We need to look more closely at intractable problems like arming the police

Many arguments in the public domain rely on what we think the consequences of change will be.  I’m broadly in favour of arming our police officers with tasers and handguns and improving response time in getting expert markspeople to scenes where necessary.  One can see potential problems – there are rogue cops and more obviously armed police could lead to more obviously armed criminals and so on.  It might disappoint some, but I’m not far from the position Gadget fairly regularly outlines on this particular topic.  I want to see a different form of regulating our police, but really want them to have the tools and back-up in the CJS to do the job.  Currently, I doubt this is the case either for police doing their job or for the public who need their help.

I’m not interested in policing per se but the wider problems of society.  Frankly, I don’t think social science and philosophy are much help in this.  The people doing this stuff are too often up themselves and stuck in their own interests and soaked up values.  Very few put their work into the broad public domain as , say, Steve Keen (economics) or Alain Connes (maths) who can be read for free.

If we start to think through the consequences of arming our police, I’m sure we would quickly come up with good and bad.  What interests me is how quickly impasse is reached even over such a simple matter.  What chance then of Keen’s (and others) ideas on radical social change in forgiving debt (a regular feature of our history – see David Graeber) and returning to banking focused on productive work and innovation in a real economy?

The problem is that human beings do very little thinking and are broadly content with habit. The irony of my teaching might be summed up as ‘brow-beating people into thinking for themselves’.  One or two of my own teachers worked this miracle on me in the past, and I’m very grateful.  However, the issue of flogging dead horses remains.

In the end, we can’t all decide whether special and general relativity are any good because we have already balked at much lower hurdles like basic algebra.  Universal education has obviously failed to turn us all (or even many) of us into scientists or creative thinking individuals.  One idea developing from modern brain science is that we make few rational decisions and rely on a kind of unconscious reasoning.

I think science is mostly straight and that matters like banking (as banksterism),politics and economics largely bent – like the Emperor’s New Clothes.  I have little problem with elite groups doing science, but am generally sickened by what other elite groups get up to. I can explain why.  The problem is not a matter of explanation – it’s that the way we enter into explanation on social matters is itself the problem we can’t overcome.

I’d like to see questions like whether to arm our police alongside deeper economic issues in mainstream discussion in order to find new decision-making processes based in practice and honesty.

 

 

Advertisement

Are we on the brink of a genuine revolution?

There’s a big set of photos like these posted by my friend Chris Jenkins at – http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150334273466494.348470.722681493&type=3

The venue is Occupy Tampa, part of protest across the USA – we have the beginnings of our own versions.  Chris’ theme is now ordinary the protesters are.  Most street protest has only made me yawn or reach in despair for my cricket box – we has-beens had no protective equipment.  I hope we are going to see big protests this time.  I’m so fed up with politics as we have it that I could barely be bothered to register to vote – like many more gauging from the Council guy who has just been round with the registration forms.  I want a government of ‘white suits’ across the US and Europe and a structured debt jubilee and international service.  I’m not actually a democrat, but want to see a system in which votes matter to the people, not the loons making up political speeches and the same old promises to garner them.  There are clearly some things that most of us can’t vote on using considered argument – but these can still be open to public scrutiny are generally are not.

What I’d like to see is such a weight of public protest that politicians, banksters and our poodle media could not ignore.  I suspect something much worse is coming because our apathy is unbounded.  I see no left and right in any of this – the call is freedom and substantial change.to put us nearer 1970 than 1900 (which is where wealth distribution is).

The private sector as it has been for the last 40 years can’t help us get what we want, which is mostly simple enough – reasonable security and reward through work.  We just won’t be honest about this and research shows most of us don’t know the real state of play, do want more equality and imagine there is much more than there is.

Not exactly a bunch of ‘caped anarchists’ this lot, are they?  Chris has posted hundreds and I’m sure we have to do something.  Most people hope they can ignore what’s going on and that somehow decent jobs will return.  Some are so barking they still hope for a crisis in capitalism – not realising capitalism has almost disappeared and is something we need back.

Broken Windows

http://pse.som.yale.edu/sites/pse.som.yale.edu/files/Case_Bratton%202nd%20ed%20Final%20and%20Complete.pdf

This pdf is more or less the story of the Bratton management style.  It touches on some of the criticism of ‘Broken Windows’ – but frankly only the easiest to dismiss.

First Bratton needed a leadership staff that was committed to crime control. Before he arrived in New York in January 1994, he asked for resignations of all senior staff. Next he put together a new team of “deep selects” that included Jack Maple as deputy chief, John Timoney as chief of department, Louis Anemone as chief of patrol, John Miller as deputy commissioner of public information, and Michael Julian as chief of personnel.
Then Bratton created a crisis. He hired a consultant, John Lindner, to perform a “cultural diagnostic” of the NYPD, describing its strengths and its obstacles to change. He appointed more than 300 employees from every rank of the NYPD to “re-engineering teams” that studied everything from uniforms and equipment to discipline and training.

The failure was the organization’s leadership over the previous 20 to 25 years. They wasted your most valuable resource: your human beings; that’s what they wasted—by micromanaging, by setting systems in place that stifled creativity…. With the best of intentions, they set up a structure that was meant to fail as a crime-fighting mechanism. It was built for failure.

I’ve heard all this stuff – it’s standard management teaching and there’s more to understand.  What if our police forces are a combination of staff unwilling to deal with the real problems as ‘underneath them’ and what I term ‘Screwtape bureaucracies’ – I see see plenty of sign of both.

I’ve met plenty of cops who have heard about broken windows policing – few who knew it’s about massive attitudinal and organisational change.  The riots may show just how much harder our police could clamp down.  Many of the claims about this kind of management are false and 70% of attempts fail across all industry sectors.

But what if our cops are so ‘bad’ that they are as dysfunctional as Bratton claimed NYPD was?  I have seen companies that were this bad and even worse.  Most non-science and technology higher education is.  And I’ve seen all these management claims made falsely.  The classic examples are when our governments change and it’s all the fault of the last lot.

A recent, free academic paper on broken windows at:

ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp5484.pdf

has a good, relevant bibliography.  The standard liberal critique ideas can be started at:

http://www.csub.edu/~danderson_facile/docs/Week8_1.pdf

A recent MA can be found at:

http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/11735/1/Distler_umd_0117N_12199.pdf

My own opinion is that the glaringly obvious factor is the crooked rich and our failure in democracy.  We cannot demand the solutions from our politicians other than through skewed systems that are as disgusting as the riots themselves and actually far more damaging.