Police (Part 3: Reform)

TLDR: Utopia has highly specialized, unarmed officers who rely on the military for gun threats. Auditing allows for competition and other good incentives. Utopian police reflect a positive, service-oriented culture.

Prerequisites: Surveillance, Gun Control, Part 1, and Part 2. Also builds on the ideas of several other essays, such as Speed Limits.

In the first two essays in this series I think I’ve taken a somewhat middle-of-the road position on policing — appreciating the importance and historical context of police while exploring the risks and tradeoffs involved in dramatic change. I think this kind of centrism is broadly good, especially at respecting the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of the subject. And it is not incompatible with reform — our explorations have suggested several possible ways to improve police work on the margins. But in this essay I want to break a bit from conservatism and the status-quo and envision a suite of reforms that seem possible, at least in Utopia.

Let’s start by revisiting ideas from previous essays in the context of police work. For example, I believe that Utopia handles victimless crimes like drugs and prostitution not through paternalistic bans, but instead through licenses — if you want to snort cocaine, simply prove to your local community that you have your act together and understand the risks. The one major potential exception to this is gun ownership, which is totally banned in Utopia. These two changes by themselves seem like they’d already produce a huge contrast with police work in the USA. Utopian police treat it as a given that people don’t have guns and that if they have drugs, they have a license to use them.¹ This, in conjunction with principled objections to searching, means Utopian police don’t engage in anything like stop and frisk, and only search people when it’s directly relevant to a known crime, such as searching a computer for records of embezzlement.

Utopian police are generally held to a high standard of honesty and transparency. Sting operations are illegal, as are undercover officers, unmarked vehicles, and other forms of secret police. Police in Utopia surveil the populace in a variety of ways, but always in an explicitly marked way, where you can clearly see you’re being watched. Outside of desk jobs, all police are equipped with a pair of body cameras that have indicator lights to show they’re active. Police are not considered to be on duty unless they’re in uniform and either in a police station or have both cameras visibly active. Off-duty police have no special powers or protections.²

Utopian surveillance extends to tracking all motor vehicles on public roads. Thanks to automation, this includes tracking vehicle speeds, allowing fines for speeding to be assigned automatically, without any police contact. Traffic police still exist in Utopia, but they’re concerned entirely with preventing reckless driving and catching those who try and evade the vehicle surveillance system. Fines associated with motor vehicles, like all legal fines, are paid out to the community, rather than directly to the police, cutting down on predatory behavior. In general, police in Utopia are funded by taxes on the unimproved value of land.

Surveillance footage and other data collected by the police is not generally accessible to officers, but can only be accessed (usually by detectives) in cooperation with a civilian oversight organization, and can only be shared when relevant for a crime and with irrelevant personal details removed. Private surveillance and security is usually illegal in Utopia, with corporations sponsoring police units to watch and guard their properties, when necessary.

Roles

Utopia doesn’t really have a single notion of “police officer” much as our world mostly doesn’t have a notion of combined policing-and-fire-fighting. Instead, most urban areas have a variety of jobs, including:

Sentry

Sentries are the most common form of Utopian police officer, tasked almost exclusively with the job of watching communities and helping those in need. Sentries patrol overlapping territories in random patterns, trying to simultaneously watch for crimes-in-progress and for people who need help of any kind, calling for backup when needed. Sentries also perform wellness checks and occasionally do acts of service for people in their community, such as helping people with physical labor or cleaning public spaces. Our world’s equivalent of security guards and traffic cops are sentries. The most common vehicle for a sentry is an electric bicycle, and sentries pride themselves on being friendly and approachable. While sentries can intervene if someone is being violent, they are generally trained to wait for backup, and are not expected to get involved in conflicts.

Peacekeeper

Peacekeepers are the most common form of dispatched Utopian police. If your neighbors are making a racket in the middle of the night, someone’s spraying graffiti, there’s a car accident, or it seems like someone might be abusing a child, Utopia sends a peacekeeper (and maybe an ambulance, if the car accident is bad). Peacekeepers are trained first and foremost as conflict mediators, focusing on empathy and nonviolent resolutions. Peacekeepers are still police, and are authorized to make arrests when necessary, but will generally avoid physical conflicts and are understood to prioritize helping community members come to agreements with each other, rather than needing to charge anyone with breaking the law.

