Episode 1069 Scott Adams: How to Reimagine Police Work to Free Resources for Social Services (Better Than Defunding)
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Content:
Reimagine Policing
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Hey everybody, this is a special unexpected livestream.
I want to talk about one topic and one topic only today.
It's the topic about defunding the police, which of course is a provocative thought.
Some people want fewer police presence or less of it.
Some people want more of it.
So the country is being torn apart and I would like to suggest That this is not a question of left or right, even though we've made it that way.
The question of defunding the police should be a technology and systems question.
In other words, we should be thinking of it in terms of a puzzle to solve, and not a left problem or a right problem.
And the puzzle is this.
How do you get more bang for your buck?
A very basic corporate business decision.
How do you take this thing we've been doing, policing, How do you get as much benefit as you can at the lowest cost?
And I would say that just thinking of it that way would make a big difference.
And so I would like to say we should think of it more as reimagining the police, not defunding them.
Defunding is sort of a...
Those are fighting words, and we don't need that.
But I would suggest that we already have in place everything we need, or very close to it, To be able to do something that really radically reimagines the police.
So what I'm going to tell you are some things that already exist.
So if you say to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, we will never be able to develop these things, you're already behind the times.
Everything I talk about already exists.
We just have to think about it in this way and it's going to be able to move us forward.
And it looks like this.
So you have a current police force With a current budget and a current way of doing things.
But at the same time, there's a little satellite around them of private companies who are doing functions that have, in some cases, wide application, but they're also really, really good for police.
And I'll talk about a few of these in a moment.
If you'd use this model where you let private companies develop new technologies, That would make policing way more effective, cost effective.
So it gets the job done at a much lower cost.
Would you like to see these kinds of things experimented with inside the police force, in other words, inside a government-like entity, or would you like to see private entity doing the development and taking the risk?
It's a rhetorical question.
The last thing you want Is a government entity or something like the police force doing technology innovation?
You don't want it there.
You want it where it is in the private industry.
Now there are a few developments that really make the idea of changing or reimagining how police work is done very practical.
So when the left says, hey, let's defund the police and make money available for social services, I say, that is completely doable.
It is completely doable without losing a thing in policing.
And because of this new technology that I'll talk about in a moment, you can actually get far better police results.
And I'm talking about multiples of better.
I'm not talking about a 10% improvement.
I'm talking about a 5x improvement sort of situation.
Here are some examples.
Let's take DNA. If you are a serial rapist, it is possible that the police already have Several records of you with your DNA because you might be leaving it at each of these sex crimes places.
But it would be very common for the police to have three separate DNA samples for three separate crimes and not know who you are.
Because knowing your DNA doesn't automatically make you findable.
Approximately 15% of sex crimes, you can take the DNA and actually find the person.
85% of the time, It's just a data and a record and it's a dead end.
Can't find the person. But the newer DNA technologies, and we won't get into specific companies, I'm going to talk generically now, the newer DNA, they could take the DNA from the suspect and they could find their family members.
And if you find somebody's family members, because there are enough people who have DNA in different places, etc., that are accessible, if you can find their family members, You can pretty much find the suspect almost every time.
Because you just go to Uncle Bob and you say, Hey Bob, do you know anybody in your family who might live in this neighborhood?
And Uncle Bob will say, Yeah, that's my nephew Jason.
And then you go check on Jason and you've got your suspect.
So, imagine that level of improvement.
To go from about 15% of your cases are solved.
I'm talking about violent rapes.
15%, one five, is how many they can identify.
An external company can get them all.
Can get them all.
Now, nothing's 100%, right?
So when I say can get them all, you should translate that into your head to maybe 90% or something.
But to go from one five percent To 90%?
How expensive would that be?
And here's the kicker.
Not very. It's not very expensive.
In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of rape kits, in other words, the sample that's been taken from the crime, that have not been tested.
Hundreds of thousands of them.
Now, most of them will be tested and they'll go through the system, but they will not result in any kind of a match.
They could go to An external company and say, for this reasonable dollar amount, can you solve all of our worst cases?
So you could take, for example, all of the records that have multiple crimes associated with the same DNA, and you can say to this company, look, we've got five DNA samples from five different rapes, and we don't know who this is.
How many crimes do you prevent If you take a serial rapist off the streets, maybe a lot.
You could end up solving, or not solving, but preventing, ten rapes by getting one serial rapist.
Likewise, I suppose, if it's some other kind of violent crime that leaves DNA. So imagine how much is being left sort of on the table of free money because this isn't completely being used at the moment.
And that's just one example.
Imagine having facial recognition widely available for the police.
Imagine the police have a suspect, get a photo somehow, and they can identify him.
Now you have the problem with African-American faces are harder to identify, but apparently that is not common to all of the different facial technologies.
There are some that are actually good At distinguishing African-American faces, and some are not.
So if you hear some stories about facial recognition has problems with black citizens, that's true, but it's not true of all the technologies.
At least not as true.
And certainly, there's something about the process that can be done better.
