Incarceration, studied

 From here:

Conclusion

For four decades, the U.S. has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal justice system more expansive and more punitive. As a result, incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime, with, for example, 70 percent of convictions resulting in confinement — far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates. Our new analysis of incarceration rates and crime rates across the world reveals that the U.S.’s high incarceration rates are not a rational response to high crime rate, but rather a politically expedient response to public fears and perceptions about crime and violence.

Today, there is finally serious talk of change, but little action that would bring the United States to an incarceration rate on par with other stable democracies. The incremental changes made in recent years aren’t enough to counteract the bad policy choices built up in every state over decades. For that, all states will have to aim higher, striving to be not just better than the worst U.S. states, but among the most fair and just in the world.

...

Notice how even "enlightened" California has higher rates of caging people than most other NATO countries. Even the U.S. most "enlightened" states (e.g. Massachusetts) have incarceration rates that exceed the supposedly terrible dictatorships like Iran and Cuba.

Meanwhile, Sacramento County just voted to expand its jail with a $450 million addition. The City of Sacramento is going to purchase an armored vehicle ("The Rook") for the police. Supervisor Frost excitedly states in her latest newsletter about how (finally!) we're going to be able to compel non-criminals to take their medication. That's right, our justice system is going to beat those non-criminals until their morale improves.

And no, Supervisor Frost did not talk about spending $450 million on treatment facilities for the mentally ill homeless, or some housing vouchers. Just to remind you: the City of Denver experimented with giving homeless people housing vouchers and found arrests declined by 40%. Seventy-seven percent of those who took those vouchers stopped being homeless.

So...my question: how bad does it have to be before we do something different?

Just asking...

 

 

Update #1: Police are now either lazy or incompetent. Excerpt:

Since clearance rates have been declining for decades and since the response to that has been to increase budgets, there really is no reason for police to do their jobs. In fact, not doing their jobs is probably the strategy that works best: it’s easier, they get to say crime is out of control and claim that more money is needed.

If not doing your job leads to more money not less, why do your job, especially when you’ve been trained to think it’s a dangerous job, when being a policeman isn’t even as dangerous as being a farmer, logger, or fisherman.

The Connection Between Original Sin and Economics: Political Theology and Political Economy

From here.

We Need to Talk About the Original Sin of Economics

How a bleak Christian theology influenced the development of the dismal science

by Lynn Parramore

When you think of original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve, an economics class probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. After all, economics is a secular discipline. Or is it?

Maybe not entirely, considering that the earliest economic thinkers had religion very much in mind when they laid down its tenets. Economist A.M.C. Waterman notes that economics was a branch of moral theology in the Christian West until the eighteenth century, while ethics professor Michael S. Northcott holds what we now call “economics” or “political economy” was the province of moral philosophers and theologians until the mid-nineteenth century.

Adam Smith was the son of a devout Presbyterian mother and lived in a world dominated by the Kirk. As economist Paul Oslington notes, his writings, despite a certain amount of personal skepticism of religion, are strewn with religious concepts, such as his view of nature as demonstrating “providential care” and the “wisdom and goodness of God” (Theory of Moral Sentiments). And, as Oslington attests, Smith’s work was often interpreted theologically by early economic enthusiasts like Scottish minister and political economist Thomas Chalmers and Richard Whately, holder of the first chair in economics at a British university. Both saw God’s will in the conversion of self-interested actions into the greatest economic good.

This God, it appears, was a classical economist.

According to Northcott in “Political Theology and Political Economy,” economics developed with a Christian perspective that can be traced to a particular time and place. This view held that human beings, and nature in general, were forever tarnished by the Fall and Original Sin. He points to the Reformation, which swept through Europe in the 1500s, as the catalyst for a widely accepted view of hopelessly sinful humans capable of redemption only through individual faith. The combination of pessimism and individualism, Northcott argues, is the key innovation of this period of Christian theology, which manifests in the work of Thomas Hobbes, who depicted wicked humans who would run amok unless the State protected them by underwriting private property, law enforcement, and contracts.

Economic individualism is born, with the State as its guarantor.

