Rachel Harmon: preference

Transcript context

…If a department doesn’t meet those standards, do you take away money, put them into receivership, something else? What do you do? There are different proposals for that. Right now, people are talking about an accreditation system where departments would seek to be accredited by meeting national standards. You could penalize them by taking away money for things that they want, but that has, again, cost and benefits, and over time, the federal government has been totally unwilling to do that. It’s basically not used money as a tool for ensuring police accountability. I don’t know if there’s one way to do it, but there are several ways to do it, and I think partly, communities have to do it themselves. That is to say, once we have national standards out there, communities can hold their own departments accountable for not meeting them. Camden, Trenton, and Newark seem to have improved the quality of their police from what we can tell. Are there lessons we can draw from those examples? Those are tough cities, right?…

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