Police (Part 1: Funding)
TLDR: Policing has systemic problems. Anti-brutality protests reduced policing and thus probably increased crime (incl. homicide). Most market-based reforms amplify predatory behavior.
Prerequisites: None
Foundational to: Part 2 (and Part 3)
In the summer of 2020, set off by the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, and amplified by several other high profile deaths (particularly of African Americans) at the hands of law enforcement, massive, anti-police protests erupted worldwide. At their height, the loudest voices1 called to “defund the police” including radical abolition of the institution.
This idea should be taken seriously. The most important function of the government is to establish a monopoly on force and use that power to keep people safe, allowing them to let their guard down. If the police were simply inefficient, that would be sad but understandable — absence of competition naturally fosters sluggishness and incompetence. If these were rare cases of brutality stemming from “bad apples” that slip through the screening process, we might simply tell ourselves that the cost of “never” is (almost always) too high.
But to have repeated, horrific, high-profile examples of police officers from across the country attacking and killing civilians, including children, especially in a way that reflects deeper, systemic problems,2 should make everyone stop and reflect on whether, perhaps, this medicine is worse than the disease.
We should, at the very least, hold these victims3 in mind as an ongoing symbol of how we must do better, as a society.
Pullback
In the wake of the protests, the level of policing decreased in various ways. We can see this in metrics like the number of police stops or arrests, especially in cities that were central to the protests:
This pullback was probably due to a combination of factors,4 including decreases in funding, reduced morale leading to resignations, wanting to respond to the will of the people (including because the mayor pressures the police to lay low), and a reduction in how often the police were called to handle crimes. Any particular factor can be disputed, but the general trend is clear — there was a dramatic reduction in policing.
Sadly, it’s also not hard to see the impact of this reduced police activity. When the police pull back, crime rises sharply, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The FBI’s reported national murder rate for 2020 (the year with by far the largest anti-police protests) was 30% higher than for 2019 — the largest year-on-year increase on record. Similar trends can be seen in other crime statistics, and in other times/places.
In the USA, police kill about 1250 people each year in total (including when officers use deadly force to defend themselves/bystanders5). There were about 16,700 homicides in the USA in 2019, and about 21,500 in 2020. (The rate shot up in 2020 and stayed high for about three years, but is now back to the mid 2010s level.) So if we suppose that only a quarter of that increase is due to reduced levels of policing,6 then reductions in policing in 2020 led to about the same number of deaths as all deaths at the hands of police — and far more than the deaths of innocents due to police brutality.
On a basic level, if you care about protecting people’s lives, especially those of Black people, calling for decreased levels of policing is deeply counterproductive. Police, in general, save lives, even though there are some terrible counterexamples. If anything, it seems to me that it would be wise to broadly increase police presence in areas of high crime. After all, the USA averages only ~240 police officers per 100k people — far lower than the ~340 in Western Europe, despite having a much higher rate of violent crime.
Still, just because police are important to keeping people safe does not mean we should be complacent, or simply accept occasional police brutality as unavoidable. Police behave badly for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they make mistakes that could be avoided with better training, being less overworked, or having better mental health support. Sometimes they respond violently to protect themselves in situations that they’d be more able to handle with a partner or more backup. And sometimes government can’t adequately select for high-quality officers due to upstream factors,7 bad incentives, local politics, and negotiating friction with police unions.
Market Competition
So how might we reform policing? A running theme of this blog is that society can frequently be improved by leaning more into market structures, money, and competitive self-interest. In this same spirit, we should seriously consider whether it’s possible to dramatically improve society by switching from centralized police to private companies that perform the same functions.
The primary thing that sets police apart from other groups, such as social workers or private security guards, is that police officers are given permission to use coercive force to do their jobs. But in our current society this power is essentially a monopoly. If the police aren’t doing their job, you can’t really fix that except through influencing the government. In a more ideal-market context, if you’re not satisfied with what you’re getting, you can hire a different company. This market dynamic, applied to policing, would probably lead to increased focus on efficiency, promptness, and customer satisfaction.
Some critics of this type of proposal might point out that this sounds an awful lot like how things look in parts of the world where organized crime becomes so powerful that it becomes the de facto law of the land. Are ordinary people in these places, subject to gangs and paying “protection” money, best thought of as “satisfied customers?”
But this criticism is unfair. The market-based solution is not actually an end to the notion of a monopoly on force at the high-level — we can very easily imagine a state government (or world government) that hands out legal permission to use violence to companies that abide by regulations. The government could, for example, make it illegal for private police to use their coercive privileges to, say, drive out competitors from a region and thereby extract rents from the populace.