The influence of Christianity on the development of capitalism and economic thinking was memorably examined by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). Weber homed in on the fact that Protestants, especially the Calvinist variety, believed that a person’s place in heaven was already decided and no amount of praying and almsgiving would change it. With this bleak picture in mind, Calvinists turned their efforts to work in the secular world, imagining that God’s favor could be discovered in piles of money.

Weber also saw monasticism playing a fundamental role in the development of economics and economic practices, observing that monks, trained in methodical, self-denying habits, promulgated the idea that God wanted you to stay occupied and find yourself a “calling.” As this view influenced the secular world, many people, especially Calvinists, started to look at business as a calling, adopting the monkish perspective that God meant you to carefully save money and reinvest in your enterprise.

Safeguard those piles of money, and for heaven’s sake don’t give them away.

Weber saw these cultural shifts as tending to draw people away from focusing on the commons, the sharing of resources, and yeoman farming (farming associated with a class intermediate between the gentry and the laborers and serfs). They instead turned their attention to joint stock-holding corporations, factories, and the calculation of wages and profits.

Values shifted from cooperation to competition, from shared prosperity to individual gain. The idea was that you may as well focus on your self-interest in this world because you can’t save anybody. Never mind the poor, who deserved their fate and clearly did not have God’s favor. For Northcott, this Reformed theology freed people from responsibilities represented in the old medieval system which, while flawed (for example, by a rigid class system), at least had some elements of redistribution and morally grounded economics in bans on usury, the rise of trade guilds, some local regulation of prices and wages, a negative view of avarice, and a framework of society as a social organism.

Northcott traces a thru-line of the money-focused mindset in John Locke’s emphasis on private property ownership and productivity, along with the idea that you can “own” nature when you use your labor to improve it. From there comes banking and financialization as ways of “redeeming” the land from the Fall. Salvation lay in turning the surplus extracted from improving nature into money. The new moral code: money-making is the ticket to heaven. To sin is to fail to maximize your personal gain.

Northcott observes that early economists like Malthus took the story of the Fall and its aftermath to mean that scarcity was God’s plan – so there was no point in trying to eradicate poverty or promote equality. It wasn’t important whether or not your individual actions were inherently good: what mattered is how much wealth they produced.

Christ may have warned about the accumulation of wealth, but this strain of Christianity clearly favored the rich.

Northcott notes that by the mid-twentieth century, we get what’s known as the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, whereby the actions by individuals, firms, or governments that increase wealth are judged beneficial even if some people are harmed. Lives are priced competitively. This mindset was evident during the Covid pandemic when the vulnerable and the non-affluent were expected to sacrifice themselves for the economy. (Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, summed up his view of the lives of America’s senior citizens, explaining, “there are more important things than living.”)

However, other strains of Christianity interpret religion and its relationship to economics quite differently. There have always been Christian thinkers pushing back on the code of competitive individualism and its bleak outlook, like nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin. Ruskin, raised in an Evangelical tradition, became a vociferous critic of classical economic thinking and capitalism. As Northcott observes, Ruskin pictured the Garden of Eden as evidence of the peace, abundance, and sharing of resources that God intended for us. As Ruskin scholar Jeffrey Spear and I have observed, he abhorred the idea of placing a market value on human life and what he termed the false Gospel of Mammonism, which made the pursuit of self-interest a social good and excused – or even promoted - the exploitation of human beings and nature. Ruskin favored the western tradition and values rooted in Scripture and the classics over those of classical economics.

Poet William Wordsworth, raised as an Anglican, was another figure from the Romantic movement known for his critique of capitalism and economic thought. For him, communing with nature was the means through which people could experience God, and that path was open to everyone, rich or poor. He decried the displacements and turmoil ordinary people faced as the Industrial Revolution commenced, as well as the despoilation of nature that came with it. Like Ruskin, he deplored the condition of workers in the market economy. In his 1829 poem “Humanity,” Wordsworth challenges 

Adam Smith’s most famous book by name:
“For the poor Many, measured out by rules
Fetched with cupidity from heartless schools
That to an Idol, falsely called "the Wealth
Of Nations," sacrifice a People's health,
Body and mind and soul”

In the nineteenth century, Christian socialism emerged, first in England, combining the goals of socialism with what they saw as the proper religious and ethical values of Christianity that had been abandoned. This translated into the promotion of cooperation, helping the poor, and fostering goals and practices like cooperatives, trade unions, mutual insurance, and egalitarianism. Northcott points to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), as the catalyst for Catholic Social Teaching, which advocated more economic equality and the sharing of nature’s goods.

