Rachel Harmon: commitment

Transcript context

…At the same time, there are many instances of misconduct. It seems hard to limit them through a number of mechanisms that I’ve been suggesting. So what is the most cost-effective intervention that will improve the quality of policing, but without just limiting the number of engagements? I don’t know. The most cost-effective intervention to improve the quality of policing without limiting engagement — I don’t know. I don’t know that I can think of a single intervention. If you think about particular interventions, I can tell you how they might affect that equation, but there are a lot of forces acting on policing. For example, people talk about civil damages actions, and one of the things about civil damages action is they worry about indemnification. Indemnification is when the city pays, even though the officer gets the judgment against him, and people object to this because they think the officer should be punished more. But I’m actually pro-indemnification, because I think if the city pays, then as long as we make that payment transparent so we don’t have nondisclosure agreements, then we can act, and we also collect data on it. Then a community could actually say, “Hey, I don’t want my taxes to go up because you idiots won’t train and prepare officers and discipline them and supervise them so that they do less of this.” So we want the costs to be internalized. There are a lot of different ways to ensure that we internalize the cost of policing — making them more visible, making them experienced by the political actors who are going to make decisions about hiring and firing police chiefs, about setting policy for police departments. I think the more we internalize the full costs of policing and make sure they’re fairly distributed, the better policing will be. There are other countries that are very different. An extreme example would be Norway. I’m not saying we can be like Norway, right? We’re a very different country. But if you’re Rachel Harmon, dictator of all matters police, and you’re allowed to make one change that will last after you’re gone, what would that be?…

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