Policing is one of the most difficult jobs that requires the exact application of procedures and calibration of technique. In the military, if you blow up someone’s factory too much, you can go on with life; if you’re a mechanic and you mess up, your post-procedure checks often can identify the problem before it becomes a serious loss. A police officer gets one chance to get it exactly right, in physically and emotionally demanding situations.
The only mode of operation that can get you that level of execution accuracy is:
- Extreme specialization of labor
- Detailed written procedures, down to muscle movements
- Frequent training/re-training, to those procedures, in realistic settings
- On-the-job corrections and after-action evaluation
The specialization of labor reduces the training burden (cost) for a specialty. The written procedures make instinctive reactions trainable, and the allocation of budget to training, and active monitoring steps, allows the officer to make those procedures the instinctive response, before people get crippled or killed.
Those procedures also have to accomplish the job; if the procedure is to break off the chase of a suspect as soon as the chase becomes dangerous, certainly an officer exactly can execute it, but the job function has not been performed. Given that these types of situations include:
- High-speed/high-obstacle chases
- Fighting and subduing suspects at any range
- First aid
this means that the average beat cop has to be highly physically fit, well trained with their vehicle and weapons, having some level of paramedic skills, and in general a skilled driver and martial artist. Combining that with the need to train procedures e.g. in domestic violence response and triage, the sum of the training time of these skills places a police officer into the bachelor’s degree (4-year post primary) class of personnel; which at minimum, places them into the median/average income bracket.
Here, the working conditions of the police officer (high injury rates, odd hour shifts) already make the work economically disfavorable. Here, we further must consider other attributes of the officer that make them capable of executing the procedures, and in general targeted only towards criminals:
- Generally honest
- Emotionally regulated enough, to stick to training and procedures when e.g. negotiating with suspects
This increases the quality of the candidates, to that typically associated with the six-figure/professional level of income. This level of income, also is the second-to-last level at which money meaningfully translates into improved happiness or life prospects. (The last is to be rich, leading you to a $250K+ salary/pension structure and early retirement.) The fundamental issue here is that unless you are willing to pay huge amounts (i.e. $250K+) per officer, you cannot draw any economically rational (vs. e.g. danger-motivated or violence-motivated) actor to do the job, since the tradeoffs of injury and danger generally, cannot be justified by the additional money earned. There are some people who are motivated by other factors, but recent history shows that we cannot staff police departments at the required levels, using only those groups of people. Moreover, historical staffing levels in crime-infested areas, and in the prison systems generally, typically have been well below adequate, so the need is even greater than the nominal staffing usually provided by police chiefs.
Therefore, we cannot load any more demands on the beat cops, than those generally associated with six-figure incomes. This means that the danger has to be mitigated to an acceptable level; the means by which that can be accomplished are:
- True safe harbors, in which rough adherence to procedure or even negligence, at worst results in firing with no loss of accrued pay (e.g. no Scot Peterson prosecutions, no charges in situations like that of Edward Bronstein)
- Minimization of hand-to-hand combat, i.e. you shoot lethally or harm non-lethally suspects at a distance
- Waiting drunks and other suspects out, instead of needing to subdue the suspect quickly to go on to other calls
- State of the art equipment e.g. GPS darts for high-speed chases, paint guns, to mitigate the dangers of the pursuit
and to minimize the number of contested situations that escalate to chases and violence:
- The people in your jurisdiction have to be trained as well, on how exactly the officers should approach, how they should identify themselves, how they should respond, the general investigative approaches (i.e. no Andy Raymond showdowns with unmarked police vehicles driving at him) and in all other matters to make as many of the officers’ approaches safe, as economically feasible
- Ensure that arrests and other encounters with the police, short of conviction, do not result in adverse effects such as the loss of jobs and housing on arrest (this includes e.g. beatings and rape in jail)
- Enough police staffing to investigate all leads, conduct sting operations, and to end chases with multiple officers available on scene, instead of single officers having to pursue suspects to the end
- A well funded and run justice system that ensures convictions exactly in cases where evidence exists that indicates guilt beyond a reasonable doubt