Economic historian and Christian socialist R.H. Tawney, born in 1880, saw human character as inherently social and warned against the focus on self-interest and facing God in isolation. He maintained that for property owners, economic responsibility outweighs privilege. For him, business without ethics led to evil. As Tawney put it, “a religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion.”

Christian socialism met a powerful foe in the twentieth century in the form of the Mont Pelerin Society, launched in 1947 and led until 1960 by Friedrich Hayek. This group of influential economists, bankers, and intellectuals promoted the individual freedom of the producer and consumer over common concerns. They set themselves against social projects like the New Deal that intervened in the economy to increase the power of ordinary people. For them, the government should only infrequently take action to reduce inequality or promote the people’s welfare.

We’ve seen, of course, how that has turned out: Extreme inequality, private ownership of public goods, ordinary people disempowered, a global financial meltdown driven by neoliberal deregulation, climate disaster, and a pandemic that burdened the poor but saw the rich getting even richer.

For Christian thinkers like Northcott, the pessimistic individualism that lives on in neoliberalism is the Original Sin of economics – a sin that has proliferated for the last two hundred years, culminating in the precarious situation of humanity of the twenty-first century. For them, as the welfare of people and planet are increasingly threatened, it is this stain that must be removed if we are to save ourselves and, as Wordsworth urges, “come forth into the light of things.”

Chris Hedges Addresses an Antiwar Rally

His speech is here. Excerpt:

The political class, the media, the entertainment industry, the financiers and even religious institutions bay like wolves for the blood of Muslims or Russians or Chinese, or whoever the idol has demonized as unworthy of life. There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman earn billions of dollars in profits. The vast expenditures demanded by the Pentagon are sacrosanct. The cabal of warmongering pundits, diplomats and technocrats, who smugly dodge responsibility for the array of military disasters they orchestrate, are protean, shifting adroitly with the political tides, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”

Rook? (Today's Bee Letter)

 To the Sacramento Bee 2/19/23, re: "A Matter of Safety" p. A1

The Bee asks whether the City should purchase a Rook (armored vehicle) for the Police, but omits the larger context. 

Seventy percent of local government's spending is for police, courts, and jails. The population grew 42% between 1982 and 2017 in the U.S, while police spending grew 187%.

In California, police solve only 15% of crimes, yet in Canada--which cages one seventh as many per-capita--crime is about the same. Of course Canadians don't have to start cooking meth to pay their spouse's hospital bills (the plot of Breaking Bad). Healthcare for all is Unamerican!

The city of Denver gave its homeless housing vouchers and arrests declined 40%. Meanwhile, Sacramento County just voted to approve a $450 million jail addition--in effect a militarized homeless shelter. 

Could we have a program like Denver's? Could we possibly have peace officers rather than an army of occupation? Maybe not. After all, we've been rooked.

Spotted on the internet

 

COVID News: Aussies get it

 

Epic video—“LIVING WITH COVID = LET PEOPLE DIE”

➡️Governments continue to ignore deaths from #COVID19. We shouldn’t let them gaslight people. #ventilation #filtration #airdisinfection #n95 #MaskUp

Amazing work by @RealOzSAGE @JohnSnowProject pic.twitter.com/n7K8Fb0WPs

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 17, 2023

Misinformation Studies

Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges Social Media + Society. The Abstract:


Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated. Drawing on research examining the use of big data in social science and reception studies, we identify six misconceptions about misinformation and highlight the conceptual and methodological challenges they raise. The first set of misconceptions concerns the prevalence and circulation of misinformation. First, scientists focus on social media because it is methodologically convenient, but misinformation is not just a social media problem. Second, the internet is not rife with misinformation or news, but with memes and entertaining content. Third, falsehoods do not spread faster than the truth; how we define (mis)information influences our results and their practical implications. The second set of misconceptions concerns the impact and the reception of misinformation. Fourth, people do not believe everything they see on the internet: the sheer volume of engagement should not be conflated with belief. Fifth, people are more likely to be uninformed than misinformed; surveys overestimate misperceptions and say little about the causal influence of misinformation. Sixth, the influence of misinformation on people’s behavior is overblown as misinformation often “preaches to the choir.” To appropriately understand and fight misinformation, future research needs to address these challenges.