Crisis Responder

In urban areas of Utopia, there is a distinction between peacekeepers and crisis responders. A crisis responder is an officer who is primarily dispatched to deal with someone who is in acute need, either because they are having a mental health breakdown or because they were recently the victim of a horrible crime. Where peacekeepers focus on conflict resolution between citizens, crisis responders are more like mental paramedics, handling the immediate challenge of someone who is suicidal or having a manic episode in the middle of the street. Crisis responders are trained to gather relevant information from victims in a way that helps other police roles do their jobs while also being gentle with someone who might be going through the worst night of their life.

Subduer

When a potentially violent criminal is identified and an arrest is needed, Utopia prefers to send subduers. Subduers are specialists who focus on making arrests with minimal force and maximum politeness. Unlike the above roles, however, subduers are not selected for being able to help the general populace, and are almost always large men with an interest in martial arts and an affinity for physical conflict. In small communities subduers might patrol as sentries when not actively subduing a suspect, but in larger urban areas subduers spend their downtime training, and focus entirely on the art of catching criminals without risking physical harm.

Defender

Where a subduer trains for the art of the takedown, a defender trains for physical conflicts that are not primarily about catching someone. Some defenders sub-specialize as bodyguards, site-security, blockades, or riot control. Like subduers, politeness and respect are an explicit part of the job for a defender. Unlike subduers, defenders are often free to travel to a distant place of need, rather than be on call in a particular jurisdiction. Bailiff is a job in our world that would be a defender, in Utopia.

Investigator

Investigators are nearly identical to our world’s detectives, albeit with less experience doing patrol or other police work. Investigators often train specifically for their role in school, and further specialize in various ways, such as on property crime or homicide. The best investigators often travel for work, operating across entire continents, rather than being restricted to a single city.

Other Roles

There are, of course, a variety of other roles that are connected to doing police work, such as being a dispatch operator, crime scene technician, or office clerk. Like our world, these people are not generally understood to be police, because unlike the roles explored above, they aren’t given the authority to use coercive force or make arrests.³ But unlike our world, there’s also generally an understanding that police chiefs and other leaders/administrators are not police officers. It’s still typical for a senior officer to promote into a leadership position, but in Utopia it’s also possible to become the administrator in charge of a police department while never having carried a badge, and police that become administrators are asked to turn in their badge and uniform as part of leaving their old role.

Deadly Weapons

Thanks to universal gun control, all police in utopia are also prohibited from carrying deadly weapons, including roles that, in some sense, specialize in combat. Many officers, including sentries and peacekeepers, carry pepper-spray, subduers are usually armed with electric weapons⁴ (e.g. tasers), and defenders sometimes wield batons, but in general there is an understanding that police officers are not soldiers and should never be armed with weapons designed to kill.

To further emphasize that police aren’t in the business of killing people, it is the norm in Utopia for any officer who kills someone (accidentally or not) to lose their job and be barred from working in any police role for over 16 years, in addition to likely being prosecuted for the homicide. Due to a variety of factors, this almost never happens in Utopia, and doesn’t have a significant impact on retaining good officers.⁵ Banning killers working as police is widely understood not to be a punishment (that’s up to the court), but as an assurance that when someone is interacting with a police officer, they know they’re not dealing with someone with a history of lethal force.

The removal of deadly weapons from police does not, however, mean the removal of body armor. Many police officers dress in a way that protects them in one way or another, and assists in combat, including subduers, and of course, defenders. Tower-shields are common for defenders, and for subduers who work in tactical squads. Some of this equipment can be comparable to military-grade gear. Sentries sometimes wear light armor while out on patrol in dangerous neighborhoods, but there’s an overarching pressure for most police to be mostly unarmored as part of the narrative that they are not looking to get in fights.

But what if a criminal (or gang of criminals!) gets their hands on some guns (or other crowd-killer weapons, like bombs)? Well, for starters the police are trained to command them to disarm and warn them that they are crossing a clear and bright line with regards to the use of force. If the criminal fires their gun at someone or otherwise refuses to disarm, the understanding is that they are identifying themselves not merely as a common criminal, but as a soldier. “Guns are weapons of war,” says Utopia, and if you insist on using a gun against civilization, well, civilization is allowed to call in actual soldiers to deal with you.⁶

Where Utopian police are trained to use the minimal amount of necessary force, Utopian soldiers are under no such obligation. After being authorized to use deadly force by the police, the army is empowered to straightforwardly kill anyone (armed or not) whom they assess is a threat, using all tools at their disposal, including heavy-duty war machines. The soldiers are, of course, instructed not to harm bystanders, but Utopia generally holds the military to a lower standard than the police.

