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Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and now they all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:
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The city didn't ignore notifications, officials did.
Don't sanction the city, sanction the people. The city didn't delete texts, people did. Throw those people in jail, fine them until they are destitute, and make an example that misconduct is punished personally.
I said it with regards to a suggestion last month about making examples of gain-of-function researchers for Covid, and I'll say it again here: you can't fine people for fucking up on high-skills jobs, because if you do you'll never get competent applicants for those positions - they'll go study a discipline with a career path that doesn't carry a jail risk, instead. So then you'll only get incompetent applicants who didn't have the brains to switch to a less risky career, having incompetent people in the position is more dangerous than having criminal people in the position.
This sort of thing is one sphere of human activity where holding people responsible for their crimes is actively detrimental to the greater good.
Sorry, but the current (terrible) practice of punishing a faceless organisation is nevertheless the least terrible of all the options. Well, aside from encouraging voters to stop electing crooks, but no-one's cracked that problem since Pericles.
If you're one of the umpteen US generals who lied to the public and the politicians about winning the war in Afghanistan, making progress and so on, then you ought to be punished. There's already a problem of there being too many suck-ups in the military, there are only so many slots open to become a general so they have to please all of their superiors. But the way to fix this isn't to make the system even more uncompetitive and stratified. We need to open up more new posts, appoint people who get results. Real-world success should be rewarded and failure punished. If we don't get rid of the old guard who lose wars to illiterate goatherders with 1/1000 of our resources, how can we expect to win wars against strong opponents?
These people and systems are not functioning at anything near peak performance. It is possible to win wars against opponents you massively outclass, though this might be a novel concept to the average NATO commander. Or even if we can't reach a vaguely decent level of performance, could we aim for 'dignified exit within a year of realizing we can't achieve our political goals' as opposed to 'subsidizing a pedophile-run army and funding corrupt Afghan officials for hundreds of billions in the vain hope something will change and we'll suddenly achieve our goals'?
People obey incentives. If we don't provide a serious negative incentive for global failures like 'losing the war', they'll simply optimize for avoiding local failures like 'bad press coverage' or 'falling behind schedule' or 'looking bad to my superiors'. But these local failures are there precisely to avoid global failures. The whole point of press coverage and oversight is to correct mistakes rather than letting them get entrenched. Only a severe punishment for global failure can get people to acknowledge local failure. If admirals and top brass knew they'd face serious punishment if their warships crash into civilian freighters (and kill seven sailors in the case of the USS Fitzgerald), they'd take the time to train them better and maintain their fleet properly rather than accept every political request to do missions and run themselves ragged.
If we don't punish the gain-of-function researchers who unleashed this catastrophic disaster, they will do it again and again. We already obliterate the careers of geniuses who have sex in the workplace. And then we wonder why fertility rates are falling... If we're going to punish people, it should be for some kind of actual failure.
I'd be very happy to see a world where there wasn't a single gain-of-function researcher, we should be moving towards that scenario at great speed. Militaries do need generals - but there's a lot of competition to become a general. There are plenty of aspiring officers.
On the other hand, if you save the govt 500K or 1M through some method, you should get a large bonus for your work.
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No, I think it's the reverse.
The competent applicants are all in the private sector (where punishments for incompetence or malice exist- wages are higher as a result), and the incompetent applicants are all in the public sector (where the protections you described exist- ignoring the black swan event that is "the public gets so angry they just kill you").
The public sector also has a unique failure mode where incompetence and political motivation are indistinguishable from one another, and intentionally not punishing those things just serves to amplify the power of whatever political opinion can best leverage who/whom. Additionally, the public sector can excuse the same sort of who/whom bad behavior from the private sector in a way the private sector can't do to the public sector (outside of news media, of course), so the consequences of not reining them in are worse.
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I think the framework for civil engineering demonstrates a pretty strong case against this: criminal charges for negligent construction or operation of a business are rare, but they're not unheard of, and fines or suspensions of licenses targeting individuals are fairly common. And civil engineers are very aware that even if things like the Hyatt Regency collapse weren't brought to court, that was as much by the grace of grand jury as by law or norm.
Yet, despite being a difficult and math-heavy field, civil engineering remains a popular career path, and the Sword of Damocles has not frightened away all of the competent or risk-averse candidates. There's certainly some point where a lower standard of proof, or broader concept of liability would, but given that the Hyatt Regency guys weren't tarred and feathered I'd argue we're a little on the too-soft side even recognizing Joint Over- and Under-Diagnosis.
This also isn't really specific to any one field. You have to fuck up really bad to get twenty-five counts of involuntary manslaughter running a food processing plant! But people have done it.
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Huh? If I committed even unintentional negligence in my private sector business I could be fined and lose my licenses and my industry has no shortage of applicants - why would it be different for public sector employees?
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I don't know, the Venetians had a decent system
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People in the private sector get fined and jailed for fucking up all the time, and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of competent applicants for those positions despite the risk. Why not?
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CHAZ wasn’t just an oopsie of city leadership. They deliberately decided to keep it up. It wasn’t an innocent mistake, an accidental screwup. It is totally fine to sanction people for deliberately using the power of their position for evil.
More specifically, they embarked on an easily foreseeable train wreck, and should be held accountable. Just like a doctor or engineer who makes the same category of deliberate unforced error.
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