MMT about inflation

 

pic.twitter.com/pyEKOKE4W6

— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) February 13, 2023

Catapulting the Propaganda Locally

(c) by Mark Dempsey

I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time.  - Matt Taibbi

After reading some columns (here and here) advising how to solve California's problems building affordable housing in the supposedly un-conservative Sacramento News & Review, I was amazed at what these columns omitted. Then I noticed who was funding the reporting: the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative, part of a larger organization--"Solutions Journalism"--whose funders include the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates also promotes the "Green Revolution" in Africa so those former colonies will remain indebted to their colonizers for fertilizer, energy, and genetically modified crops. 

In other words, the omissions in these "Solutions" have an agenda. They omit what is unpalatable to the powers that be. The "Solutions" people are not getting government funding, but it doesn't take a political scientist to see the interests of a governing oligarchy and its non-government cronies and think tanks are identical. Next, they'll promote "public/private partnerships" like this.

What is missing from the discussion of options to make housing affordable? Perhaps the biggest omission is what keeps real estate prices high. Those who have studied such prices¹ say 80% of increases stem from land costs. 

In Sacramento, land speculators purchase outlying agricultural land for a few thousand dollars an acre, then, after they persuade local governments to permit development, sell it for 50 - 100 times that much to builders. If the speculators swap for income-producing real estate like apartments or shopping centers, that 5,000% - 10,000% gross profit defers income tax indefinitely too.

That means Sacramento's public policy favors commute-lengthening outlying development (sprawl) that is roughly twice as expensive to maintain as compact development, increases global warming, and produces a class of plutocratic land speculators called "developers." The late Sacramento County Supervisor Grantland Johnson declared that it's widely acknowledged throughout the state that the region most in the developers' hip pocket is Sacramento--not a contest we want to win.

Were these facts mentioned in the "Solving Sacramento" articles? Nope. According to them government regulation makes things expensive. Government is bad! They must be reined in by partnering them with the private sector!

Yet publicly-owned utilities like Sacramento's Municipal Utility District are cheaper (35% for SMUD) than privately-owned utilities like PG&E. As an added bonus, SMUD executives are not facing charges of negligent homicide because they defunded maintenance and started both fires (power lines) and explosions (gas lines) like PG&E. So...cheaper and better managed by public ownership.

Another omission: Could government build housing? Nixon stopped federally-built affordable housing in the '70s. Then, while he was cutting taxes for the wealthy roughly in half--and with his successor raising payroll taxes eightfold--Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Even New Deal programs for affordable housing were destined to fail. 

England built "council housing" to make housing affordable following World War II, but Margaret Thatcher sold that housing to its occupants at discount prices, pleasing British voters for the time being, but setting the scene for rising U.K. home prices for years to come. The U.K. has a similar affordable housing problem now.

Incidentally, did you know that thanks to proposition 13's tax limitations, unless California's local governments collect their infrastructure costs in up-front building fees, they won't get reimbursed? That's in addition to the $12 billion annually the State forfeits because of prop 13's commercial property loophole--commercial property is never reassessed if less than 50% changes hands, so many properties remain assessed at 1978 values plus the modest increase prop 13 permits.

So the "let's be like Texas and deregulate" pundits are ignoring the fact that Texas has no such prop 13 tax limitation, and even taxes petroleum at the wellhead while California doesn't. Yes, California building fees are large--and vary significantly--making home purchases less affordable, but lower property tax requires a big up-front fee and does not incidentally make holding property off the market affordable, so it also enables land speculation too.

The "Solving Sacramento" pundits who decry California's (Ronald-Reagan-signed) CEQA law as the source of expensive housing are simply ignoring too much to be credible. That such advice appears in a supposedly left-leaning publication is all the more deplorable.

¹Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, and Laurie Macfarlane

---

Mark Dempsey is a former member of a Sacramento County Planning Advisory Council.

Chris Hedges on "Woke Imperialism"...a real problem

See the whole "Woke Imperialism" article here. Excerpt:

"Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control.

 "Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them."

As I've quoted previously:

Why "70 million votes for Trump? (Trump won 74 million votes, nearly five million more than any previous presidential candidate) Says Thomas Greene (from Noteworthy): “Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge.....Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing.""

