Painful Options: Open Thread on Law Enforcement
One of my favorite quotes when discussing systemic problems is from the movie Argo.
The scene takes place during a meeting in which two CIA agents are presenting a high-risk plan to rescue escaped American hostages from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis.
When the CIA official who has to approve the plan criticizes it as ridiculous, the younger CIA agent concludes his response with this: “There are only bad options; it’s about picking the best one.”
The older official asks the two agents, “You don’t have a better bad idea than this?”
The scene ends as the senior agent responds, “This is the best bad idea we have, sir, by far.”
The state of American law enforcement is this exact situation we are in today. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or delusional.
The Uvalde Police Department allowed 19 elementary school students to be slaughtered. I honestly don’t care if it was out of incompetence, cowardice, racism, or a combination of all three. They failed to do their job.
What happened in Uvalde is not an isolated incident, and neither is the rise in violent crime.
But I am looking to prompt an open thread about how to solve this problem.
This is an open thread. I have the following suggestions on how to gain functional law enforcement in the United States. Keep in mind that what may work for one police department may only make a bad situation worse elsewhere.
A. Keep the status quo while doing painful, slow-moving, and often half-measured reforms to make your police department better. Keep in mind that this work can be reversed depending on who is in power and will be fought at every turn by the rank and file.
B. Assign law enforcement duties to the sheriff’s department in a given municipality, which can work if the jurisdiction is small enough and the department can spare staff. This situation is what happened in Falcon Heights after Philando Castile was killed. But this falls apart if the sheriff’s office is just as bad.
C. Purge the entire department and rebuild from scratch using officers from better-functioning departments—assuming nearby departments have the officers, equipment, and staff to spare.
You can probably all see why I am so fond of the above quote from Argo. When it comes to fixing the law enforcement apparatus in America, at this point, there are only painful solutions.