15. Maybe You Shouldn't Call The Police

     Many and various people have pointed out the numerous problems that can occur in a community when there are bad cops there.  Of course, the vast majority of cops are good ones and only a very few are bad, but those few will have a highly disproportionate impact that will poison the whole policing function.  But the real problem is not so much that there are some bad cops, since that’s a problem that can be easily solved just by identifying them and removing them, but that the institutions around the policing function too often refuse to do anything about the presence of bad cops.  Police departments, police unions, city councils, county commissioners, and so on, have too much of a history of retaining people in policing roles who just shouldn’t be there.

      As a result of the lingering of the rare bad cops, many people have noted that, at the very least, there are two very negative consequences:  First, there is a complete loss of trust within a community of the people involved in policing roles.  People will easily come to think:  If the system has bad cops in it and actively defends and retains them, then there is no reason to think that it has any legitimacy as a law-enforcement system; the policing system appears to be no different than a criminal organization wanting to have its own way for its own benefit.  Second, there will be many good cops who will be injured or killed as a result of the natural wariness of people towards anyone in a policing role. People also will easily come to think: I just got stopped by a cop, but who knows which kind it is, a good one or a bad one, and since I don’t know which, I’d better be really wary, and be primed to defend myself in whatever way necessary; which of course means that I’d better be ready to shoot.

     Though the retention of bad cops in policing roles can be a source of negative outcomes, that actually is only one small part of two larger general problems with policing organizations.  Here are some stories that are not funny, but that can illustrate these more general problems.

     (1)  A teenage girl is kidnapped but the local police have a description of the car driven by the kidnapper.  So the police department puts out an appeal on the local television news station with a description of that car, asking all city residents to be on the lookout for it and call in if they see it.  Some people see that car parked on their street and call in.  So a patrol car comes out to see it, and the police team surveys that parked suspect car.  That team eyeballs the car and then they write out a parking ticket on it, and then drive away.  The neighbors immediately call the police department again, frantically insisting that this is the car the department put out the television appeal for.  Police return to the scene, and this time search the car. Of course, the dead body of the missing teenager is found in the trunk of the car.  In the end it seems that the police department put out the public call for information about that car, and then they forgot that they did that. Later, there is no information provided about whether the teenager was alive when the first police were at the scene.

     (2)  A police patrol team of two officers gets a call about a domestic dispute, and they drive to the location given.  At the scene, they find a man staggering on the sidewalk. They approach the man and notice that he has something in his hand.  They fear that this object is a gun of some kind and so they open fire, loosing a total of 28 rounds into the body of the person.  It turns out later that the man was not in fact holding a gun.  A later police inquiry determined that the shooting was entirely justified and that the officers would have no negative report on them. But of course, that decision is ambiguous:  Were the officers justified in shooting, or were they justified in firing off 28 rounds? If the shooting was not justified, of course the officers should be fired.  If the shooting was justified, that means that the officers required 28 rounds to bring down a person who had no weapon.  And if they had to expend 28 rounds to bring down someone who had no weapon, they were extremely ineffective with the use of their guns, which means that they should be fired at least for that.  So they should have been fired in either case, but this ambiguity is never cleared up.

     (3)  A family has a son who has some emotional instability problems.  One day their son becomes distraught about something and starts raving about killing himself, having somehow gotten hold of a gun.  He barricades himself into a room in the family house while making this threat.  The family obviously becomes frantic about their son's state of mind and his risk to himself and others, and so calls the local police.  Their intent with this call was to do all they could so that their son didn't hurt himself or others.  The police arrive at the scene and set up communication with the son barricaded in the room.  After some time with this going on, the house and the immediately neighboring houses are evacuated so as to reduce the danger to others, so that danger element is removed. Once this was done, the son barricaded in the room still shows no sign of calming down.  The police decide to resolve the situation by making a forced entry into the room, which triggers the son to shoot himself, as he had stated he would do.  After removing the body from the scene, the police teams leave the area, considering their mission accomplished.  Immediately afterward, the family realizes that that all they had to do was wait for their son to get tired out, and he would have fallen asleep eventually, at which point they would have been able to get the gun.  And of course, they realize that the police could have done the same thing, but it seems that the police never thought of it; but whether they did or not is never clear.