The housing problem as covered in Sacramento News & Review

Responding to an interview with North State Building Industry Association (NSBIA) president Michael Strech in the Sacramento News & Review:

Mark Dempsey | February 3, 2023 at 4:54 pm | Reply

“Let’s just deregulate (no CEQA!) like Texas” is a constant refrain from these jokers. But the real problem is the cost of land, not the regulations. Studies demonstrate 80% of the cost increase comes from land costs. Lumber and labor is not more expensive in CA.

Oh yes, and building fees in CA have to be higher because if you don’t collect the money in fees in CA, Prop 13 tax rates are so low and unyielding you won’t be able to maintain the infrastructure. That’s right, Texas doesn’t have Prop 13 property tax limitations. You might remember Butte County flirted with bankruptcy because it had building fees lower than its infrastructure (roads, schools, fire & police, etc.) during a building boom a few years ago. Prop 13 had Butte County in a vise.

NSBIA is really just parroting some right-wing meme, not really interested in solving problems here. Besides building fees, the really big problem is land speculation. Land speculators (“developers”) can buy ag land cheap ($2K/acre in N. Natomas floodplain) then, after they get permission to develop, sell it dear to builders ($200K/acre to Winncrest homes). That egregious 10,000% profit not only accrues exclusively to private benefit, it’s even tax sheltered if the speculators swap for income-producing real estate like shopping centers or apartments. Quite the racket.

It’s no accident that Sacramento has the “Tsakopoulos Galleria” rather than the “Sacramento Galleria” — meeting space next to the central library. We gave all the money to Angelo! Plutocrats! Gotta love ’em!

In Germany, the developers have to sell outlying land to local government at the ag land price, then re-purchase it at the development land price. All the benefit accrues to the public. And German universities charge no tuition, they have single-payer healthcare, and the arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the U.S. of A.

NSBIA is strictly distracting from these inconvenient truths with its “all regulation is bad” line of talk. Perhaps we should ask Mr. Strech which toxic food he would feed his children. After all regulations are bad, right? Back in the good ol’ unregulated days, the big meat packers were fine shipping botulism with their product.

How Crooked Are Corporations?

Is corporate wrongdoing on the rise? Statistics certainly suggest so. The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s latest annual report on its whistleblower program showed a record 12,210 tips were provided in 2021 – a 76% increase against 2020, itself a record-breaker. The commission also made more financial awards to whistleblowers than in all previous years combined – in other words, the information given was real and significant enough to lead to real consequences.

From I’m a corporate fraud investigator. You wouldn’t believe the hubris of the super-rich (the Guardian)

How the west came out on top

 In the Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argued:

“The immediate source of Western expansion, however, was technological: the invention of the means of ocean navigation for reaching distant peoples and the development of the military capabilities for conquering those peoples… The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerns often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do”.

Answering Mr. Strech from the NSBIA

Sacramento News & Review published an interview with the CEO of the North State Building Industry Association (NSBIA).

Here's my answer:

“Let’s just deregulate (no CEQA!) like Texas” is a constant refrain from these jokers. But the real problem is the cost of land, not the regulations. Studies demonstrate 80% of the cost increase comes from land costs. Lumber and labor is *not* more expensive in CA.

Oh yes, and building fees in CA have to be higher because if you don’t collect the money in fees in CA, Prop 13 tax rates are so low and unyielding you won’t be able to maintain the infrastructure. That’s right, Texas doesn’t have Prop 13 property tax limitations. You might remember Butte County flirted with bankruptcy because it had building fees lower than its infrastructure costs (roads, schools, fire & police, etc.) during a building boom a few years ago. Prop 13 had Butte County in a vise.

NSBIA is really just parroting some right-wing meme, not really interested in solving problems here. Besides building fees, the really big problem is land speculation. Land speculators (“developers”) can buy ag land cheap ($2K/acre in N. Natomas floodplain) then, after they get permission to develop, sell it dear to builders ($200K/acre to Winncrest homes). That egregious 10,000% profit not only accrues exclusively to private benefit, it’s even tax sheltered if the speculators swap for income-producing real estate like shopping centers or apartments. Quite the racket.

