Another one: Any time an agency of the government collects a fine to deter bad behavior, the money must be given to another agency that is significantly removed from the decision making process that sets the fine, or to charity. Likewise for seized goods, etc. If the county police department starts writing more tickets for rolling stops, the money just ends up with the parks department. (Obviously it is possible in principle for different agencies to collude, but the same can be said about all checks and balances. The point is to make coordinating the collusion difficult/dangerous.)
People can complain all they want about individual instances of civil forfeiture or predatory red-light cameras, but those sorts of issues are all caused by the incentives induced when the agency that enacts the fine benefits from the money collected.
(This does not apply to the separate penalties/restitution used to compensate victims, pay for fixing actual damage, etc..)
If some agencies are currently dependent on revenue through fines, then this requires a one-time adjustment to their budget. But this is good as it just means that the cost of running their agencies becomes more transparent.
That sounds like a good idea on the surface but it doesn't actually discourage anything. If the revenue is getting into government at all it still has the same perverse incentives.
I think the better way would be that such fines are sent straight to a national/federal agency, which in turn disburses the fund across the entire country as needed. That would prevent any corrupt small-town police force from simply fining people to raise money because they may never see any of it themselves.
There should be no incentive for the government to collect fines. We should incentivize fewer crimes and fewer fines, not more.
If you're worried about deflation, then another solution would be to put all the fines collected into a fund that is split up and given directly back to the citizenry every year. But the point is that crime shouldn't fund government as it's a perverse incentive.
It's worth noting that from the federal govt's perspective, destroying money and collecting it are basically the same. As long as the supply of money decreases, they can just print more.
Sending the revenue up the chain only enables graft and corruption at a larger scale, not to mention constitutional issues at the federal level at least.
The only solution I see is to make enforcement absolute and trust that enough people get hit with unreasonable fines that they vote in someone who will end them. The big issue here is selective enforcement keeping the pool of people affected small enough that they can't effectively fight back.
No need to "imagine" it. Just come to Europe. I can recommend either the UK or Slovenia based on personal experience, cops are completely domesticated. Portugal, Germany or Netherlands if you want decriminalization. Switzerland for direct democracy. Most EU countries for treating the mentally ill.
One of two places in the world I've been searched intrusively outside an airport, without warrant or probable cause: Switzerland (my wife used to live there). The other place: also in Europe.
I'm sure Europe is much nicer if it's evident that you're from whatever country you're in.
(Not exactly on point, but, whatever: the TSA has nothing on Heathrow international terminal for intrusive, pointless, rude searches).
My family came from Switzerland about 200 years ago, and our name is recognizably Swiss. I actually got my passport temporarily confiscated and went through an interrogation about 20 years ago (before 9/11/2001) because they didn't believe I was an American. The fact that I was speaking to them in German was used as evidence against me - because how on earth would an American know German? I giggle at the idea that my ancestral home interrogated me, but the border guards when I went to scary communist China or muslim Turkey barely opened the cover of my passport before they passed me through. But really the worst I've ever been treated was coming back into the US from Canada...
Washington is forcing Switzerland to intrusively search Americans, who aren't even in an airport, without warrant or probable cause? How on earth do you figure that?
People here in the US are always astonished when I point out that many European police officers don't carry any weapons, eg the typical UK or Irish police officer just carries a baton. Of course guns are available they're not regarded as an everyday necessity. I grew up with the concept that police officers were there as much to help people find their way around as to deal with crime.
On the other hand, the police in Italy openly carry submachine guns.
I think there's a lot of post-hoc fallacy in comparisons between US and EU policing. There's certainly a problem in the US, but it's probably nowhere near as simple as "US police carry guns".
Bonding tip-of-the-spear employees of the criminal justice system: cops, prosecutors, parole officers, prison guards. That way you can do away with qualified immunity, municipalities are not on the hook for paying settlements, and thugs price themselves out of the system.
The idea is to protect governments from settlement costs while creating pricing signals for over-aggressive cops, prosecutors, etc. AND enabling victims to get compensation.
There seem to be too many cases of bad prosecutions, and, as it is now, the victims usually get screwed.
I'm not necessarily "anti-police" but I do agree that treating "criminal" behavior as a mental health issue rather than one to be handled by punitive measures is the best way forward.
This is a huge problem in the US; lots of people have mental health problems but there are very few votes in trying to fix it. I've gone on at length about this before so I'll just offer these two links for people who want to get up to speed on the issue:
Disarming most police patrols would be an excellent start. Most of the violence committed against innocent civilians is perpetrated by the police. In major cities like Los Angeles, "no criminal organization kills as many people as the police.” [1]
> Most of the violence committed against innocent civilians is perpetrated by the police.
