Because when you have your target as zero then when you don't hit zero you push for ever more costly and suboptimal policy to achieve your goal. This is a problem both in that the incremental policy changes are highly unlikely to provide a larger benefit than their incremental costs and because it draws resources away from tackling problems that probably have a larger societal impact and smaller costs to achieve those goals.

That makes no sense and I'd be interested in examples supporting it that are not some person on the fringe shouting opinions.

What should the goal of the police department regarding killing innocent people? Should they aim for a dozen per quarter? Per-capita weighted?

Incremental changes have been hard because it gets down to the police policing themselves, and that has shown to be a failure.

Again, one of the "simplest" reforms would be to have other professionals deal with mental health crises.

A bigger reform with much more value would be ending the War on Drugs but that's way higher up the food chain. It is germane though, in that the whole point of said war was to give police more opportunities to oppress "others" (i.e., "minorities" and "hippies").

That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis. There are tons of examples. People killed by drunk drivers, pedestrian road deaths, illegal drug usage in society, etc. Innocent people killed by cops is a bad measure because, by definition, pretty much all the people cops kill are innocent because almost all of them have not been found guilty by a jury of their peers for whatever the cops are trying to apprehend them for and are by definition innocent. The target for cops proven to have violated relevant policy related directly to the killing of a person should be zero but there is a non zero number of people killed by police each year society should be fine with. Even the target I said should be zero above should only be zero if the regulations pertaining to that are clear and concise enough to be easily understood and adhered to by police, otherwise situations where lethal force are justified will get tripped up on marginally relevant grounds because the probability the average police officer fails to follow some procedure increases with the number of procedures required.

All of these things have a pattern in common where the majority of the improvement can be had reasonably cheaply and capturing the last small improvement has huge costs that are usually much more costly than the benefit of eliminating the last bit and the population of potential events is huge. Road deaths are an illustrative example. Adding speed limits, traffic lights, crosswalks, moderate enforcement, etc. all dropped road deaths precipitously in the USA. If the USA changes its model from cars first to people first there are still some moderately costly infrastructure changes they could make to get their numbers down to Netherlands levels, which are still not zero. Beyond that you are left with hugely costly heavy enforcement among steadily more dystopian and invasive methods that will likely improve the number but not get it all the way to zero. It is really unlikley that these last improvements cost less than the benefit they incur between the direct cost of implementation and the negative effects on the total population of driving events.

On top of all this all those large costs you are incurring for very small gains come at the expense of being able to spend those limited resources on other things that likely have better cost to improvement ratios. You are foregoing a larger decrease in something else bad for society for small decreases in your target. In the road deaths example above that final small drop in road deaths might be coming at the cost of large drops in crime if you deployed those police there instead of on road deaths, as an example.

> That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis

Maybe your writing was not clear enough, m'kay?

And now you play word games with my intent. I did not advocate for extreme measures -- simply to have clear targets of and rules of engagement; to identify workable solutions.

No, I am telling you what the problem is with having the rate set at zero, which is what I have been doing the entire time. Using your terminology, you don't get extreme measures initially, you walk yourself to extreme measures because everything you change does not hit your goal rather than just calling it a day when you hit the inflection point where the costs of your policy are roughly equal to the benefits of your policy and there are no obviously better uses of your limited resources that you should be doing instead.

I don't think you're willfully misconstruing me, but you are nonetheless.

You're manufacturing slippery slope reductions of a concept and therefore dismissing the concept.

What should the goal of police departments of pet dogs killed by cops? Should they aim for 10,000? A million? Just a handful? A logical answer is "we want to avoid killing any pet dogs in the course of service" (also known as zero).

Now they could take absurd actions to avoid that (leaving the scene whenever a dog is present), or they could add that to standardized training so that they're better prepared to deal with that situation.

So without providing real-world examples of you concerns you are just offering up florid conjecture.

Guy shouting fuck you pig while surrounded by 50 SWAT guys sounds like a mental health emergency. Can't do much about that. Ain't called first respondersfor nothing.

I mean, you can, but everyone involved has already ruled out doing any kind of root cause analysis because they don't like the obvious solutions to the causes, so both "gun" and "mental health emergency" and "shooting by police" are treated as natural events like weather that we cannot hope to understand or control.

>sounds like a mental health emergency

Sure, you can dose him up with Haldol and solve that particular emergency. What happens when he does it again next week? And the week after that?

Persistent severe mental illness is interesting in that it's a new problem. For all of human history, severe mental illness was a death sentence. Either you'd get beaten to death by your largest neighbor for acting weird, or your village would exile you and you'd starve to death in the forest.

The current compromise we've arrived at is that being crazy is not actually a crime, so you cannot be permanently imprisoned for it. So low-functioning schizophrenics cycle through mental hospitals-- they climb a lamp post and urinate on passers-by, get committed and then are put on antipsychotics, sober up, survey their surroundings and rationally conclude that inpatient mental health facilities are really awful places to be, (basically no rights or privacy, surrounded by crazy people, can't wear or handle any object that's on a very short list of approved suicide-incompatible things) and then check themselves out, which they are legally allowed to do. Then they go off their meds, (also legally allowed) and it's back to the lamp post...

This continues until they accidentally walk into traffic, or are shot by a cop. It's a miserable compromise that persists because all the alternatives are even less palatable.

Follow up response -- the meth epidemic seems to be manufacturing craziness at a rapid clip. Our current "solution" is failing us and we'd be well-served to reexamine how to deal with it.

The correct answer is to legalize, tax, and regulate all drugs and to create "mental health courts" that can administer the involuntary institutionalization of those that need it.

We need to take another try at involuntary institutionalization of the mentally ill.

It should be cheaper than prisons and more humane as well. The homeless crisis begs for this.

Just got to work out trivial details like how to not have that power be abused...

Second comment because I was responding without addressing your point properly: somebody in a crisis like that could possibly be helped if there weren't 50 SWAT guys eager to take target practice.

There's obviously violent scenarios that can only be addressed with violence, but bringing that on should be a last resort.

Putting someone already in crisis into a dangerous situation (surrounding them with SWAT) is going to make the crisis much worse. The film we see of people having a mental health crisis always comes from after the cops have shown up; they may have been much less agitated beforehand.

Yep. There are "simple" things we can do that will make things better but that can't happen until we agree to do it.

And for that to happen we need to understand it.

And for that to happen we need to talk about it.

Yeah, suicide by cop is a thing.

My point was that the comment about divisiveness between teams red and blue in this regard was divisive as well in how it was framed.

Police are granted incredible powers and have historically not had the best oversight, let alone relations with "minorities".

There are real problems and they can be addressed but that will never happen as long as we can't even agree that the "what" exists, let alone if the "how" is correct.