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Yeah this becoming a Big Issue in the summer of election year is right on time. Very hard to even want to talk about it. Are we gonna actually fix this at the national level or not? What's the specific policy proposal? Why hasn't it been implemented or at least proposed in Congress in 4 years of Democrat rule? Etc etc.
My contempt toward the use of this event as a political strategy threatens to overshadow my raw spontaneous personal feelings about the event itself, which is a shame.
I have a half baked idea. Nationalise and centralise the training of state police under a 'National Police Bureau' (a joint exercise between say the FBI and US Marshal Service) similar to how the National Guard operates.
Then once trained, the police are deployed to their home state to operate under local command and control (eg police chief under the mayor/governor) to allay fears of federal control of the police forces. It could also be an avenue for internal investigation so local cops can't cover up bad shootings/dirty cops. Certain incidents automatically escalate to a review from out of the state investigators.
This standardisation of best practice vetting and training will eliminate some low hanging fruit leading to bad shootings and other incidents. Much less hiring of people that should never have become cops. Much less crazy bad training methods (like training your cops that kneeling on people's necks is a legitimate restraint technique).
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You can't fix it. For one, cops are people, so some of them will make mistakes, or panic, or even simply be malicious. You can, and should, minimize this with proper hiring and training, but it will never be entirely zero, because cops are people. Meanwhile, racial tensions are not driven by the deaths but by the media coverage, and the media coverage is not driven by the deaths either but by political expediency.
According to the Washington Post the police killed 245 black people last year. That's pretty much one per work day. We certainly don't get national attention for every one. That only happens when it's convenient.
Suppose we had some magic way to lower police violence by 9/10ths. By this point the US would have the nicest police in the world by far. But there would still be more than one black person killed by the police each month. Today, there is much less than one big news story per month even though they could do this multiple times a week if they wanted. One or two a month would still be more than plenty to keep going as they are going.
US police killed 1161 people in total in 2023. If it were lowered by 9/10ths, you'd save 1045 people a year (assuming this lowering of police violence doesn't just increase the rest of the violence), but you would otherwise change nothing. For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths. So even that is only a small drop in the bucket. You can round that down to nobody. (After all, one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.)
The actual police violence doesn't matter at all in the big scheme of things, and not even with literal magic could you do something about police violence and thereby change anything about society.
Ironically, in our rush to deem police as morally bad in 2020, traffic deaths rose from 10.99/100k in 2019 to 12.89 in 2021, around 8000 additional deaths, with no appreciable change in total miles traveled. It's pretty clear to me (and anecdotally, comes up in conversation occasionally as generally accepted) that they basically stopped enforcing traffic laws at the time, which has lead to more deaths than if police killings dropped to zero. And the number of murders went up quite a bit too. I'm fairly confident that, overall, Black Lives Matter has a negative count of (Black) lives saved, but I'm glad (/s) they feel good about their advocacy.
IMO one of these cases where systems are more complicated than they seem. Something about Chesterton and fences, even though I think there's substantial room for improvement in how we do policing and criminal justice overall.
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