Police reform: what I'd support and what I probably won't

I gestured in my last post to the topic of police reform. Here, I'll list what types of reform I would support and what types I (probably) won't support.

What I'd support

• Mandatory body cameras for police.
• Automatic federal (and state, and local) review of all killings by police.
• Curtailing, or possibly eliminating, qualified immunity for police officers.
• Forbidding police unions to bargain collectively with their employers and otherwise deinstitutinalizing police unions.
• Re-calibrating funding so that police departments have much less incentive to invest in quasi-militarized units and quasi-military equipment.
• Implementing "good enough" discipline against bad police officers when criminal prosecution is unlikely to be successful, even in cases where, in an ideal world, the officer would be prosecuted.
  

What I probably won't support

• Less aggressive enforcement of traffic safety.
  
• Radical de-funding of the police.
• Abolishing the police.

Some explanations

I have reasons for what I support, and I won't review them here. I would like to say this, though. I realize every single thing I support comes at a cost or with tradeoffs. Body cameras, for example, are probably a net good. But they will inevitably justify some egregious police behavior, perhaps even behavior that would otherwise be disciplined.

 

The items I don't support are, for the most part, vaguer than the ones I do.

 

The exception is the point about traffic safety enforcement. Some proposals have been made to end, curtail, or revise the way routine traffic safety stops are done. (An example here (accessed May 12, 2021, Washington Post paywall applies): https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/16/remove-police-traffic-stops/.) I'm open to some ideas for different approaches, and I certainly recognize that "routine traffic safety stops" can and will be an invitation to harass minorities. But....traffic safety is important. At least in the city where I live, drivers are a danger to pedestrians, and in my opinion, every run stop sign or near-miss against a pedestrian is a broken window that invites more irresponsible driving. I might be open to changing my mind on this issue, but it's a real problem.

 

Finally, this list isn't comprehensive or final, and I'm not an expert.