The idea behind the use of overwhelming force in such situations is to make it clear to criminals that escalating the arms race will not be tolerated, and to prevent these situations from arising in the first place.⁷ A criminal armed with a knife, sword, or bow, only has to worry about getting tased or beaten, even if they’ve killed an officer with their weapon, whereas a mugger with a handgun runs the risk of getting shot by a sniper. As a result, only the most foolhardy criminals in Utopia seek out firearms, which helps eliminate the black-market for such weapons and generally solidify the taboo.

Following each instance where the police called in military support, an investigation is launched by a third-party auditor to review surveillance footage and testimony to ensure that the bright line was actually crossed. If the military is called in a context that doesn’t justify, in the eyes of the civilian auditor, the involvement of the army, the authorizing police officer is generally held responsible for the death of the target(s), meaning the Utopian police tend to err on the side of caution. (Collateral damage, including civilians caught in the crossfire, is still the army’s responsibility.)

Incentive Gradients

Utopia invests heavily in police, even though crime rates are generally lower than in our world.⁸ In particular, Utopia tries to prioritize police presence and responsiveness. This means having sentries visible much of the time (in urban areas, anyway) and having fast response times for peacekeepers, crisis responders, and sometimes for subduers. But it also means having investigators work around-the-clock to solve crimes and arrest criminals quickly. This is because evidence suggests that not only do cases get harder to solve as time goes on, but that increasing the probability of being caught quickly (and then sentenced) is a far stronger deterrent for would-be criminals than harshness of potential punishment. And of course, deterrence is the ideal outcome.

Everything from fast responses to polite and respectful conduct are achieved through cleverly designed organizational systems and careful use of incentives. While the full competition of the private sector is unworkable, Utopian police do still compete with each other to be the best at their roles. When possible, departments are organized to have multiple parties operating in similar conditions (same territory, etc.); these teams are then assigned randomly to cases and tasks. For instance, if there’s a break-in, a crisis response unit (usually two responders, ideally both a man and a woman) is randomly selected and dispatched to handle the immediate situation. Once it’s confirmed to be a property crime, a specialized detective is randomly selected from the pool to investigate. If the detective identifies a suspect, a random subduer unit (usually two men) is selected to make the arrest.

Later, each party can be evaluated by a third-party,⁹ judged only on their role in the broader system. The third-parties who are selected to evaluate police performance are also randomly selected, using a secure, internet-based service hosted by the government that picks out teams of one civilian expert and one police officer in the corresponding role to review the relevant body-cam footage and other data,¹⁰ and then score the police on relevant metrics such as how active they were, whether they used the right level of force, and so on. Response teams, detectives, etc. are then given prizes and additional funding, based on their performance, both compared to local peers and to comparable teams in other parts of the world.¹¹

Funding for a police department as a whole (and its leadership) is usually handled by a futarchy, whether at the local level, or at the level of the world government. An example of how this works is that the futarchy sets up multiple prediction markets that pay out based on an aggregate crime statistic (e.g. violent crimes + 0.1*nonviolent crimes), where each market is conditional on the police department receiving a certain level of funding. Once the predictors weigh in, the futarchy selects the level of funding based on how the populace has voted to trade off between price and crime. This incentive means that police departments are mainly selected for keeping crime down, rather than bad proxies for efficacy like having a high number of arrests.

One final, but crucial note about law enforcement incentives is that in Utopia, when someone is found not guilty of a crime, they are automatically entitled to government compensation for all harm and inconvenience of the arrest. These costs can be significant, and serve as a major top-down pressure on police to avoid making spurious arrests. (Resisting arrest is still a crime, so if the footage indicates someone fled rather than cooperating, they can lose some or all of their compensation.) My hope is to write more about the judicial process in a future essay, and I’ll revisit this idea there.

Utopian Police

On a cultural level, Utopia regards police, especially sentries, as respected servants of the communities they protect. Police departments deliberately cultivate cultures of politeness, respect, honor, and stoicism. Utopia works hard to encourage a virtuous cycle here, where the most high-integrity men and women become police, thus holding their peers to a high standard which encourages people with an affinity for those virtues to join up. When Utopians have negative opinions of cops, it’s because they’re seen as rigid, righteous, and serious, not brutal or callous.

