Police as a Bureaucracy

A slightly different lens for thinking about the situation with the police, for your consideration:

There is a basically ironclad law of nature: Bureaucracies Want to Grow. More or less every bureaucratic institution has a defensive instinct of wanting to protect its budget -- plain and simply, no middle manager ever wants to have less money to play with, and there's a lot of pride in having more money to splash around in your division.

Police forces are a government bureaucracy like any other. I don't mean that as a pejorative -- it's just a statement of fact. They are big government divisions, with overhead and paperwork and lots of staff. And like all the rest, there is a natural instinct to want their division to get ever-bigger.

Most bureaucracies get lots of pushback, and even have to live with funding cuts now and then. But police forces have developed some really strong memes to resist this.

"We are protecting you!"

"How dare you talk about reducing the funding for our Boys in Blue!"

"Think about the children!!!"

It's all designed as a protective memetic wall of fear and patriotism, saying that Police Are Different. (The worst of them go so far as to make Mafia-grade threats: "Pretty nice town you have here. Pity if you were to reduce the size of the police, and something should happen to it.")

To help justify that, police forces have taken on more and more responsibility over the years, with each addition helping make the case for More Money and More Police. And of course, generations of politicians have served as enablers for this trend, uncritically encouraging the Police to grow and grow.

There's a lot of well-justified heat right now, and emotions are running high. But it's worth stepping back and asking, quite coldly, why the heck we have so many police? Why are they responsible for so much? Why are we spending so much on them? What are all the things they are doing, and how could we do them better in other ways?

Something that comes up frequently in the business world is that conglomerates -- big, poorly-focused corporations that try to do too much -- generally suck. They tend to be inefficient and badly-run compared to better-focused companies that know what they are for. I suspect there's an element of that here: The Police has become this all-encompassing maw of money and manpower, doing too much and not doing it well enough. In turn, that large size means a constant need to hire, and that in turn leads to bad hiring standards and problematic culture.

I don't happen to agree with the Abolish the Police sentiment: there's a real need for law enforcement. But I think we'd do far better with a police force that was considerably smaller, more focused on the core mission of protecting all people (not just the white ones), more professional and more accountable. Some of what it has been doing should probably be handled by other departments; some of it probably doesn't need to be done at all. (Turning peaceful protests into riots through violent confrontation certainly doesn't.)

In some places, that's probably just a matter of trimming and adjusting. In other cities, where things are really broken, I think there's a strong case for firing them all and re-hiring the good ones after rigorous screening. Probably all cities are due for a rethink at some level.

And yes, this will be hard -- restructuring always is. But it's a reality that those of us outside government deal with all the time: I don't think there's anything sacred about the police (or any other government institution) that makes it immune to the need to make serious organizational changes from time to time...