A Thin Blue Line? What to do about bad cops. Light is our best friend.

The "thin blue line" is a monicker used to stand for police, asserting they are the slender bulwark which keeps society from descending into violent chaos. A more extreme, adversarial emblem of cop solidarity in the face of oppression by an ingrate citizenry - often appearing on tattoos -  is the skull symbol from the Punisher comic series. These memes have spread avidly, now in counter-beat to “Defund the Police” and both of them elicit hand-rubbing glee in Kremlin basement troll farms. (And so - to an extent - does the ill-chosen phrase "defund the police.")

This time I plan to discuss Police Unions, focusing on how to continue protecting ‘good cops’ while finally delivering at long last on 50 years of solemn promises to ‘eliminate the bad apples.’  Indeed, in the short term we need a slogan like: “Protect both citizens AND good cops from the calamity of bad cops.”

Over the long term, though, we’ll see below that that entire point may be moot. Police forces will professionalize and gain accountability, just as they will get much smaller. 

It will happen for many of the same reasons that are playing out  now, in our streets, and that I predicted in The Transparent Society.

== The debacle of Police Unions - a practical reform ==

The New York Times published an investigation explaining how police unions have amassed political power and blocked change. Ever more it’s become clear that the unions are central to the entire mess and their members need to be told: “You can either continue to reflexively protect all your bad apples, using procedural and contractual and legal maneuvers… OR protect the vast majority of your members who are good cops from the deterioration that those bad apples bring to their working lives. You cannot do both.”

Yes, some of those procedural protections had reasons. If a chief or mayor can fire police officers at-will, that power will often be misused politically, or for graft, or blame-deflection. Moreover let’s be clear that eliminating such protections for civil servants, in general, is the top priority – often stated openly – of the Republican Party, bringing back the spoils system and ending the autonomy that has made the 4^th branch of government the biggest obstacle to oligarch feudalism.

So, while we aim to bring the cop unions around, turning them into forces for good, that does not mean elimination of procedural safeguards!

Is there a way to get a win-win? There is… and this method can apply to Teachers Unions, too!  Here’s how.

== Simple, direct and practical ==

Set up FIVE STAKEHOLDERS. City officials, senior cop management, neighborhood citizen oversight commissions… and an annual confidential poll of all officers in the precinct.  All are asked to “name cops you know are rotten, or loose cannons, or threats to public safety or professionalism, or who just scare you.”

The fifth input is automatic… from complaints filed against officers.

Now the rule is simple. If an officer is in the bottom 5% according to ALL FIVE stakeholder groups, ejection for cause is automatic. No appeal. No buyout. No nothing. Get lost.

If it’s four out of five, an appeal is allowed, but the presumption favors firing and the appealing cop bears burden of proof it should be otherwise,

If it’s three out of five stakeholders who denounce him, all of today’s processes play out before an impartial board, with firing entirely up to the board. But even if the officer is retained, she or he is publicly named and warned and given retraining.

If the officer is denounced by just two out of five stakeholders, or just one, the board inquires confidentially into causes and determines if a full hearing is called for, and remedial training is needed, but presumption is made in the officer’s favor the first or second time.

This approach allows the union to stand up for members against capricious bias or political interference, or else a public smear campaign. But if the public in a precinct and the cop’s secretly-polled peers AND a citizen oversight panel all agree, shouldn’t the bad apple get to speak… but then (default) go away?

(Note that this entire process is a matter personnel management and not for dealing with specific complaints of particular crimes or wrongdoing, which are handled separately, though they can initiate this process. Here we are talking about simply saying: "Whether or not your misdeeds are proved: we don't want to work with you anymore!")

The same should hold for teachers. We recall one awful fellow who all the parents and students and fellow teachers hated, who was protected by tenure. With those three stakeholders, plus administration and outcome test scores in play, shouldn’t the same sort of arrangement give us a win-win? A way to protect teachers from any one kind of bias campaign or unfair railroading… but also to eliminate the worst, when diverse and competing stakeholders agree?

It’s called NON-ZERO SUM thinking and one of our goals, after winning this year’s life-or-death fight for civilization, should be to reinstate it as something that we normally try to do. You’ll find lots of other examples in POLEMICAL JUDO.

Of course for now, all of the above is just blather. Sure, it would work and all that, finding a win-win overlap of interests. But with black folks being outright murdered before our very eyes, the time for subtle solutions lies ahead of us by months, not days.

For now, we march. We shout. We must.

== A simpler alternative ==

Discussed on NPR - a much more basic solution using market forces to eliminate bad cops …requiring them to individually have (along with their respective police forces) liability insurance, as we require doctors, lawyers, barbers, and hairdressers to do. Sure, the department subsidizes premiums on a matching basis. Still, cops with bad records will be viewed, properly, as bad risks who raise everyone else’s premiums.

Yes I talk about insurance as the libertarian alternative - never mentioned by libertarians - all the time. Including in POLEMICAL JUDO.

== Did I say it’s about light? ==

        

Will you forgive me if I say that much of this ‘cop problem’ ought to go away organically? And for a reason I discussed in The Transparent Society (see especially page 160!) 

The reason is simple, but you may have to pause and step back a minute.

It's long been proved that criminals are not deterred so much by envisioning punishment, as they are by the relative certainty of getting caught.  It matters far less what penalty awaits than knowing “I’ll be seen and identified, so I better not do it.”

And yes, we are seeing it today, on our streets, as the prevalence of phone-cameras has made it harder to conceal misdeeds performed out of doors. Even back in the 1960s, Martin Luther King credited the presence of primitive newsreel and TV cameras with saving his life, multiple times, and verifying the testimony of civil rights workers before the eyes of an appalled public. As Will Smith recently said: “It’s not that things are as bad as the 1860s, they aren’t. It’s not that things are as bad as the 1960s, they aren’t. It’s that they are filmed.”

What I find strange is that no one seems willing to put all this together and extrapolate what happens when citizens become ever-more omniscient, with their pan spectral Augmented Reality goggles supplemented by tiny drones you can order to peek down that dark alley over there. Do you honestly think one top outcome won’t be less violent crime? 

And if there’s a lot less crime, then won’t there be fewer police, allowing us to hyper-professionalize those who remain?

Oh, once, just for once will you curb the cynical reflex and not just leap to assume the worst Orwellian outcomes? Actually work with me, here.

 Let’s suppose citizens calmly do as recommended in The Transparent Society and elsewhere, aiming light of sousveillance at all elites, preventing Big Brother.

Further let's all strive to ensure that we evade the trap of “social credit” homogenization that is being erected in some countries right now, as a means of conformity enforcement and social control. I go on elsewhere about how we can achieve that.

But no, for now let's stick to the street crime that the Thin Blue Line is set up to protect us from. Now squint and consider a future in which you are safe on any street at night, not because every streetcorner has a cop, but because your own augmented senses guarantee it. Most crime is deterred by us, not by armed agents of the state. 

Is that the ultimate overlap of liberal and libertarian goals? That the thin blue line grows thinner as the need diminishes?

And don’t you think the good cops of today – the best ones who remain – would rather practice their calling like doctors, both skilled and relatively rare?

Yes, we have battles in the here and now. I am as hip deep in those as any of you! 

But we are supposed to be the ones who also lift our gaze farther ahead. And the very trends that make us vexed today may also be the ones offering a path to sunlight.