Predatory Incentives
But even with competent government regulation, privatizing police would bring a swarm of nasty problems.
Let’s start with the most basic: creating an incentive for crime. If you have to pay a bodyguard to protect you from assault, then this means the bodyguard, on some level, benefits from the existence of would-be assailants. Even if the private police don’t actually encourage criminal behavior, either because it’s illegal to do so, or because they’re paid on a subscription/insurance model rather than in response to crime, it would still be, at the very least, in their interest to make the world seem scary.
At the start of my essay on surveillance, I discuss why this is very bad: the point of civilization is to be able to let one’s guard down and focus on vulnerable cooperation, rather than burning resources on defense. In other words, the better the government is at keeping the peace, the more it will seem like there’s no need for police. Competitive pressures, especially if advertising is allowed, would make this worse, not better.
Another nasty problem with privatizing police is distributional inequality. It’s already the case that the worst crime problems stem from the poorest neighborhoods. Market-based policing would concentrate efforts further, leaving those who can’t afford protection without recourse, while the elite attempt to shield themselves from the wave of crime afflicting the poor. Crime is, in this way, a bit like disease and policing is like vaccination. It’s most efficient, even from the perspective of the rich, to ensure laws are enforced everywhere, thus giving criminal activity nowhere to fester. (Indeed, this is part of the problem with revolving-door prisons!) A world where police resources are concentrated in the safest places is a world that is broadly unsafe, and represents a failure of civilization.
But perhaps the nastiest collection of problems from privatizing police is the way it would incentivize cops to prey on “criminals.” The sorts of police brutality we were discussing a moment ago didn’t arise because the police were attacking random people on the street — they mainly stem from interactions with suspected criminals where there was some attempt to resist or evade arrest. What better way to impress your customers than to showcase how “tough on crime” you are? What better way to cut down on costs than to train officers to follow the least-expensive path (read: the one that leads to the fewest officer injuries), rather than the path of minimal force?
These are common and pernicious problems even in our world, and they’d surely get even worse in a world with greater market pressure. Even when police forces are mostly funded through property taxes and other secular sources, all it takes is one foolish policy to lead to parasitism. Speed traps, civil forfeiture, quotas, bail bonds, and impound lots are all examples of predatory arrangements that we should be trying to minimize, not amplify.
Interlocking Systems
As we think about police reform from various angles, I think it’s important to recognize that police departments are not isolated institutions, and that many of the dynamics that characterize the government’s use of force are a result of factors that are distinct from the behavior of individual cops, or even police departments as a whole. For instance, the prevalence of guns in the USA, and the culture of violence that surrounds those guns, makes policing American streets a unique challenge.
Along those same lines, the “War on Drugs” that began in the 1970s meant high levels of top-down pressure on police to treat non-violent citizens as hardened criminals, giving rise to massive black markets which fund organized crime. Enforcing drug laws diverts resources away from violent crime and places officers in adversarial relationships with the communities they serve, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods where drug enforcement has been most aggressive.
Regardless of whether it’s good for hard drugs to be illegal, we should recognize that improving the relationships between police and their communities is not as simple as demanding that police behave better — most of the problems are systemic, and spread into surrounding policies and institutions. No amount of careful action by law enforcement can, in isolation, heal the deep wounds of colonialism, slavery, and segregation. In these essays I’m deliberately trying to keep my focus on policing here, but true reform demands changing policy, courts, prisons, and tackling crime at its source by providing better opportunities and resources for those who are born into bad circumstances and are most at risk of turning against civilization.
Regardless, I hope you’ll join me in Part 2 and Part 3, as I discuss the historical context of police, and more promising paths for improvement towards Utopia.
There were, of course, many voices and perspectives that participated in the 2020 protests which were not calling for radical abolition of the police or even a simple decrease in funding. I’m focusing on the most straightforward aspects of the defund movement here because I think the basics of policing and crime are an important starting point. I’ll talk about some of the more nuanced reforms I saw in connection with the movement in the later essays in this sequence.
Everyone agrees that in the USA there are wide disparities in how the police interact with people that at least correlate with race, wealth, and gender. In some cases I think it’s also clear that there are broken systems and cultures (e.g. racism and corruption) endemic to specific police departments and policies. The important question for police reform is whether there is a widespread problem in how policing is done, or whether the disparities we see are simply the result of upstream factors (e.g. men commit more crime) and the occasional (cluster of) bad cops. I think upstream factors are a big part of the picture, and it's unwise to anchor too heavily on particular scandals, but also there is lots of room for systemic improvement. We’ll talk specifics as we proceed.
