I don't think it needs to take all that long. The Camden, NJ police were disbanded and reorganized less than a decade ago and are now recognized as a model force. All that's necessary is the political will to use the tactics that can destroy toxic police officers' unions: establish a new law enforcement bureau under all-new leadership and slowly reassign duties away from the old police force. There's no need for armed police to enforce parking meters and bus fares, so start there. Do not permit, as a rule, lateral transfers from the old police department to the new one. Make everyone come in through the front door like any candidate. Require public disclosure of disciplinary record as a condition of hiring. Require local residency for the first ten years of service. Have a written and enforced use-of-force policy. Don't patrol city centers in cars.

These aren't deep mysteries; police reform advocates have written volumes on these topics for decades.

In my state in my home country, the police force is divided into traffic, patrol, crime, detective work and so on. Different roles require different qualifications and as such attract different people. Bribery is common. Detective work is the least lucrative and is a form of punishment for upstanding officers. The consequence of that is it’s the least corrupt of all the branches, it’s genuinely interesting work and the morale is high. Traffic is the most corrupt but it has the least consequence anyway.

> Require local residency for the first ten years of service.

This is a popular idea, but it seems like a bad one. It limits the pool of highly qualified applicants, which we badly need to expand. I've seen arguments in favor of this rule that take the form of "why would you privilege nonresidents in the hiring process?", but that is a non sequitur: not requiring residency isn't a way of privileging nonresidents.

In addition, police officers sometimes point to the difficulty of policing in the places that they live. This seems to me like a secondary consideration, but perhaps one that also merits attention.

"With a crime rate of 47 per one thousand residents, Camden has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities." [1]

Seems to have worked out very well...

[1]https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/nj/camden/crime

Luckily we have the FBI uniform crime report to inform us. In 2018, Camden had 16 violent crimes per 1000 residents. Ten years earlier, it had 23 per 1000. Murders fell from 54 to 23.

In adjacent Philadelphia, violent crime fell from 14 to 9 per 1000, the same ratio as Camden enjoyed. Therefore it stands to reason that Camden's violent, corrupt police force was not necessary to reduce crime. This is consistent with other evidence that aggressive, violent police tactics are not associated with lower crime.

so I guess this is the lies, damned lies, and statistics part of the thread.

Because the question should have been what it was like before, hey

https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...

you're right! It looks like it did work our rather well.

To make an actual comparison, you’d need a before/after of crime rates there and also a comparison to rate of change in similar towns which didn’t reorganize their force.

Lazy post on my part, saw the current terrible numbers and didn't bother looking at the past.

90% of the job is dealing with drunk and disorderly people or descalating domestic disputes. That knocks a lot of High IQ/EQ people off the list.

My mother was a dispatcher for 15 years. I was in our local areas explorers program. It’s exactly what you see on Live PD. Traffic stops, drunk and disorderly people, drug busts, or domestic disputes. Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.

> Cops do almost no detective work. Investigators do that.

Why not? Not enough crime to solve?

I answered that question. It’s a separate job to investigate.

Regular cops are first responders not investigators.

> Pays really well

How much do you think police are paid?

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...

> Starting salary: $42,500

That's in New York City. Ouch.

> may potentially earn over $100,000 per year

And that's what they're advertising as an aspirational possibility! Even a first-year engineer will earn more than that.

You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.

> You may be able to find some corner cases of some individual police officers getting paid up to $500k. But that's just showing that the very top officers earn about the same as a mid-level engineer at a tech company.

I really don't believe your typical mid-level engineer is making $500k at any company in the world, let alone that it's just a given if you make it into big tech.

FWIW, I have received offers for senior positions from FAANG before.

> I really don't believe your typical mid-level engineer is making $500k

Including stock? They absolutely are in the US.

If by mid level you mean well tenured L6, then sure.

If by mid level you mean actual mid level, like L4, then no.

If by typical you mean someone not working at Google or Facebook, then no.

I don’t think l6 is a good definition of typical. Only 10% of SWEs are at 6 and above. 50% are at least L5, making that the median grade, and therefore a pretty good definition of “typical”.

That's sort of my point, L5 SWEs aren't making 500K anywhere.

> 50% are at least L5

I don't think half of software engineers are senior or above.

At Google they are. Half are below L5, half are L5+, 10% are L6+.

I think they are since you are senior when you have 5-10 years of experience.

Is E5 mid-level? I made <400k at Facebook and that was after very substantial stock appreciation and a “discretionary equity” extra grant bonus.

Please tell me where to apply, because neither Google nor Facebook were willing to pay me that for a senior position.

https://www.levels.fyi/

There absolutely are engineers making that much, I even know more than one making 7 digits in liquid comp, but they are not "typical" in any way.