That sentence is completely different from "no criminal organization kills as many people as the police." While it is shockingly high, 3 to 8 percent is not 50%.
EDIT: Also, the majority of police victims are probably not "innocent" civilians, but armed, violent criminals.
I don't know why this is always posed as some sort of hypothetical or thought experiment, as if we don't have ample empirical evidence. Before modern nation-states emerged, we had feudal war lords in charge. When you overthrow nation-states, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the feudal war lords return to power. Those are the two options.
You were already arguing a false dichotomy, and then ended up admitting it with that last sentence.
Hopefully one of these days (probably in the far future, if ever), we'll have a society dominated by individuals cooperating and interacting with each other without the need for a top down autocracy, which the U.S. is moving towards now.
But as long as you have government agents and those in the media actively trying to divide people and pit groups against each other in order to gain power, that will never happen.
And as long as we have indoctrination of individuals into thinking that government should be involved in every aspect of their lives in order to promote fairness, there's no hope.
You appear to be arguing a false dichotomy as well, that there's no middle ground between anarchy and fascism.
Inevitably, complex societies bring the opportunity for people to organize themselves into power structures, and a power vacuum will be filled. People form societies with governments on the premise that having a system of laws and agents to enforce those laws is a better framework to live by than what came before, where rather than a state, the primary force of violent coercion was the family or the church. You can change the name or the scale but the story remains the same - government is not something alien to human nature, it's a part of the way humans try to organize and control their environment, and build on the complexity of the generations prior.
I suppose you could argue that complexity itself is the problem, if government is an implicit evil, then the ability to form governments must also be an implicit evil. But then you have the problem of how to force people to "cooperate and interact with each other" without forming a government if they choose.
It's only a false dichotomy if there's another choice, and in history we haven't seen one at any substantial scale. In any society where there's no centralized power, a small organized group skilled in violence can terrorize and dominate a large, disorganized population. That's how feudal warlords came into power over scattered tribes in the first place.
You could have argued the very same way against the possibility of nation-states before the emerged historically. There's just no way to use history as some sort of "proof" that there are no other forms to organize a society besides what has already been there.
They recently created uniforms for the Seattle Police department here. Its nebulous what they hope to accomplish with the added surveillance and personally it freaks me out.
I'm not saying were an Orwellian police state but at least we are headed that way.
My impression is that most people want the police to wear cameras so they have something more objective than the officer's verbal assertion when disputes arise - where they've been deployed, such cameras seem to lead to a reduction in complaints because officers know their behavior is being recorded.
It's two sided -- officers behave better because they're on camera, and people make up fewer false accusations because they know they were on camera.
My city (Denver) passed a law mandating body cameras for police during the last election. It'll probably be a year or two before we get data on how well it's worked.
One concern I have about cameras is if the police get the opportunity to review the footage before testifying, and others don't. I think that would be a significant shift of power toward the police, though it may still curtail some of the most extreme abuses.
The article seems pretty US focused. There are a lot of countries out there that are less police dominated that could be used as examples. In the UK where I am the policing is fairly light. It would be hard to say society is dominated by it outside a few bad areas where gangs stab each other so the police have to intervene. I was last stopped by the police about 20 years ago for driving 130mph in a 70 limit and let off with a warning.
Yeah, it's a bit different here. The last time I was stopped was a few years ago for having a burnt-out brake light in Nowheresville, Wyoming. The cop probably didn't like my dirty car and out-of-state plates, but my paperwork was in order, and I'm a harmless-looking white dude, so I got away with mild harassment and a warning.
This is really at the heart of the problem I have with the American approach to policing - everything becomes a police issue. Your tail light is out. Does the cop: a) tell you your tail light is out and to have a nice day and drive safe or b) demand license and registration, take 10 minutes to run a complete background check, insult you for having the tail light out, threaten to search the rest of your vehicle, and finally get around to giving you a ticket so that they can meet their quotas and fill their coffers.
Drugs: we treat it like a policing issue, other countries treat it as a social and health issue.
Immigration: we turn it into a policing deal when really its an economic and social system matter.
Gangs: our cops talk tough on the nightly news and the newspaper, but really this is directly tied to the drug and immigration problem and is again, and economic problem of when you have disfranchised young men.
Even a lot of the speeding and traffic problems are really cases of poor civil engineering and traffic management, but we "fix" them through a convenient policing trick that also generated revenue without raising anyone's taxes visibly.
Homelessness, especially due to mental illness? Let's make laying on the sidewalk illegal so we can turn a social problem into a police issue.
So in short, our US system turns things into policing issues because you know, fixing the real problems would be tough.