People in high-stress positions such as dispatch and crisis response are encouraged to either switch careers “early” or work part-time and perhaps spend their other hours on more wholesome activities like manual labor or teaching. Subduers are treated similarly, albeit with hard term limits instead of soft norms, forcing them to go into leadership, auditing, or instruction as they get older.

In general there's a lot of overlap between teachers and police roles in Utopia, especially in martial arts and spiritual mentorship. Many police see themselves as not just in charge of physically protecting their community, but also serving as role models and paragons of honor and duty who inspire right-action.

It’s normal for teenagers in Utopia, especially young men, to apply for a job as a sentry and serve with the police for a year or two. For many young people, this is their first job, and a place where they learn virtues of hard work and responsibility. Other police roles primarily recruit by offering promising young sentries an opportunity to apprentice in their departments, though of course it is also common for people to apply directly to specialized roles.

Though holidays in Utopia are varied, many communities explicitly celebrate a Police Day (sometimes combined with celebrating other first-responders like firefighters), where kids are invited to dress up as cops and criminals, play team games similar to capture the flag, and spend time in police stations interacting with the men and women who keep their homes safe.

P.S. Special thanks to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s article on Rebooting the Police for inspiration.

1. A key component here is that legalizing responsible drug use dramatically cuts demand for illegal drugs. In theory, if drug licenses are too hard to get, or drug taxes are too high, there would be demand for illegal drug merchants who don’t check user licenses. Utopia does some policing to hunt drug dealers who sell to children or other people without licenses, but mostly there’s an effort to keep demand for illegal drugs so low that nobody bothers to do illegal sales.

2. Obviously caveat: you can't smash an officer's camera and thereby take them “off duty.” Bodycams are designed to be resistant to tampering and hard to deactivate or destroy.

3. I have mixed feelings about citizen’s arrests. Despite looking into them a decent amount and spending hours in contemplation, I do not have an opinion about whether they’re good, or should exist in Utopia.

4. Electroshock weapons like Tasers (which are a specific brand of stun gun) are broadly good. While they have been historically overhyped in both their efficacy and their safety, and can certainly be misused, their effectiveness in safely subduing targets while also keeping the officer safe is very clear. There’s a reason they’ve been quickly adopted by police departments, and it’s not hard to find testimonials by officers who swear by them. The academic literature backs this up. For example, the abstract of “TASER Use in Law Enforcement: Examining Effectiveness, Medical Consequences, and Ideal Scenarios” says:

Since its adoption, the TASER has reduced the likelihood of injury to officers and suspects and is more effective against heavy-set and intoxicated individuals. Although extremely unlikely to result in death, injuries are more likely when used against mentally disturbed people and in situations when falling presents a physical danger. When compared to other methods like pepper spray or physical force, the TASER is least likely to cause injury and most effective at subduing resisting subjects.

Or consider “Police Use of Force, Tasers and Other Less-Lethal Weapons”:

The general, overall findings from the study indicate that in use-of-force events citizen injury rates ranged from 17 to 64 percent, depending on the injury, while officer injury rates ranged from 10 to 20 percent. The study also found that in use-of-force events the use of conducted energy devices (CEDs) and pepper sprays could significantly reduce the rate of injuries to suspects, while the use of CEDs could decrease the rate of injuries to officers.

(Warning: there are a bunch of papers put out by Axon, the company that makes Tasers, which are, in my opinion, untrustworthy garbage. Check for conflicts of interest when researching.)

Notably, there are also a decent number of anti-Taser studies that argue things like (1) use of Tasers doesn’t imply police stop using their firearms, so use of Tasers doesn’t make people safer, or (2) people who are hit by Tasers are still often injured in the process, so Tasers don’t actually reduce rates of injury. Perhaps I’m biased here, but I think studies with these kinds of arguments are bad-faith. Yes, the police need to actually stop using their guns to see an effect, but electroshock weapons are a part of that, even if it also requires retraining. Likewise, even though people can easily be injured by a Taser (I think it’s reasonable to treat getting electrocuted as an injury!), the question is whether those injuries are less severe than the counterfactual where the Taser wasn’t present. (The consensus is they are.)

Beyond the formal studies, we can think about electric weaponry using first-principles. Getting up-close and physical is dangerous, both for the target and for the officer. George Floyd is certainly not the only person to die from police using excessive force that had nothing to do with their weapons, and in a world where all police were unarmed, it seems plausible that police would need to employ fierce martial-arts techniques to subdue people while keeping themselves safe. Using electric weapons is thus probably the next-best choice in most situations to convincing someone to peacefully submit with words.