I talked about this on a separate periscope, that if you have a match, you think you have a match, and you go to the suspect's house to find out If your facial recognition got the right person, you should at least bring the picture with you.
So you can hold it up, and when the person answers the door, you can say, okay, we didn't get a match this time.
It's obvious. I'm looking at you.
I'm looking at the picture. It's not you.
Sorry to bother you. So there's something that can be done differently in the system to make the technology even more bulletproof.
Likewise, police are already using drones.
You can imagine private drone companies I'm just brainstorming here.
Made a bunch of deals to put drones on rooftops, just staged, in various places around the city.
I'm just making this up.
This doesn't exist. And imagine if there was a crime and the police force had a deal with a drone company and they said, look, we've got a crime in this neighborhood.
Can you get us some eyes on it?
Drone takes off.
And takes pictures, and they get the best look at things that they can.
If the drone has a good camera, then you've got your facial recognition.
So, some of these are being done in some fashion.
But what you'll find is, you're going to say to yourself, well, Scott, you've just described a perfectly good system.
So is this already working?
Isn't this already working?
Because why wouldn't it be? The police know about these technologies, in most cases.
They know about them. Why aren't they using them?
Some are. Some are not.
But why isn't it just widespread, just this is the way you do it?
And the reason is bureaucracy.
The reason is the left and the right, the battle over turf, nobody wants to lose their job on the old system that's not working.
How do you get anything done in a bureaucracy?
It's all that stuff. But as these technologies prove themselves with the police entities that do use them, and they're all being tested somewhere, as they're being tested, it will be impossible to ignore them.
Because if you have one city that is solving all of its sex crimes, just think about that.
Suppose you had one city that said, we don't have any backlog, we solved them all.
Just give us the DNA. We'll solve it for you, too.
How does Chicago, just to use an example, how do they not do this if some other city, let's say Baltimore, tries it out and it just works?
How do they not do something that's so obviously good and works and saves money?
Now, the idea is that each of these technologies is so much more effective than what the police are doing already that it should take the amount of resources they need way down.
Would the police be in favor of this?
Let's say the individual police officer.
I'm not talking about bureaucracy, not talking about left or right or the mayor or anybody else.
Would the individual police officer be happier if these technologies were more widely deployed?
I think yes. They'd be happier on a number of levels.
Number one, if you're a police officer, Don't you like to solve crimes?
Of course you do.
What is better if you're a police officer than actually doing good work and solving crimes and making your community a better place?
You probably get a raise.
So that's all good.
But I would argue that also there's a secondary benefit, which is really big.
It's really big. Which is if you're a police officer, all of these entities which you would then be working closely with become a career path.
Because wouldn't it be good to have an experienced police officer working on your drone startup, working on any of your other startups that have policing technology involved?
So this is the basic idea.
You'll notice some themes I'm pulling together.
One is that A-B testing is always the way to go, if you can.
If something can be tested...
And to do it large, you know, to roll it out everywhere would be really expensive, well then test it small.
This is the perfect situation for testing it small.
Now the other thing that's working here, the other big theme, is changing the system, of course.
It's a change in the system.
Instead of moving all of the functions of police within the police organization and budget, you can move some of it out to private corporations, And de-risk it.
In other words, the private corporation can take all of the risks that a police entity could not.
And I'm not talking about life and death risks.
You know, nobody should be taking those.
I'm talking about just something that might be embarrassing if it didn't work.
Something that if a police put their budget into it and then it failed, well, that'd be bad for the police, bad for everybody.
So you take that risk and you just move it into places where people like risk.
Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, they like risk.
So move it where they like it and it won't hurt the rest of the people until it's proven.
I'm looking at the comments.
It says, Scott does not talk about the real problem, which is the wickedness in the hearts of people.
Well, that might be a different periscope.
Somebody else is going to have to do that.
But I do make the following claim.
That there are a lot of things that look like they're problems of the left and problems of the right and not agreeing.
This is not one of them.
This is a problem that has artificially been put into the world of politics, because everything is, but has nothing to do with politics.
There's nobody in the world who wouldn't like better police effectiveness with less violence, And at lower cost.
There isn't anybody who doesn't want that.
And so if you take it out of the political realm and put it in the economic realm, the entrepreneur realm, the realm where ideas actually work and can be tested, well, then you've got a solution that works for everybody.
And, of course, language gets us in trouble.
Because is what I just described a case of defunding the police?
Kind of. Yeah, because the ultimate result would be the police would be far more effective, and there's also another impact on top of this.
Imagine you're a criminal.
Some of you might be criminals, so it's easy to imagine.
Imagine you're a criminal, and in today's world, if you did a violent rape, you could get identified 15% of the time.
That's not much of a disincentive.
Is it? Because a lot of people who are inclined to crime, if they see there's only a 15% chance of even being identified, you might be willing to do the crime.
Suppose you had a 90% chance of getting caught.
Would you do the crime?
Some people will, and they'll be caught.
But they won't do a second crime because they got caught after the first.