I have witnessed very heavy handed policing of peaceful protestors and squatters here in the UK.
At the same time I know of cases of people being imprisoned that should be receiving psychiatric care instead; so point 6 in the article struck me especially.
The police seem to treat protestors much worse than anybody else, which makes me think such heavy-handed tactics are a response to pressure from above.
The government(s) have shown a consistent disregard for freedom of assembly.
There have been a lot of different ways to make and enforce laws through history, each with their particular costs and benefits. For a review of several I recommend this work (in progress) by David Friedman.
Another suggestion: abolish the practice of 'perp walks' and police publication of mugshots. They badly prejudice the right to a fair trial, the government is under no particular obligation to release that information until someone comes up for trial, and they're a grotesque infringement on the privacy and dignity of arrestees, many of whom are never even charged with a crime.
I can certainly imagine the proposed alternatives. I personally don't think they'll solve the behavioral issues in society at large. They likely would reduce the amount of policing and supplement traditional policing, but I don't think it'll eliminate the need. It's not as if all countries conspired and said, let's all have a police force!
I think the policing grows out of necessity. It's not as if there aren't lawless places where there is either little police or no police. Those places exist, for the most part, most people would choose to live in a different place where there are decently funded police. I'm not saying 'militarized' police are necessary or desired, but i think large societies need a force (people or robotic) which enforce the rules (reasonable/constitutionally sound) out by the population at large. Maybe a robotic force would be more impartial than people personafying the police force....
If you don't like police in your community elect officials (or get elected yourself) to stop paying for them. If you don't pay the cops they will not show up. I assume many of the commenters on this post have some advantages that would aide in persuading the local citizens of the benefits of transferring funds for police to education, mental health care, tax reduction, or whatever.
I believe we're beginning to see that happen, slowly. Younger folks tend to get their news from their friends on facebook, twitter, etc. Mainstream media sources are toward the late stage of the conversation rather than the beginning and end. I don't know that it's necessarily improving things, in that a lot of Fox News style bullshit gets passed around in the form of photos with inaccurate captions, etc. But, "mainstream" it is not.
Then again, the dialogue is still being controlled for enough of the population that the state line gets reproduced by a large number of people, possibly even the majority of people, in most instances where the state interests are at stake. Even seemingly without mainstream media, the message is well-controlled.
Some recent examples of a large percentage of people seemingly buying into the state story without question that I found unnerving: "North Korea was definitely responsible for the attack on Sony" (despite many technically savvy people having serious questions about that), "Michael Brown was definitely in a rage and running into a hail of bullets toward an armed police officer when he was killed" (despite significant evidence to the contrary), "Eric Garner wouldn't have been killed if he had just obeyed the law; it had nothing to do with his race", "Tamir Rice pulled a gun on cops" (despite video contradicting this claim).
"Your comment is impossible to address without essentially starting a flamewar, due to your decision to include several hot-button issues as examples."
Is it? You seem to have succeeded in doing so, anyway. Which is good, as I think it's worth discussing. I called out situations where a state-approved message clearly exists, and that a reasonable person could find that state-approved message difficult to believe.
"Suffice to say, Facebook and Twitter are mainstream. HN, too, is mainstream in tech circles. All of these conversations are at the very least influenced by other people."
So, if social media is "mainstream media", then what do you suppose makes media not mainstream media? What does it take to not be mainstream?
I don't necessarily agree with the comment I responded to that the "much more important" issue is mainstream media, though I think it is part of the equation that decides whether a democracy can succeed. But, I did want to point out that the control that NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. have over the messaging that reaches most people is weakening. And, what is replacing it may not be superior, at least in the short term.
I don't think you and I disagree (except perhaps on the value of mentioning "hot button" issues in this discussion).
Sigh... I wish HN would prevent replies to deleted comments. I deleted it, checked that there were no new replies, waited a few minutes, checked again, and now checked a couple hours later and sure enough, a reply has appeared.
I deleted my comment because I don't like calling people out, especially when it comes to politics. We may disagree on the value of mentioning specific hot-button issues, and that's fine. I shouldn't have brought it up as a slight against you specifically. Sorry. I was also probably wrong that it was impossible to address the comment without starting a flamewar.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that social media may be as controlled as more-mainstream media. It may be slightly harder to control or influence the conversation, but influence happens from Facebook to HN. HN's is preferable, but only because of the people piloting it.
Why do you feel social media is any less shackled than mainstream media? In many ways, it's more influential, and therefore influencing social media acts as sort of a "force multiplier." If you convince just a few people to start convincing their friends, who convince their friends, etc, the effect is quite strong.