     (4)  A police patrol stops a teenager involved in some kind of fight with friends or neighbors or someone over some matter of dispute. They clear the people from the area of the dispute and arrest the teenager, putting him the back of their patrol car.  Some time after this point, while interviewing some of the other people involved at the scene, everyone hears the sound of a gun shot from inside the back of the patrol car.  The teenager in the car had shot himself with a gun and was dead.  It seems that the arresting officers had not searched him when they put him in the car, at least not well enough to find the gun he had.  So they weren’t very effective at that, which could have had an impact on them had the teenager used the gun on them, instead of himself, if they had driven away with him in the back.

     The point of these stories is to illustrate that there are problems far more common and far more general than the big and highly-visible problem of bad cops being retained in policing roles.  Those problems are:

     (a)  There are some policing organizations that are just extremely ineffective at what they are supposed to do:  They just don’t do their work very well at all.  This could be due to any number of factors, including just simply being inept in general.

     (b)  There are some policing organizations and their regulating governmental bodies that both together are just very unresponsive:  They do not respond to the concerns of the communities that they serve, nor do they respond to problems that crop up by doing what has to be done to solve them. When problems occur they just need to be solved, but this cannot happen when there is a denial of the existence of problems and/or a refusal to solve any problem even when apparent.  (The defending and retaining of bad cops is just one case of this.)

     Now what is important to note with these two general problems is that they are nothing to get all bent out of shape about, which is something that some people do, and the reason why we should not get all bent out of shape about the problems is that we have seen them before in other contexts and have made some progress at solving them in those contexts.  Both of these problems have been encountered before in the area of primary and secondary education.  There are some schools that are extremely ineffective at the education function; they just don’t teach kids very well, whether that’s because they are set up to do everything but education, or whether the teachers just can’t teach, or for whatever other reason.  And there are some schools and school boards that are very unresponsive to the concerns of parents and communities.  For example, some school boards have appeared to have the attitude that they have a God-given right to your tax money, so you must hand it over and let them do what they want with it, and your views about how it is used have no relevance.  

     One thing that has been tried in response to these problems in the context of education has been legislation and agitation and all kinds of community activism of every sort that people can think of.  This may work in some cases, but in most cases will not. Legislation and activism and things like that attempt to bring about changes to the governing rules of an organization.  Attempts at change through these means are unreliable, and this is because of a basic principle that applies to organizations in general:  Organizations generally do not change for the better due to internal factors, but only due to external ones.  But the governing rules of an organization are factors internal to it.  Anything internal to an organization is under its control; it can be followed or ignored at will.  And so, changes in the rules, just by themselves, are not really modifying forces; by themselves they contain no motivation.  You can lay down rule changes to an organization until you are blue in the face, and everyone in it will sit there and nod their heads, and then they can get up and go off and do something else entirely, even back to what they were always doing.

     This is doubly a problem in cases of organizations to which there are no available alternatives.  When there are no alternatives, there are no consequences to the breaking or ignoring of governing rules.  This is the reason why there has always been so much of an objection made to commercial monopolies:  These businesses can do whatever they want because there are no alternatives within their industries.  Of course, this only lasts until people are able to find substitutional goods or services.

     External factors, however, can change the whole pattern of organizational behavior.  External factors are not under an organization’s control, merely by being external.  Because of the useful effects of external factors, a different thing that has been tried in response to the problems of ineffectiveness and unresponsiveness in education is just simply replacement by substitution.  This is done through the forming of charter schools, public schools that are intended to be alternatives to the existing traditional public schools.  As educational alternatives, charter schools can exert a modifying force on the traditional school systems because they are external to them and so cannot be controlled by them.  The traditional schools, then, have no choice but to change; they can ignore all the legislation and activism that tells them that they have to do things differently, but they can’t ignore real, available alternatives, especially when those alternatives attract the financial resources that they would like to have for themselves.

