Should We Double Police Salary?

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i don't know that raising salaries is going to make things better in polica. I think there are about as many social workers as there are police. Should we take a third of those social workers any reallicate them to police, weorek paying them more if we have to. There is no police departmentmn in america who wouldn't say, what we need is more mental health services because mental health services would prevent the crises. And if we had more social workers responding to those crises, either with law enforcement or without, depending on the nature of the crisis, we might get more effective police sint yes, sure. i'm open to almost trying almost anything as an...

Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. “You could call it a random walk,” she says, “or you could say that I’m really interested in the structure of things.” But despite her experience and training, even she can’t identify a single point of leverage that can radically reform the complicated system of policing in America. “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.”

She joined Tyler to discuss the best ideas for improving policing, including why good data on policing is so hard to come by, why body cams are not a panacea, the benefits and costs of consolidating police departments, why more female cops won’t necessarily reduce the use of force, how federal programs can sometimes misfire, where changing police selection criteria would and wouldn’t help, whether some policing could be replaced by social workers, the sobering frequency of sexual assaults by police, how a national accreditation system might improve police conduct, what reformers can learn from Camden and elsewhere, and more. They close by discussing the future of law schools, what she learned clerking under Guido Calabresi and Stephen Breyer, why she’s drawn to kickboxing and triathlons, and what two things she looks for in a young legal scholar.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded June 8th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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