"Why do you feel social media is any less shackled than mainstream media?"
I don't. I said roughly the opposite of that; I've said that despite mainstream media losing its stranglehold on how people get their information, there still seems to be an effective method of controlling messaging.
All I said is that while it does still seem to be controlled, it is not "mainstream media". Nonetheless, I said that it seems like I agree with you, generally speaking. I think maybe we've gotten off on the wrong foot in this conversation; I feel like you're hearing a much more argumentative tone than I believe I'm projecting.
My disagreement (mostly) was with the comment I originally replied to, that asserted that policing, as it is practiced today, isn't a serious problem (which I disagree strongly with) and that mainstream media is the real problem (which I am somewhat in agreement with, but I think it's a more complex conversation than saying, "mainstream media is the problem").
Edit: And, on the "reply to deleted comment" thing, the comment existed when I wrote my comment. I believe I quoted enough context to continue the conversation. While I appreciate the sentiment of not starting flame wars, I didn't intend to start one with my comment; I was sincere in my desire to be concrete about what I was talking about when I say that social media can seemingly propagate an approved message as effectively as a well-behaved mainstream media.
I'm sorry you had to spell it out for me. I suppose I wasn't thinking clearly at the time. Apologies.
And I apologize for my general tone in my response. I made the mistake of writing it before attending to something, and my response ended up sounding much too forceful. It wasn't my intent, and I should have given your reply the attention it deserved.
I think that that's a great talking point, but from a very practical perspective the solution is to get people to question their media (social, main stream, or otherwise) carefully. Simply removing the big channels won't fix anything.
More importantly, though, it's still just a talking feel-good point: the fact of the matter is that if a cop can blow a hole in your baby with a flashbang during a no-knock warrant it doesn't matter a hoot in hell what news you subscribed to.
>the solution is to get people to question their media
That's contrary to human nature. The solution is to make the media independent of outside interests. The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity, ban investment in media from non-media companies and ban advertisement. Alternatively advertisement could be allowed as long as the money is paid equally to all media, and the ads are randomly allocated.
Third alternative is to have a responsible government channel that competes with the commercial ones, funded by tax money and independent like a central bank. That, however, would require a reasonably decent government to begin with. This model actually works pretty well in many countries.
> The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity
What does this even mean? Media employees aren't allowed to buy groceries? Media employees aren't allowed to buy cars? Media employees aren't allowed to sell Girl Scout Cookies?
Are you sure? I agree that if any individual media outlet stopped accepting ads, it would kill them; but that's because their competitors would still accept ads. Given a choice between a media outlet with ads and one without ads, consumers will choose the one with ads, because they won't have to pay (as much) for it directly. But it's possible that if ads were banned across the board, and consumers only had a choice between paying for media or not having access to media, they would choose to pay.
>> The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity
>What does this even mean? Media employees aren't allowed to buy groceries? Media employees aren't allowed to buy cars? Media employees aren't allowed to sell Girl Scout Cookies?
Well, they should be allowed to buy things, but not sell things and not allowed to own stock, bonds or anything else than cash and the real estate they live in.
>> ban advertisement
>This kills the media.
You say that as if the death of advertisement-funded media would necessarily be a bad thing. To the contrary, it might be a really good thing.
> Well, they should be allowed to buy things, but not sell things and not allowed to own stock, bonds or anything else than cash and the real estate they live in.
That is highly unreasonable. They can't sell their car? They have to live in one house until they die or get foreclosed on? What do you think we would gain by chasing everybody who is remotely sane out of the field?
> You say that as if the death of advertisement-funded media would necessarily be a bad thing. To the contrary, it might be a really good thing.
If there were a better alternative, sure. But there is not. If you cut off the only source of revenue available, just about the only sources of information remaining will be run by rich people who are willing to pay to push their views onto the masses.
But how tall a hurdle is jumping your Facebook or Twitter feed, really? IMHO these (NYT, Economist) outlets are lukewarm at best.
If you'll allow a digression, even if you do think the new media is working reasonably well, let's work together to enumerate what some of the problems are with big media that, if they were addressed, would make them better:
1.) News readership (consumer) not the source of funding, sponsors and advertisers are
2.) Most large media outlets have been bought by other corporate interests
3.) Changing technology and culture has created a void of long format messaging (and the death of usual distribution channels - which maybe is a good thing?)
