4 ms·

As normal, libertarians have the correct and rational solution to the problem :)

by syshum 6y ago

Avicebron 6y ago
Please explain how just dismantling unions is the correct and rational solution? I'm less inclined to believe in qualified immunity, but I can see that it is based on a legitimate concern.
- syshum 6y ago
  1. police union contracts in major cities routinely include provisions that erase disciplinary records and obstruct meaningful discipline (let alone prosecution) of police officers who abuse their authority. [1] 2. the strong majority of these 656 contracts have a similar disciplinary appeals process. Around 73% provide for appeal to an arbitrator or comparable procedure and nearly 70% provide that an arbitrator or comparable third party makes a final binding decision. About 54% of the contracts give officers or unions the power to select that arbitrator. About 70% of the jurisdictions give these arbitrators extensive review power, including the ability to revisit disciplinary matters with little or no deference to the decisions made by supervisors, civilian review boards or politically accountable officials. [2] 3. We look at the roll-out of collective bargaining rights for police officers at the state level from the 1950s to the 1980s. The introduction of access to collective bargaining drives a modest decline in policy employment and increase in compensation with no meaningful impacts on total crime, violent crime, property crime or officers killed in the line of duty. What does change? We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run (likely after unions are established) with an additional 0.026 to 0.029 civilians killed in a county each year of whom the overwhelming majority are non-white. [3] 4. Recent academic research further demonstrates that police disciplinary procedures established through union contracts obstruct accountability and (as I noted in this post) collective bargaining for police officers appears to increase police misconduct. This is not surprising. Through collective bargaining, police unions demand protections from disciplinary procedures that would not otherwise be approved, oppose consent decrees and other measures to increase police accountability, and (given the power of police unions in state and local politics) they receive relatively little pushback. [4] [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-unions/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli... [2] https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/ https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/ [3] https://twitter.com/robgillezeau/status/1266834185055956997 https://twitter.com/robgillezeau/status/1266834185055956997 [4] https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-of-police-misconduct/ https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-... I could provide more as well, that was just a real quick look up of my bookmarks Edit: 1 more source for good measure [5] https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3890&context=dlj https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... This Article empirically demonstrates that police departments’ internal disciplinary procedures, often established through the collective bargaining process, can serve as barriers to officer accountability.
rayiner 6y ago
I think the libertarians are basically right in this instance. Apart from systemic racism (which I believe is a very real thing, but an abstract and not directly unactionable one), I see two problems: 1) The people with the power over the police have almost no contact with the people being policed. Neighborhood schooling reinforces that problem. It ensures that ability to afford housing segregates black people from white people. (Note: it’s not a question of funding. Here in DC, most of the shiny new LEED Gold schools are 99% black. Therefore, white parents won’t send their kids there, notwithstanding the gleaming facilities and lower housing prices in the surrounding area.) School choice gives black people the power to create integrated schools, instead of waiting for statistically wealthier whites/Asians to get woke enough to want to do it. I think people would be much more sensitive to policing issues if they didn’t just hear about these things a couple of times a year on the news, but were faced with people in their PTA suffering the consequences of police brutality. I would add that, unsurprisingly, a decisive majority of black people support school choice. 2) With notion of black people being “the other” rooted since childhood, qualified immunity and police unions eliminate the near term, immediate consequences of acting on those instincts. The two things that make people think before they act are empathy and self preservation. The libertarian approach is a double-barreled solution that could hit both.
- harryh 6y ago
  I think that school choice can certainly help but there are limits. District 1 in NYC has a form of school choice but segregation persists and is even driven by minorities in some ways. This article is really interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/a-manhattan-district-where-school-choice-amounts-to-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/a-manhattan-dist... It touches on two NYC schools that share a building (The Earth School & PS64) but have remarkably different racial and socioeconomic makeups. I found it fascinating after touring Earth School earlier this year.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  We can all take a moment of silence to curse at Justice Burger, who while he may have done a good thing in Lemon v. Kurtzman, really screwed the pooch in Milliken v. Bradley
harryh 6y ago
I think the libertarian suggestions are certainly part of the solution but I don't think they're sufficient on their own. History shows us that racism is remarkably resistant to market forces.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  It's not necessary to eliminate racism. Imagine if the citizens of a community had the power to pull some of their money away from ineffective police departments to hold them accountable. There could be competing police forces, all run by the government, and the citizens could fund the ones they prefer, not unlike charter schools allow parents to fund the schools they prefer, and food stamps allow the poor to buy the food they want from the grocery store they prefer. If your police department sucks, but the one neighboring one is good, you could choose to move your funding to the other police department who would expand their operations to cover more territory.
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    We had this with fire departments for thousands of years. It didn’t go well.
- syshum 6y ago
  Racism is not something that could even be solved with market forces, nor would any libertarian claim such a thing. At best we would say the market gives non-racists the best chance to isolate the push back against racists History shows that if a society is racist the absolute WORST thing you can do is have a strong government, as that government will likely be filled with racists who will pass racist laws. (See The War on Drugs and/or Jim Crow Laws) The idea that more government is the solution to racism denies the entire history of this nation. Government is not now, nor has it ever been the solution to the problem of racism (nor any other problem), Government is like it always has been and always will be the problem... the Classic Libertarian saying "Government: If you think you have problems, wait until you see our [government] solutions"
  - 6y ago

