US Police Officer Perjury: The problem of incentives in law enforcement

Michelle Alexander, author of the excellent New Jim Crow, has a scathing editorial in the NYT about the level to which due process is being salted with poorly incentivized police officers. Here's the Keane/Chronicle article she references. So I guess the fundamental questions are "how does one eradicate quotas when simply making them illegal proves ineffective relative to the realities of police funding" and "what do modern US police incentives look like without quotas?"

Eradicating civil asset forfeiture and other funding mechanisms that give incentives to falsifying information would go a hell of a long way to reforming the criminal justice system in its own right, I should think. That and treating police testimony as skeptically as we should in a court of law, where a "he-said she-said" between a defendant and a police officer without substantial corroborating evidence should default to the presumption of innocence on the part of the criminal defendant.

How much of this is a general problem, and how much is in reaction to the US's insane level of crime?

OK, so how do you allocate funding if you don't base it off crime levels?

That's a very good question, and I have the feeling the answer is "using the best metrics available, which are always going to be flawed; but don't let that get in the way of using less-flawed mechanisms". Encouraging the police force to fund itself directly through seizures and fines is possibly the worst funding mechanism possible. I suspect that it would be much better to fund cities' police departments based on some sort of composite "crime levels in the city require n number of additional police officers" system, and I am absolutely certain that this has been the subject of both research and experimentation on both the municipal and larger level, but I wasn't able to find anything on a cursory googling.

It's worth mentioning that I think civil asset forfeiture of items not specifically proscribed by the legislature in absence of a conviction or plea bargain is unconscionable in almost all circumstances. Seizing property because it's used "in the pursuit of" or in conjunction with is obscene.

I think it's less our level of crime, and more our odd theory that everything should be run like a business. We give money to departments that appear to have high levels of success, so it's in the police's best interests to show arrests/busts and have them stick in court. This is also why there was the old NYC thing about cops encouraging people to not file police reports for crimes because it made the cops look bad to have so many crimes being reported in their area.

This is more the behavior we see in dysfunctional business units than anything. The "He said/She said always defaults to the cop" thing seems very related to how closely the justice system and the cops work. Anywho, the solution to things like this boil down to breaking the thin blue line like pretty much every other issue with US Police. The problem is that fudging the numbers in your district should lead to immediate termination with forfeiture of your accrued benefits and such, and possible jail time. The reality is that it's brushed under the rug unless it somehow winds up in the news. And then you're just transferred to another district at worst while a witch hunt tries to find who leaked to the media.

Thinking about it quickly I would base it at a local level around a population/poverty/inequality hybrid measure that would give basic coverage, and then supplement that with a fixed pool of officers at a higher geographical level (say state or city level for larger cities) that would be dispatched across the whole region as part of investigations, state wide anti-crime programs, patrolling genuine crime hotspots, specific threats, etc.

Anyway, pretty much any measure would be better than basing local funding off the value of asset seizures as that provides far too direct a linkage & resultant incentive for corruption. If more crime in your small area just meant more officers you don't really know being dispatched from 'Central Pool' to do additional patrols for a while then I imagine the incentives would revert to a more sensible state.

I guess the other side of this is the low rate of corruption discovery, who watches the watchers? If funding was penalised by double the amount for each incidence of corruption or for bad arrests and the system for discovering them was much improved (strong legal aid, strong internal affairs) then the problem would probably also solve itself.

So there's your more state intervention method (carefully fiddle the incentives to produce better outcomes) and your more 'market'-oriented method (release stronger predators to catch the corrupt).

Man, I met a mongoose in Hawaii once, and got the lecture about why you should never release stronger predators into an ecosystem.

Moving forward into other aspects of police incentives, you may have noticed Sheriff-run prisons popping up in your area, especially if you live in the South. This article lays out the industry-sheriff-patronage cycle that works so wonderfully with our ludicrously corrupt sheriff election systems. Not that it happens up front, of course. So, for instance, I drive past a shiny new Sheriff's jail every time I commute, and I was curious what the story behind it was. And if you look at the profile of the Sheriff in question, well:

This in a state riddled with budget cuts at absurdly low/badly distributed tax-point. I can't imagine where the money for that came from, although granted Gwinnett is one of the more complicated counties in terms of how they defend and apply their tax base, so I suppose it could be a complete coincidence.Unfortunately I have no idea how to go after further information without actually, you know, calling people and things like that.

On the third hand, it's really hard to see something that results in perhaps the first glimmer of rehabilitation I've seen in a bit, namely jaildogs. But my judgment is especially unreliable once doggies are involved. What were we talking about again?

Did a little digging and found a list of potential investors in your sheriff's department down the side of the page for his yearly charity golf tournament:

http://magnoliagolfgroup.com/sheriffconway/info/

Nothing seemed to immediately jump out. A lot of law firms and bail bond firms, though everyone in the county seems to serve on the same community boards. However the county does seem to have something of a reputation for racial profiling according to the ACLU (perhaps you know this already):

http://www.acluga.org/issues/racial-justice/287g-abuse-and-racial-profiling/

One of their reports annoyed your sheriff enough that he gave it a fisking here:

http://butchconway.com/sheriff-butch-conway-rebuttal-aclu-report-on-racial-profiling.asp