New York City is an outlier in combining low pay and high cost of living. Baltimore (Freddie Grey) officers start at $55k, in a city where a nice townhouse costs $250,000. In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is $55-70k depending on qualifications. Chicago PD officers start at $72,000 after the probationary period. Generous benefits add $20k+ to that figure.

Note the median starting college graduate salary is about $50,000. Median mid-career college graduate salary is $80,000.

> In Minneapolis starting salary for new officers is $55-70k depending on qualifications.

Wonder how their recruiting will be doing now? They will need to raise that a lot to get reasonable candidates now.

They also get a nice pension and can retire early. At least in California being a cop is a pretty nice gig.

And total immunity from prosecution for virtually any class of crime. Surely that can be valued.

I hire engineers at a large Bay Area tech company, and this is way off. According to https://levels.fyi, even a Senior SWE at Google pays ~$343k annually including stock. And that’s a FAANG salary. The majority of firms are not paying that.

One aspect of policing in America that your post doesn't capture is that a lot of police aren't paid well. Generally, police in large forces in large cities are paid well, but there's an indredibly wide variance that trends steadily downward the further you get from top-tier cities. Rural cops are often paid less than teachers; even in cities like Columbus, OH, or Milwaukee, WI, it's common to see police moonlighting as security guards.

Like teaching, there's always a lot of rhetoric around how police are valued, but pay scales frequently don't reflect it, and the result is a lot of poorly qualified police who fail the rest of your checklist

I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana, and his family qualifies for SNAP even with his wife working part-time.

This is a very rosy presentation of police work, it's hard to believe you've known many police who felt comfortable enough to open up about the pitfalls of their work.

>Pays well Not for the amount of danger and emotional baggage involved.

> Requires you to solve many complex ambiguous challenges. > Requires careful nuanced interpretation of situation

Which is why you will frequently be following established procedures relevant to the situation at hand and deviating from procedure will often be frowned upon without a defensible reason. Further, you'll often have to suppress your insight because of political reasons. Police frequently know in advance what places are gang hangouts and who's selling drugs or sex, but having the information and having it collected in a format you're allowed to act on are different matters (and that's before getting into whether you're even allowed to try and collect that information).

>Requires a high EQ to deal with the entire spectrum of citizens, de-escalate situations, and resolve disputes.

This is just a progressive way of saying "High tolerance for eating other peoples shit while staying focused on doing your job." There is almost never a real 'resolution' to a domestic dispute for example, there's you getting screamed at and threatened not only by an abuser but also by their victim who will probably lie on their behalf because it was a neighbor who made the call. Then, if nothing immediately actionable is happening, you get to leave for the third time in a week after making a few notes and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not doing anything again.

>Is civic service adding additional social-proof incentive.

Being a cop earns you hero points with some groups but in the mainstream will get you villified or at least distrusted. Worse, you will often see people advocating procedural changes in that either increase your personal risk (as if they have a bottomless resevoir of disposable LEOs available) or which reduce your ability to police effectively (but they'll still criticize you for failing to clean up problem neighborhoods). This is a major factor behind why police and their unions almost always stand by each other even when it looks bad, because the public will often demand you fall on a sword or turn on you the instant your optics leave even a little room for doubt.

>On paper, all of this should be CATNIP for a wide variety of high-IQ/EQ individuals to join, and raise the bar on the quality of the force.

Rare exceptions aside, smart people realize the risk isn't worth the reward and emotionally intelligent people realize the job frequently destroys LEOs emotionally. Both groups likely believe that the job is important for a functional society if they're not blinded by cynicism but they'll also understand that the majority of their energy is going to be spent primarily on dealing with beuracracy, paperwork, and simply enduring the situations they'll be placed into. This is far from catnip for these people.

>It doesn't because of the system problems, because of the rotten nature of the system to its core. Because of the meathead and the existing low-IQ population dominating the forces.

This is attitude is another reason people who can do the math decide not to be police or cease being police. Because people assume most cops ("the system") in the present are just meat heads. But if you try to introduce tech-centric solutions, like cameras, to cut down on the number of necessary meat heads in an area you get accused of trying to create a dystopian surveillance apparatus. If you try to explain why a proposed change is a bad idea you get accused of everything from being racist to being a sadist who just likes how easily you can abuse the current system. And if you implement new sensitivity policies the public forgets within five minutes anyway because a cop in a totally different part of the country did something bad. This isn't to say that no cop enjoys their work or finds it worth it, but the idea that there's a massive untapped market of uber cops being kept away because of the old guard is just wishful thinking that holds appeal because it makes the problem seem much simpler than it is.

It is not often that I read a post that illuminates and informs the way your comment has. Everything you said should be obvious but I only came to that after reading your comments. Yet again another validation of the value and wisdom of listening to different perspectives. My thanks.

You responded to this better than I did.

I participated in my local explorers program because my mom was a dispatcher. Go on enough ride alongs to see that 90% of the job is dealing with domestic disputes or drunk and disorderly people and you’ll never want to be an officer