Cops and Bureaucrats

It's a perfectly natural, if somewhat simplistic, reaction to the actions of bad cops to insist that police everywhere are irredeemably racist and that police departments everywhere should be disbanded. The drive to “defund the police” can mean a number of things, from reducing (and redirecting) funding all the way to eliminating funding altogether. The more moderate view – that of reducing and redirecting funding – can, however, be based on an erroneous premise, namely that if you reduce police funding you will, somehow, get rid of the bad cops – that they will be the first fired, as it were. But this is a mistake, and I'm not just talking about the police unions and their armies of lawyers.

I compare it to what a very wise person (whose name I forget) once said about the government bureaucracy. He was responding to the notion that reducing funding for any given government agency would automatically reduce the proportion of dead wood, AKA “useless eaters” in Bolshevik terminology, as if that class of employee was hanging on to their jobs by a thread. Actually, the very opposite is the case. In a typical government bureaucracy it's the dead wood that is most difficult to get rid of, because they are more likely to have seniority (time in service), whereas the competent people tend to move from one position to another on the way up the totem pole, and also to move readily between the government and the private sector. Walk into any government agency (federal, state, local) you can name, and I can pick out the dead wood in about five minutes. They're the ones off by themselves in a corner who don't seem to be doing anything – whose in-box is as empty as their out-box. In other words, no one expects them to do anything so they don't feel under any pressure to pretend to do anything. (Think of Wally in “Dilbert”.) But they have seniority! Wow, do they ever! Just try getting rid of them – you can't do it.

So let's say that a given government agency has, say, 20% dead wood. (This is not an overly-high number – I've seen places where it's more like 80%. There are government agencies that are little more than sheltered workshops – they aren't called that, but that's what they amount to.) Then you assume that if you cut the budget of said agency by 20% it magically gets rid of the dead wood. Not only is this not the case for reasons given above, but it's not true because, number one, you can't “target” given personnel in response to budget cuts – you still have to adhere to rules of seniority as well as a plethora of other considerations (age discrimination being one). And number two, even if you somehow – miraculously – get rid of a piece of dead wood, they are more likely than not to wind up in a different agency that is not undergoing cuts. This is because anyone in the government who is “downsized” has automatic preference over all other applicants – aptitude, motivation, and even performance ratings being totally irrelevant. (We used to call these people “stoppers” because they would cause a hiring action to grind to a halt because we didn't want to hire them but we couldn't hire anyone else as long as they were on the list. So we just had to wait it out until they got a job elsewhere, or retired, or died, or some other fortunate event.) So the overall impact of all of your effort is canceled out.

So as the commentator put it, you can't just cut off the “fat”, because it's “larded through”. He said it's not like a chicken, where the fat and the meat are easily separated; it's more like marbled steak – you can't get rid of the dead wood without endangering the competent employees. (I would even compare it to the Biblical parable of the wheat and the tares.)

So when it comes to the police, a similar principle applies. “Defunding” will not get rid of the bad cops; it will get rid of a certain percentage of cops, both good and bad. And if the comparison holds true, it might well get rid of proportionately more good cops than bad, because, once again, the bad ones tend to stay put and build seniority (and they may also have “connections”), whereas the good ones are more likely to be looking around for greener pastures.

An extreme case could arise. Let's say you defund a police department to the point where the only employees left are the bad cops. This could happen if the good ones all bail (retire, seek other employment) as the cuts are imposed. Or, in the present context, if the good ones all become sick of the whole thing and simply quit. Is this what we want?

So, once again, whoever is holding up all the “Defund the Police” signs should think twice. For one thing, they clearly don't understand bureaucracies and how they function (or fail to function). And they don't understand all of the perverse and paradoxical effects of policies which look good on paper but wreak havoc when applied at ground level.

A more reality-based, nuanced point of view would be to insist that the selection process for police be expanded to include what we might call “personality” variables – i.e. things other than demonstrated competence in police work. The problem there is that personality variables are notoriously difficult to assess in an objective manner (and one that would satisfy, let's say, the police unions), but – more critically – someone who looks good on a given personality test under normal – let's say “relaxed” – circumstances might have a tendency to break under stress. How does one assess that without putting people under actual stress? The military does it, kind of, during basic training. If a recruit “freaks out” when he or she is in the relatively sheltered environment of Ft. Benning, Georgia (soon to be renamed Ft. Sojourner Truth), they are unlikely to be good candidates for urban warfare in Afghanistan. I'm not aware of anything comparable in police selection and training other than the good-guy/bad-guy section of the shooting range or the mock-up urban environment (I invite correction if I'm wrong about this). And I'm not saying there's a solution to this – at least not an easy one. The military is full of people who looked good all the way up the line, but when put in a deadly, high-risk situation became demoralized and suffered a breakdown – and that's where “atrocities” come from. The military expects difficult – yea, well-nigh impossible – things from people, whereas police work is not as extreme at least in the sense that one is working in familiar territory. But rules of engagement are up for grabs right now, both in the military and for the police. “Sharing and caring” with the natives has always been a dicey affair for the military, and now simply relating to the local citizenry without coming off as “the man” has become a dicey affair for the police. The guy you high-fived with the other day may be the same one lobbing a Molotov cocktail at you this evening.

And by the way, what becomes of the sense of duty and the sense of law and order when your superiors are telling you to stand down and, basically, not do any of the things you have been trained to do, almost up to the reflexive level? This is the sort of demoralization that is driving people out of the policing profession in great numbers. The city/county/state officials who always have a better idea had better start thinking about which ideas will work when the police have all quit or been fired. Like so many other ideas, anarchy has a certain adolescent appeal – freedom! No one giving orders! No one telling you what to do! No curfews! No bedtimes! No jails! No laws! Woodstock! Summerhill! Right... check out “Mad Max” -- that's a much better picture of what real anarchy looks like.