While each of these cases is unique and comes with a host of complex circumstances, I believe each of them reflects some level of police brutality or failure. Let’s consider two of the more marginal cases.
In the killing of Michael Brown, the Ferguson case that sparked protest and helped create the Black Lives Matter movement, I think it’s reasonable to put most (but not all!) of one’s probability on the overall story of Darren Wilson, the officer involved, being true: that Brown attacked Wilson and attempted to take his gun, resisted arrest, and eventually charged towards Wilson in a way that constituted a clear threat to the officer’s safety. Wilson was investigated by a grand jury and wasn’t indicted or otherwise found guilty of any wrongdoing. That said, even when taken at face value, Wilson chose to pursue unarmed teenagers who had attacked him, by himself, on foot, while armed, and ultimately to stand his ground and shoot Brown at least six times. This strikes me as, at the very least, an aggressive series of choices, sparking a conflict that ended with a dead 18 year old.
The shooting of Jacob Blake is similarly fraught. Blake was a domestic abuser armed with a knife who was resisting arrest, and before resorting to using guns, the officers involved used tasers. But shooting someone in the back a half-dozen times in front of his kids, without him being an immediate threat to anyone seems like excessive use of force. (One could argue he was going to kidnap his kids or eventually stab someone, but at the moment he was shot, it seems that all sources agree he wasn’t brandishing his weapon.) The officer who shot Blake wasn’t charged for misconduct, but it seems likely that a more minimal use of force would’ve been better.
The public’s reaction to these particular cases is questionable. The “hands up, don’t shoot” slogan that came from Brown’s case is a particularly clumsy example, given that it’s based on a (likely) falsehood. And there are many, many examples where force (sometimes lethal force) was used by police in a justified way. We can debate how particular cases fall on that spectrum. (Comments open!) But beyond nitpicking, I think it’s clear that there are many examples of police force being excessive and unpunished, and my main arguments in this essay don’t rely on the specifics of any particular case.
One distracting factor is the pandemic. While there is a clearly visible change in how police work was done in 2020, the timing in most places doesn’t line up very well with the hypothesis that pullback was largely a result of COVID. This passes a kind of basic sanity-check; police were deemed essential workers and you probably won’t become a cop if you’re heavily concerned about your own safety. Across the world we see most police forces continuing to function at about the same level as they did during normal times, albeit with changes to the balance of services and to how some interactions were handled.
Perhaps more notably, the 2020 pullback wasn’t a unique instance of anti-police protesting producing a reduction in policing. There were similar reductions in policing in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed and in Baltimore after Freddie Gray was killed. Because of this, I’m choosing to focus on factors related to anti-police sentiment.
It’s impossible to know how many police killings are actually justified, but as a VERY rough estimate, we can consider George Floyd’s home state of Minnesota, which has a Wikipedia page listing 10 noteworthy police killings over the last ten years, including ~7 that seem like some kind of excessive use of force or serious error by the police (regardless of whether the officer violated the law). The website mappingpoliceviolence.org says Minnesota police officers killed a total of 117 people per year over the same period. I’d thus estimate that VERY APPROXIMATELY 6% of the time, when a police officer kills someone, that was an avoidable outcome, or otherwise excessive use of force. By this estimate, ~75 innocent people are killed by police in the USA per year. Again, this is a very rough estimate, and could be wildly off.
I certainly don't want to claim that all of the increased crime was caused by the BLM protests. An essay by Brookings, for example, claims that unemployment of young men shot up during the pandemic and that unemployment (along with school closure) caused crime, which I find somewhat compelling. What I don't find compelling is the idea that none of it was downstream of anti-police rhetoric, mostly because the increase in crime following protests is a repeated pattern, and I think those who had the hypothesis after Ferguson have earned the credibility of successful prediction. (And also because of the details around timing and the contrast with similar countries.)
An important dynamic in all this is a doom loop of: police misconduct → police are unpopular → competent people don't want to be police → police incompetence → police misconduct → …
The core problem is that no police force is legitimate because the delegation of power to them is not legitimate, by a people, including the State, who largely don't understand or care about the good of every individual. People have a legitimate right to ignore the law when there's no legitimate means to obtain their legitimate objectives; when existing systems treat their best interests with contempt.
There is no legitimate government in existence because they don't have the basics right. They're all a cobbled together mess of ideologies and ancient malfeasance.
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority - Lysander Spooner