Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that’s true. In fact, one of the problems that we had in federal cases involving sexual misconduct or sexual abuse is that you would have to prove force to prove a felony, but officers don’t have to use force, and they don’t even have to explicitly threaten force. They control the situation. The person is under arrest. They’re wearing a gun, and they express and act as if they’re invincible. And often, the women who are abused are carefully chosen to believe that they are. They know because they’ve been arrested before, and they know because they have a criminal history. They know because . . . I had one case involving someone who directed a halfway house, and the women had to have sex with him in order to see their children because he could affect their probation status, and if they got their probation revoked or ended up back in jail, they wouldn’t see their children anymore. He picked them pretty carefully. So yeah, they don’t always need force, and we might need laws to better protect against that. If I think of this problem in its most general form, let’s say we agree that having more policemen doing the right thing is a high positive social return, so we don’t just want to discourage the police from engaging flat out. Right.…

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