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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
I despair for the cause of police reform. There was a window where it might have been possible, but anywhere past the 2000s I just don't see it happening.
Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.
The median voter has never in his life gotten in trouble with the police. You'd need a hundred Uvaldes to meaningfully dent this - the sorts of tragedy I wouldn't wish on any nation. The median voter is a middle-aged comfortable person with a steady job and living who thinks everything in society basically works as it should. Oh, sure, some politicians are greedy, the kids these days are bad, but the police? Protect and serve. They keep us safe and things steady and that's all we want. If they beat up or imprison or kill someone, well, I guess that's just what their job is.
I don't know what any one nation can hope to do about this, for as long as the median age in wealthy countries keeps rising. The people who vote don't care, the people who get elected have no reason to care, and the police have made more than clear they have negative interest in policing their own.
What's a downtrodden person to do? What is anyone to do? For as long as the median voter really loves the police, I don't know that I see a way out.
The median voter is on the fence between "minor changes needed to make policing better" and "major changes are needed to make policing better". "No changes are needed to make policing better" is only 11% of the country.
What to do? Figure out something realistic that would qualify as "changes"..."to make policing better". The motte of "defund the police"=="pay social workers instead" isn't going to apply to cases like this; nobody's sending a social worker to investigate an alleged kidnapping. The bailey of "defund the police"=="abolish the police" was, if not DoA, at least shot along with those teens in CHAZ. I personally thought that mandatory bodycams were a nice improvement, but there's even been pushback on that from people whose pleasure at the "evidence when police misbehave" outcomes has been outweighed by their displeasure at the "evidence when non-police misbehave" outcomes.
My only wild idea would be to break up all larger police departments into smaller (but overlapping) jurisdictions. I have no solid plan details for how to best implement it. But if everybody knows that the East Metro cops are on the take, and the South Metro cops are brutal, but the West Metro cops are competent and the North Metro cops even helpful, there ought to be a way for the results there to end up expanding the latter jurisdictions and budgets at the expense of the former. This should extend even to enlarging good departments to the point where they could be broken in two (with corresponding promotions and budget increases to compensate for losing economies of scale), and/or disbanding bad departments entirely. "Abolish the (crooked) police" would be a legitimate threat and incentive source, not just a left-wing joke, if there was always a nearby non-crooked (or even just less-crooked! gradient descent works!) police force nearby ready to pick up the slack.
I don't see how that would have helped in this case, though, unless a better police culture in general had spillover effects. You're not going to have much jurisdictional overlap in "literally Amish country. Many miles from anything."
This is similar to what we have in Allegheny County, PA, and it's not a model to emulate. In the county there are 130 municipalities, of which 109 have their own police departments. Allegheny County Police and PA State Troopers have blanket jurisdiction over the entire county, but that jurisdiction is somewhat limited. Then add in all the various special-use police departments—university police, transit police, housing police, etc. Then add in the various state agencies with sworn enforcement arms that regularly conduct law enforcement activities in the county like the PA Fish and Boat Commission, which is responsible for patrolling the rivers, and PA Liquor Control Board, and there are over 150 entities within the county that could conceivably be called police departments, each with its own jurisdiction that may or may not overlap with another jurisdiction or jurisdiction, whether in geography, subject matter, or both. The end result is that there are a ton of tiny police departments that only field a few officers and are woefully underfunded and provide their employees low pay and inadequate training. The guy who shot Antwon Rose had been dismissed from the University of Pittsburgh Police, essentially for being an asshole, and took a job with the East Pittsburgh Police (East Pittsburgh is a separate borough from the City of Pittsburgh), a community of less than 2000 and a median household income of around $30,000. Though he was ultimately acquitted, there was general agreement that he wasn't cut out to be a policeman and that he wouldn't have been one if these small boroughs weren't so desperate for warm bodies that anyone with prior experience was automatically given a job.
This is where the
bit, which I haven't figured out at all, would have to come in. Market competition works because consumers have both incentive and ability to switch to a better competitor. If it's not easy to switch then you don't get competition, just fragmentation.
I jokingly suggested Shadowrun's private police forces before as a solution to police unions, maybe I'll do it again here--if each of those PDs has to compete on service quality, it will definitely cut down on the number of departments Allegheny has, making it sound like less of a tollbooth kingdom after some point.
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