In the past few years in the US, the issue of police misconduct has been widely discussed. The police are widely (though not universally) perceived to be corrupt or incompetent. The US has seen multiple high profile cases of racial prejudice, failures of accountability, and failures of the police to do the things they are hired to do, and each one invites more stories and reinforces distrust. The popular acronym ‘ACAB’ shows the extent of animosity and disparagement in the US zeitgeist. This is troubling both for what’s already been accused, and for its long-run effects on the composition of the police force: if everyone believes the police are full of racist, violent, corrupt, small individuals, then the people who will volunteer to join the police force will be those for whom those accusations are true, or for whom those perceptions don’t matter, creating a more prejudiced and more antisocial police force that will commit more injustices and further erode trust.
One response has been a call to “defund the police”. Though the actual policy prescription behind the slogan varies and people rarely mean it literally, they have in common the idea that the police budget and the size of the police force should be reduced, whether merely as tit-for-tat punishment for misdeeds, or from some utopian idea that supply creates its own demand when it comes to law enforcement. But diminished policing in the wake of public outcry suggests that diminished policing has already increased crime, and the increases have hit hardest in the most underserved communities, where policing is most suspect and crime is most prevalent.
Police officers, for their part, are unsympathetic, and that reaction is understandable. Police are asked to do a dangerous job, they see themselves as heroes risking their lives for the safety of others ( and when they fail to act heroically, e.g. by failing to run into the line of fire to save a classroom full of children, they are excoriated by the public). And even before the past years in which public perception has waned so drastically, policing was hard on those involved. Police officers have long been at risk for depression and despair and all the reactions that those feelings drive – substance abuse, domestic turbulence, and suicide among them.
So we’re stuck in a cycle: public distrust and a perception of corruption (real or exaggerated) which leads to self-selection for corrupt individuals which leads to greater corruption and further distrust. And we can’t solve it by ‘starving the beast’, because the presence of police seems to do something to diminish crime; nor can we reconcile the current institution with the public because they by and large lack empathy for the people who serve. How can we escape? I offer a solution: universal service in the police force.
Requiring all citizens to serve a stint as officers is a long-term solution to the problems that must attend policing. It will change the composition of the police force, so that it is representative of communities subject to policing, and increase communities’ empathy both by having friends and family in the role and by having been in the role oneself. It will give greater insight into corruption problems in the force, as conspiracies become harder to maintain as the pool of participants and potential witnesses is constantly changing. It keeps policing happening in a way that can’t lead to viciously reinforcing self-selection. And it will give people an idea of what it means for something to be illegal: will people still support law-and-order policing of minor social infractions when they or their children will be the ones who have to enforce them? Will they still support lax gun laws when they have skin in the game?
As with compulsory military service, there will be resistance to compulsory police service. People know that policing is hard and dangerous, and they won’t want to do it or have their children forced to do it. But resistance to compulsory military service was driven by perceptions that the wars for which people were being drafted weren’t important. Defunding the police, even taken symbolically, is not a popular policy; people generally accept that policing is a necessary part of a well-ordered society.
In fact, I think there is the making of a grand political bargain in such a proposal. The machismo of universal service can draw in the God-and-country crowd, while dismantling the fallen institutions of modern policing and democratizing law enforcement on the ground could appeal to those wary of corruption and the role of the police as the army of the elite. The largest source of resistance is likely to be police themselves, and in particular their unions, who benefit from a restricted market for their services. But any solution to the problems of modern policing will likely involve a significant weakening of the police unions, and they tend to resist all meaningful changes, and a broad and bipartisan political coalition would have significant ability to overcome that resistance.
=D> 