4.) Government drastically improved symbiotic working relationship with media, challenging its role as an effective Fourth Estate
5.) News media outlets routinely surveilled and journalists legally challenged on big stories, chilling knowledgeable informants and would be whistleblowers
6.) Political and legal barriers and costs of investigative journalism high, demand and compensation low
7.) Fundamental lack of reporting and self-reporting on media organizations themselves
8.) Lack of competition due to 'enshrined' reputations and primetime due to trust relationships with content services - plus girth of production in long tail (and in major suppliers) of low quality, uncorrected, inaccurate, misleading, politicized, propogandized, or unprofessional work due to lowered costs of production
9.) 'Gamification' of the consumer for views (thus dollars) - including the short media attention span, use of talking heads, scare media, infotainment, eccentric coverage of irrelevancies, invention of false controversies
(More welcome)
Certainly Facebook and Twitter aren't editorialized and are subject to and gamed by social media optimization. (They also don't address any of the problems listed above.) Facebook and Twitter are essentially the same as relying on rumor and heresay (nearly by definition). And we know they are heavily propagandized.
I want to patrol my own streets like I want to grow my own food, or supply my own home energy.
No thanks. People who provide these services do a better job than I ever will. I'm thankful that they are there, so I can focus all my energy on writing software.
Yes, but it starts with the premise that these are alternatives. If anything, I think these are things that are good in _addition_ to our current system, but as a replacement I think it's a bit of a pipe dream.
Further, I take issue with the whole notion of the United States being a society "dominated by the police." It looks like we have just the right amount[1], so it seems to me that the issue is lack of training, accountability and open reporting combined with effective police review that are likely to be our problems.
And, yet, our police seem to be extraordinarily effective at imprisoning people, comparatively speaking. If we have the right amount of police (at their current efficiency), does that mean we have the right amount of people in prison?
That's part of it, and the laws are part of it, too. But, I believe policing accounts for a significant portion of that disparity between the US and other developed, democratic-ish, nations.
Here's why I believe that: Black folks are arrested at a rate of 2.5 times, or more, that of white folks, despite committing crimes at about the same rate as white folks (actually, for some classes of crime, such as marijuana use, whites commit crime at a higher rate). This tells me that police exercise discretion when making arrests. And, were they to exercise that discretion equally across races, there would be either a lot fewer or a lot more arrests, and a lot fewer or a lot more people being imprisoned.
In short, to put it into language that HN folks will understand, it is like a sales funnel. Police are an early stage in the funnel for filling prisons, and every stage in the funnel plays a role in the prison industrial complex.
Sources on the 2.5, or higher, number (any time race comes up as a factor, someone will challenge it...so, preemptive response):
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't police start as community patrols, then were legitimized when they had to start employing deadly force in order to keep other more organized and dangerous groups at bay? (mobs, gangs, etc)
As I understand it, in the United States, policing was performed originally by an elected Sheriff. You would need to go back to the medieval period, I guess, or somewhere other than the western world, to find community patrols as a common form of policing practiced in anything like the modern world.
There is some argument to be made that police have evolved alongside the concept of property, in that the role of police has historically been defense of property (where property often included people), and that doesn't always coincide with concern for human lives.
But, I'd rather not get too distracted by what policing looked like hundreds of years ago. What does it look like today? And, is that the best way to protect people from those dangerous groups you speak of (mobs, gangs, etc.)? I honestly don't believe it is. The budgets of major city police forces are absurd, compared to budgets for mental health, rehabilitation, addiction recovery, education, poverty reduction, etc. And, those budgets are padded to the tune of millions of dollars a year from federal sources, including heavily subsidized military equipment (which is a major contributor to the militarization of police forces).
So, how would it affect your opinion on this issue for police to have started as community patrols but turned into something else? Do you assume that because someone (in a pre-democratic era) decided that community patrols were not as effective as appointed police that we should continue to do it the way it's been done for all those years? Is history the right source of inspiration when it comes to use of force?
Don't get me wrong. I've got no answers. But I think it's a bit naïve to believe that no one, criminal or otherwise, would fill the power void should an organized and powerful police force cease to exist. In countries with corrupt or minimal police force, we see rampant corruption and gangs/terrorist groups in control. It's not like there aren't examples to draw from here.
I don't have to imagine it, It's called Colombia, where the Police is at best ineffective, and it's fxxxxing anarchy.
So let's imagine instead if the liberal media in the USA had global context instead of complaining because you have a functional police force with a few problems that need correcting.
People can complain all they want about individual instances of civil forfeiture or predatory red-light cameras, but those sorts of issues are all caused by the incentives induced when the agency that enacts the fine benefits from the money collected.
(This does not apply to the separate penalties/restitution used to compensate victims, pay for fixing actual damage, etc..)
If some agencies are currently dependent on revenue through fines, then this requires a one-time adjustment to their budget. But this is good as it just means that the cost of running their agencies becomes more transparent.