives for which they can lose job and pension for any normal human error. This is a no-win situation for them. So they tend to develop procedures that are the safest for them and their careers, by choosing processes that put the officer in the position of making THE FEWEST DECISIONS. This is the problem. (6) The police do not control the bad laws that they operate under. Their job is to bring people into the system and let the system and system processes do the work – thereby (mostly) using time and isolation for heated afraid or excited people to calm down. (7) The data is what it is and the cops know the data: Black americans are disproportionately impulsively violent and will run, drug users are disproportionately unpredictable and dangerous even with bodily fluids or needles, and hispanic americans are disproportionately involved in gangs and dangerous, and white americans are disproportionately cunning and dangerous. (8) Police will not stay in the job if they have IQ’s over 105, so they hire average people for the job, because frankly it’s a lot of paperwork, and a lot of putting up with unpleasant people, and a lot of very high stress followed by very boring procedure. So for an average guy it’s a high income high status job – with decision making above his pay grade. (9) Some police forces are run well and others not, and there is no requirement that police come from the area nor stay in an area and learn the ‘crook book’ for the area. Instead, better police forces hire and train better officers, who then take positions that pay more money in less ‘prime’ territories. So there are just a lot of things going on. Where instead, we should probably have three classes of officers, at three pay grades, the top being criminal lawyers (proto-judges), the middle being today’s armed officers, and the bottom being de-escalation officers, and we should try to use numbers rather than concentration of force to deescalate and bring people in.