Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Financial incentives have given us ever more aggressive policing — if we want real change, we must change those incentives - MarketWatch

Image result for “defund the police”.Financial incentives have given us ever more aggressive policing — if we want real change, we must change those incentives - MarketWatch
"...We should be wary of calls to “defund the police”. 
Historically, when government departments (such as the U.S. National Park Service) have their budgets threatened, they respond by cutting their most essential services (like threatening to close the Washington Monument), to drum up voter support.
...Instead, we must stop making bad policing pay.
Here are just six ways we can alter the financial incentives; there are other options as well, but the logic of these is relatively easy to see.
• Repeal civil asset forfeiture laws.
• Disband SWAT teams in any town smaller than 100,000 people.
• Don’t allow towns to keep revenue from tickets and fines; instead place that revenue in victim restitution funds.
• Remove laws immunizing police from civil and criminal penalties.
• Enable citizens to sue police for excessive or inappropriate violence; pay resulting judgments from police pension funds or salary pools, rather than general taxes.
• Make police salary raise pools dependent upon measured community satisfaction.
If we change the incentives, we change behavior...
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