Things that I want

[steuard]

I want the whole concept of "juvenile charged as an adult" to be eliminated from the American legal system. (Maybe the US could then stop being the only UN nation other than Somalia not to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the ChildI want police officers to be trained under the assumption that protecting innocent civilian lives is even

Comments

[beth_leonard]

Obviously we can't have all that without a serious increase in GDP, but if I got to pick the priorities, I'd start with "I want the sale of any drug whose likely harm to the individual and to society is no worse than tobacco's (or maybe even alcohol's) to be legalized, taxed, and carefully regulated for safety."

--Beth

[kirinn]

The majority of these look revenue-neutral or even positive to me, at least once you get over an initial reorganization hump. Obviously implementation is nontrivial but I'm not seeing a lot of long term economic drain from almost any of them.

I of course can't include basic income in that category for sure, because I can't say anything about it for sure since its effects would be very complicated and it's never been tried on any significant scale.

[beth_leonard]

[To answer Stu's question in a reply to kirinn] Primarily the ones about training of police officers, i.e. "I want police officers to be trained under the assumption that protecting innocent civilian lives is even more important than their own safety

[steuard]

I see what you're getting at: additional training would definitely cost money. My hope, at least in the medium to long term, is that this would mostly be a matter of different emphasis in the training we already do. I've seen claims that modern policing shifted emphasis significantly in the past 30 years or so (perhaps in connection with "broken windows" theory, or with the drug war); I'd like to think we could to some degree roll that back. And hey: why not make some room in the training schedule by eliminating most officers' instruction in, say, the use of flash-bangs in no-knock raids, or procedures involving armored personnel carriers, or the paperwork necessary for civil forfeiture?

Honestly, though, for a lot of these (not all of them) I don't care even a little bit how much they cost: I would very nearly prefer not to have a police force at all than continue to support some of the breathtakingly immoral practices that have come to be all too common (or even the norm) today.

[kirinn]

Yeah, I don't think there's anything in this list that I wouldn't happily second.

[ricevermicelli]

Thirded.

Boston went to a community engagement model of policing a fair while ago, and the PD isn't perfect, but the police officers I've run across seem committed to non-violent law enforcement tactics, de-escalate wherever possible, and try to avoid violence. Things that some other cities handle with fire hoses and pepper spray, I have sometimes seen BPD handle by having an officer have a low-key conversation with protesters.

Then again, I have only one perspective, and it's that of a relatively high-income white person. It would shock me not at all if my non-white neighbors held a vastly different opinion. And that right there is a giant, neon indication of a problem.

Other police-related wants

[ext_3247124]

I want any instance of a police officer found to file a willfully deceptive police report to be prosecuted as a felony, with mandatory jail time if convicted.

I want any accusations of misconducts on the part of police officers to be investigated by independent third parties not associated with government, not the police themselves.

I want all police officers to be required to carry insurance for judgements of liability stemming from their conduct, and be reimbursed for the average cost of said insurance for a police officer with 5+ years of experience and minimal complaints. Any officer unable to afford such insurance will be unable to retain their position.

Re: Other police-related wants

[steuard]

I like the false report one!

I thought about things along the lines of the second one, but I have absolutely no idea how to implement it, or even what it would mean. (The investigation would be a governmental requirement and funded by public dollars, right? How do you prevent the "independent third party" from being co-opted by the folks who sign the checks? It's tricky.)

The third of these is really intriguing. I worry that even fantastic rookie cops wouldn't be able to afford to get to that 5+ year point, though. Maybe make the reimbursement match the average cost for an officer with the corresponding years of experience (at least until they hit the 5 year mark)?