Can electroshock weapons kill people? Yes, definitely. And there are some extremely sketchy and racist practices around hiding such deaths. Electrocuting someone is a violent attack, and police should definitely not feel like it’s a safe and normal way to make an arrest. In some police departments, officers have used Tasers on young children or on people who were clearly already complying. These abuses should be decried and the officers involved should be severely punished. But those are problems of police brutality, not with Tasers themselves, and I’d much rather be electrocuted by a stun gun than beaten into submission with a baton.

5. In the USA there are approximately 800k police officers, and police kill about 1250 people a year. Police career lengths are probably bimodal — some people don’t fit well with the job and leave after ~4 years, while others have long careers perhaps averaging 25 years. Let’s assume that one third of officers leave early, and thus the average career length is 18 years. Now, for the moment, let’s naively assume that police killings are uniformly distributed — there are no particularly violent cops who are disproportionately responsible for the deaths, and that cops who kill aren’t more likely to leave early. Then approximately 2.8% of police will kill someone in their career. With more realistic assumptions I expect the true number to be closer to 1%.

Put another way, if the average career length is 18 years, then around 44k officers already leave the force each year in the USA. If all police killings resulted in an increase of firings (i.e. no officers are currently fired for use of lethal force) this would naively increase the rate at which officers leave by 2.8% (and realistically much less).

This would be an acceptable change, even in the USA, where almost all police carry handguns and we have a culture of violence. If we assume that Utopia is closer to Japan in terms of gun prevalence and violence (notably, Japanese cops do still carry handguns!), then we might estimate a rate that’s closer to 2% that of the USA, meaning an increased rate of turnover in Utopia due to this policy of ~0.02%.

6. This bright-line also fits with a narrative about keeping the government in check when dealing with “rebels.” It is a foundational rule that even when faced with a literal army of angry citizens armed with swords and bows, the government can only deploy riot police armed with batons and tear-gas. If those defenders are too weak, then the government may fall, but if it falls to medieval weaponry, it should do so in a way that respects life and avoids escalation.

7. Through the lens of any good decision theory, we can model the situation as a kind of bargaining game between police and criminals. The BATNA, or state of nature, is that criminals pull out all the stops and try their hardest to avoid getting caught, including resisting arrest, arming themselves to the teeth, taking hostages, and killing anyone who stands in their way, including police. Conversely, the non-cooperative default for the police is to do anything and everything they can to stop the criminal, including overwhelming lethal force. Both parties would like the other to be less savage than that — the criminals would ideally surrender when caught, and the police would ideally treat criminals gently and fairly, respecting their rights and using minimal force. In our world we see some of this in how police escalate when someone resists arrest and how “cop killers” are handled more harshly than ordinary thugs — and indeed, in our world most people cooperate, and do not resist arrest or try to kill the police that come after them, even when armed. Utopia adds another of these win-win bargains by disarming the police, but only if the criminals also disarm. In order to preserve and maintain this more-peaceful equilibrium, law enforcement must actually follow through on re-arming to deal with criminals with guns, and the simplest way to do that while keeping the invariant that the police never wield lethal weapons is to bring in the military.

8. Crime rates are lower in Utopia both because of less inequality, thanks to basic income and more sensible economic policies, and because Utopia invests heavily in the police!

9. Not all police actions get reviewed. Depending on what the workload is like, only a quarter of cases might get audited. These audits are done pseudo-randomly, with algorithms prioritizing reviews for work done by officers where there’s more uncertainty, such as rookies or when someone changes teams.

10. An example metric that’s important for investigators is 20th/40th/60th/80th percentile times-to-arrest. This encourages investigators to go quickly, while also acknowledging that some cases are impossible. Investigators are pressured to avoid being overly hasty by their commander, who, for reasons we’ll get into once I talk about the court system, is strongly incentivized to avoid arresting innocent people.

11. Reviewers are rewarded based on whether their reviews seem good when randomly selected for meta-reviews, and if their scores tend to match their partner’s scores. I.e. civilian auditors are rewarded for agreeing with the police, and police peer-reviewers are rewarded for agreeing with the civilian oversight. (But also they have the power to unilaterally disagree if their review partner is being unreasonable.)