Rachel Harmon: prediction

Transcript context

…How much of the problems with American police are just correlated with the problems of the citizens? If you had a town where just literally everyone was completely nice, would police brutality be a major issue? There are a lot of ways to prevent police — call it brutality. Let’s call it violence or just a use of force. Let’s say all uses of force — it would be better if no uses of force happened. Now, we could prevent them by preventing the underlying problems that police respond to. We could do education, and have economic development, and provide mental health services. And then police will respond to far fewer problems, and things would be better. We could re-identify problems and tolerate a little bit more disorder. Maybe a police officer doesn’t have to break up a loud party, and then he won’t have to arrest the people involved. So we could do that. We could encourage people to react differently to the police. If people trust the police in your nice town where people believe that the police are there to help, not to hurt, where police are not being aggressive towards them, they might be far more likely to respond to just a mere request. “You know what, why don’t you turn the music down?” And they would say, “Fine. ” You could do all those things and help improve policing, sure. And then at the end of the day, the police officers in your nice town might also be likely to wait out people who are noncompliant or look for alternatives because in a nice town, that’s what people do. So I think niceness could help, but thinking about how it could help is really what matters. How do we limit the number of police who lie at trial, or lie to back up their peers, or somehow just outright refuse to play by the legal rules of the game, telling the truth?…

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