Rachel Harmon: evaluation

Transcript context

…Conceptually, what do you view as the fundamental constraint in the system? Someone might say, “Well, it’s too hard to watch police officers.” But body cams — it’s not clear they’ll work. Whom we pick — it’s not obvious that’s the lever of progress. What’s the actual constraint you would like to be able to control better? Yeah, I’m not a big believer in silver bullets. I don’t think there is a single constraint. We have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments, so I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly fix this by flipping one lever. I think that one thing that we could do is facilitate better accountability in policing. And what I mean by that is, if you think about policing or accountability that an officer would be responsive to standards, he would have to explain his behavior, and he’d face consequences when he didn’t live up to those standards. Those standards should reflect the full costs and benefits of policing so that we set rules for policing that actually get what we want out of policing. Those standards won’t reflect those rules if we don’t know what the costs of policing are, and that means hearing from the members of the community on whom we tend to concentrate the costs of policing. Then we have to make sure that police are, in fact, accountable, that they do have to explain their behavior — which means we would know what they were doing — and that they face consequences when they don’t live up to expectations. If we paid law professors 50 percent more, we’d probably get more good people wanting to be law professors. Should we pay police 50 percent more?…

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