As normal, libertarians have the correct and rational solution to the problem :)

by syshum 6y ago

As normal, libertarians have the correct and rational solution to the problem :)

Please explain how just dismantling unions is the correct and rational solution? I'm less inclined to believe in qualified immunity, but I can see that it is based on a legitimate concern.

syshum 6y ago
1. police union contracts in major cities routinely include provisions that erase disciplinary records and obstruct meaningful discipline (let alone prosecution) of police officers who abuse their authority. [1] 2. the strong majority of these 656 contracts have a similar disciplinary appeals process. Around 73% provide for appeal to an arbitrator or comparable procedure and nearly 70% provide that an arbitrator or comparable third party makes a final binding decision. About 54% of the contracts give officers or unions the power to select that arbitrator. About 70% of the jurisdictions give these arbitrators extensive review power, including the ability to revisit disciplinary matters with little or no deference to the decisions made by supervisors, civilian review boards or politically accountable officials. [2] 3. We look at the roll-out of collective bargaining rights for police officers at the state level from the 1950s to the 1980s. The introduction of access to collective bargaining drives a modest decline in policy employment and increase in compensation with no meaningful impacts on total crime, violent crime, property crime or officers killed in the line of duty. What does change? We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run (likely after unions are established) with an additional 0.026 to 0.029 civilians killed in a county each year of whom the overwhelming majority are non-white. [3] 4. Recent academic research further demonstrates that police disciplinary procedures established through union contracts obstruct accountability and (as I noted in this post) collective bargaining for police officers appears to increase police misconduct. This is not surprising. Through collective bargaining, police unions demand protections from disciplinary procedures that would not otherwise be approved, oppose consent decrees and other measures to increase police accountability, and (given the power of police unions in state and local politics) they receive relatively little pushback. [4] [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-unions/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli... [2] https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/ https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/ [3] https://twitter.com/robgillezeau/status/1266834185055956997 https://twitter.com/robgillezeau/status/1266834185055956997 [4] https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-of-police-misconduct/ https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-... I could provide more as well, that was just a real quick look up of my bookmarks Edit: 1 more source for good measure [5] https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3890&context=dlj https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... This Article empirically demonstrates that police departments’ internal disciplinary procedures, often established through the collective bargaining process, can serve as barriers to officer accountability.

rayiner 6y ago

I think the libertarians are basically right in this instance. Apart from systemic racism (which I believe is a very real thing, but an abstract and not directly unactionable one), I see two problems: 1) The people with the power over the police have almost no contact with the people being policed. Neighborhood schooling reinforces that problem. It ensures that ability to afford housing segregates black people from white people. (Note: it’s not a question of funding. Here in DC, most of the shiny new LEED Gold schools are 99% black. Therefore, white parents won’t send their kids there, notwithstanding the gleaming facilities and lower housing prices in the surrounding area.) School choice gives black people the power to create integrated schools, instead of waiting for statistically wealthier whites/Asians to get woke enough to want to do it. I think people would be much more sensitive to policing issues if they didn’t just hear about these things a couple of times a year on the news, but were faced with people in their PTA suffering the consequences of police brutality. I would add that, unsurprisingly, a decisive majority of black people support school choice. 2) With notion of black people being “the other” rooted since childhood, qualified immunity and police unions eliminate the near term, immediate consequences of acting on those instincts. The two things that make people think before they act are empathy and self preservation. The libertarian approach is a double-barreled solution that could hit both.

harryh 6y ago
I think that school choice can certainly help but there are limits. District 1 in NYC has a form of school choice but segregation persists and is even driven by minorities in some ways. This article is really interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/a-manhattan-district-where-school-choice-amounts-to-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/a-manhattan-dist... It touches on two NYC schools that share a building (The Earth School & PS64) but have remarkably different racial and socioeconomic makeups. I found it fascinating after touring Earth School earlier this year.
selimthegrim 6y ago
We can all take a moment of silence to curse at Justice Burger, who while he may have done a good thing in Lemon v. Kurtzman, really screwed the pooch in Milliken v. Bradley

harryh 6y ago

I think the libertarian suggestions are certainly part of the solution but I don't think they're sufficient on their own. History shows us that racism is remarkably resistant to market forces.

Consultant32452 6y ago
It's not necessary to eliminate racism. Imagine if the citizens of a community had the power to pull some of their money away from ineffective police departments to hold them accountable. There could be competing police forces, all run by the government, and the citizens could fund the ones they prefer, not unlike charter schools allow parents to fund the schools they prefer, and food stamps allow the poor to buy the food they want from the grocery store they prefer. If your police department sucks, but the one neighboring one is good, you could choose to move your funding to the other police department who would expand their operations to cover more territory.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  We had this with fire departments for thousands of years. It didn’t go well.
syshum 6y ago
Racism is not something that could even be solved with market forces, nor would any libertarian claim such a thing. At best we would say the market gives non-racists the best chance to isolate the push back against racists History shows that if a society is racist the absolute WORST thing you can do is have a strong government, as that government will likely be filled with racists who will pass racist laws. (See The War on Drugs and/or Jim Crow Laws) The idea that more government is the solution to racism denies the entire history of this nation. Government is not now, nor has it ever been the solution to the problem of racism (nor any other problem), Government is like it always has been and always will be the problem... the Classic Libertarian saying "Government: If you think you have problems, wait until you see our [government] solutions"
- 6y ago