     So by the use of the analogy to educational options, one option for addressing the general problems of ineffectiveness and unresponsiveness found in existing policing organizations would be the creation of alternative, “charter,” policing organizations, along lines similar to charter schools.  Charter schools accomplish the mission of reform by taking students away from the traditional schools, and by doing that they take away money tasked for the education of those students.  Similarly, charter police can accomplish the mission of reform by taking on policing functions, for which they would get the money that a community has tasked for those functions.  In the big picture, the idea is not to “de-fund” the schools so as to reduce education, as if there were a problem with education in itself, but to fund educational alternatives, and thus educational reform.  So also the plan should not be to “de-fund” the police so as to reduce policing, as if there were a problem with policing in itself, but to fund policing alternatives, and thus policing reform.  This way, maybe you shouldn’t call the police if you don’t think that’s the best thing to do.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call for policing functions when they are needed, by calling someone else who is also able to handle those functions, and who may be much better at it.

     In addition to all of the reforming effects they could have on existing police departments, there are other advantages to the use of charter policing organizations, including the following:

     (1)  If traditional police departments show increasing levels of failure, sooner or later its going to happen that people start considering the possibility of privatization, something that has been considered more than once in the past. One good aspect to a charter policing initiative is that it could help to de-fuse any move towards privatization of policing functions, which every time it has been considered has been shown to be a bad idea.  (One of the better reviews of this possibility regarding private protective organizations can be found in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974.)

 Using charter schools as a model means that the new policing organizations would not be a privatization of any sort of policing functions, and that they would not completely replace existing police departments, any more than charter schools have completely replaced the traditional schools.  Funding of charter departments will be no different than the standard ones; people will just decide to have their funds tasked to this or that organization that they think will do the best job.  And States will have their standard requirements for policing, which standards will apply to charter departments equally as with traditional ones.

      (2)  Charter policing is the ultimate method for making sure that people have input into the policies and procedures that govern the policing functions that they may have need to call upon.  A decision to fund an organization or not is the ultimate feedback mechanism.  Groups that wish to form into charter police organizations will succeed or not based on what practices they follow, and whether those practices are acceptable, as people direct the policing money on the basis of those practices.  

     Now on the other hand there is a natural and fundamental objection that could be raised to this whole idea, which is that it can easily result in cases of conflict of jurisdiction between traditional police and charter police activities:  We could easily find different groups each claiming the right to deal with the same problems.  Of course, this is a possible problem, but there are at least three ways of dealing with it.

     (a)  There is a sense in which there really is no ultimate conflict because of the fact that the law that is to be enforced is the same for all who are allowed to enforce it. The law that applies to all applies to any and every person charged with any policing function.  To overly-strictly say that only traditional police organizations can enforce a law is at the same time to say that no individual can, for example, defend themselves when attacked.  When an individual is attacked, they have every right to defend themselves and also to call upon for help any persons they would like to help them, whether those others are duly sworn police or not.  Since there is and can be no law stating that people mustcall police for aid when its needed, there can be no requirement against any alternative charter police organization being the ones called in to help.  If there is any issue of precedence in a situation it should be resolvable by who got the call to address it, from whoever made the call for the policing function.

     (b)  Now there will be cases where there are multiple calls in the event of the need for policing functions, where different groups are called in to the same situation.  One option for resolving jurisdiction conflicts in these cases would be to have a general regulatory law that would make it that the traditional police department has overall jurisdiction, but not necessarily tactical control of each particular situation.  Response to any situation would be determined by who gets the call first or who gets there first or by some other considered method, not by who has overall jurisdiction. So, for example, if charter police get there first but themselves need assistance, they can bring in other traditional police as needed, which recognizes the latter’s overall jurisdiction, but not their control.

     (c)  In the end, the ultimate solution to any conflict of response between policing groups is for a community to just go all the way and assign all policing functions to one charter group, de-establishing whatever traditional department they had.  This way there is one and only one group to deal with policing functions.  So another possible response is to have a general regulatory requirement that there be only one local policing group, no matter what type they are.

(published 6/16/20)