- One of the areas that abuse of power
has shown up a lot in the news recently,
is with police abuse.
One of the things that's been discussed around police reform
is how we can make this stop,
how we can end up fixing policing.
A lot of the discussion is on a part of the problem
that absolutely warrants attention,
but is only part of the problem,
and that's what the police do.
So this involves solutions
like putting body cameras on police officers,
oversight, scrutiny, basically;
trying to make it so that there's deterrents
to stop police officers abusing their position.
What we don't think about often,
is not what the police do,
but who the police are.
On one end of the spectrum,
people say that "This is anti-police
because the data show that
certain types of people are more attracted to policing,
who frankly, shouldn't be in a uniform,
and therefore, I'm trying to paint the police
as some group of bad people."
Which is not what I'm saying.
On the other end of the spectrum, politically,
people are saying, "This is naive.
Policing is fundamentally going to have these problems
because the institution of policing
was set up to abuse people."
The way I came to this problem
was to look at how recruitment of police officers
determines who ends up in the uniform.
And I was scouring across the United States
and looking at various police departments,
and one that stood out to me is
this small suburb of Atlanta called Doraville, Georgia.
Now, when you used to click on Doraville's website
for the police department,
you are greeted with this video,
that is quite frankly, insane.
The first thing you see is a literal tank
with the SWAT Team inside of it,
screaming across the frame.
They're in military uniforms,
they're carrying assault weapons,
and they toss smoke grenades out of the vehicle.
They shoot their weapons,
and the whole thing is set to the soundtrack
of death metal music.
The people who look at that video and think,
"Wow, that looks cool.
I'd love to drive around Walmart in a tank
with a smoke grenade and a huge weapon"-
they sign up.
Now, New Zealand thought about it carefully.
So I spoke to people in my research
who had designed a system of recruitment,
that they called, "Do You Care Enough To Be A Cop?"
Basically what they start with
is this very funny video,
in which police officers are chasing an unseen suspect,
but stopping to help people cross the street,
dancing with someone with a boombox for a bit,
telling jokes that are quite funny.
- 'You kind of just ruined my flow now,
there was supposed to be a big buildup,
and now we have to go over this whole section again.'
- 'Who's we?'
And then at the end of the video,
they finally catch the perpetrator,
which turns out to be a border colly
who's stolen a woman's purse,
and "Do You Care Enough To Be A Cop?"
flashes on the screen.
And what happened in New Zealand
was that the number of recruits shot through the roof.
Their applicant pool expanded dramatically.
People who didn't previously see themselves
as police officers,
started to think,
"I could do that job
because I care about the community."
The juxtaposition with the Punisher logo and the tank,
compared to the border collie
and the "Do You Care Enough To Be a Cop?" logo
is so extreme that it's almost amusing.
It's two parallel worlds of policing
that are drastically different.
It's not that we can ignore what the police do,
we absolutely have to have oversight
and very close scrutiny of police officers
who abuse their authority.
But at the same time, we have to think more carefully
about who ends up in the uniform, to begin with.
This shows up in the data
when you see that the rates of domestic abuse
among police officers in the United States
is higher than the general average in the public.
So, you know, when you think about why that's happening,
perhaps it's that the job is making them a bit more on edge
or causing them to behave in certain ways.
I think what's more likely
is that people who are abusive
are disproportionately likely to seek out a job
in which you can abuse people.
So that means you have ever-more important scrutiny
and ever-more important screening
of who becomes a cop in the first place.
That aspect of recruitment
is often not part of the discussion.
So I think, we absolutely have to think about
what the police do,
but we also have to devote
just as much attention to who the police are.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that my proposals
mean that we will never have police abuse,
we'll never have police violence-
these are deeply ingrained problems.
I do think that we are not picking the low-hanging fruit
of how we address some of these problems,
and that means that we have to think more carefully
about how we can make marginal improvements that add up.
You have to make police behave better
so that people want to be officers,
and you have to present policing as though it is better,
so that people apply
when they are publicly minded as public servants,
rather than people who like the idea
of holding power with a badge and a gun.
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