It’s no accident that Sacramento has the “Tsakopoulos Galleria” rather than the “Sacramento Galleria” — meeting space next to the central library. We gave all the money to Angelo! Plutocrats! Gotta love ’em!

In Germany, the developers have to sell outlying land to local government at the ag land price, then re-purchase it at the development land price. All the benefit accrues to the public. And German universities charge no tuition, they have single-payer healthcare, and the arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the U.S. of A.

NSBIA is strictly distracting from these inconvenient truths with its “all regulation is bad” line of talk. Perhaps we should ask Mr. Strech which toxic food he would feed his children. After all regulations are bad, right? Back in the good ol’ unregulated days, the big meat packers were fine shipping botulism with their product.

What Police Reform Should Look Like

From Ted Rall

Each high-profile killing by police of an unarmed Black citizen—this week he’s Tyre Nichols, 29, of Memphis—prompts calls to reform the police. But how?

We should begin with two questions:

What is the police for, currently?

What should they be for?

Police currently fulfill two primary roles: generating revenue for local municipalities and terrorizing marginalized people.

If you’re white, middle- or upper-class, almost all your interactions with law enforcement will come in the form of a traffic stop, most likely in a small town, rather than in a big city, because big cities enjoy strong tax bases, and even more likely in a cash-strapped municipality.

Tickets for speeding and equipment violations, both of which can generate fines costing hundreds of dollars each, are by far the most common reason for a traffic stop. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis conducted a fascinating study of North Carolina traffic stops which concluded that “significantly more tickets” were issued when localities experienced financial difficulties, suggesting they were “used as a revenue-generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety.” Some towns finance as much as 90% of their annual budgets from traffic tickets.

Defenders of the status quo will argue that the flashing disco lights in your rearview mirror enforce public safety. Indeed, motorists who speed or run red signals are a danger to themselves and others. If safer roads is the goal, however, why fine money for a moving infraction? Adding points to your license for dangerous violations, with suspension of driving privileges over a set sum, serves as ample deterrence to the wealthy and poor alike.

Only 9% of traffic stops involve suspicion of criminal activity, according to a national RAND survey of police officers.

Policing in poor and minority neighborhoods assumes the character of foreign troops patrolling hostile occupied territory. “Jump-out boys” squads like the Scorpion unit that murdered Nichols snatch people on little to no pretext, eager to rack up arrests in order to please police executives who themselves serve “tough on crime” politicians.

Cops in tough areas roust the homeless, purportedly for the “crime” of loitering but really to sweep away the unwholesome evidence of poverty that would reduce property values and street traffic to businesses if it were visible.

Police respond to countless domestic disputes—romantic relationships turned toxic, parents struggling with out-of-control children, drug abusers and their long-suffering family members, victims of schizophrenia and other untreated mental illnesses—to which a saner society would dispatch social workers and welfare case officers.

Armed cops enter homes, not to help (they can’t) but to enforce the simulacrum of peace that allows landlords to find takers for bedraggled rental properties. Recruited from the ranks of returning war veterans (who are more likely than other cops to use excessive force), jacked with steroids and trained to throw their weight around, the threat of violence is omnipresent when a uniformed officer arrives at the scene of people in emotional and psychological crisis. Shut up and calm down or we’ll lock you up/take your kid/beat you down.

What should police be doing instead?

They should make us safe. And make us feel safe.

We want cops to arrive quickly to defend us against violent people and thieves. We need them to protect us during natural disasters. We want them to provide deterrence by being present and ready to help in places where we are afraid: subway platforms, deserted city streets, public parks. But public safety is incompatible with revenue enhancement: “Police departments in cities that collect a greater share of their revenue from fees—conceivably because their governing bodies put pressure on them to generate revenue—solve violent crimes at significantly lower rates,” a recent NYU study found.

Cops should not be intimidating. They should present as friendly, polite, affable, calm, eager to help with our problems and unfailingly professional. The Nichols snuff video, in which the killer cops repeatedly shout profanities, urge one another to escalating violence and are laden with combat gear, portrays the exact opposite of what we want cops to be.

How could we get from where we are to where we want to be?

Police departments should change their training and incentive structures away from the current warrior mentality, in which cops see us as potential enemies and their main objective to return safely home every night, to a guardian mode in which their own safety is secondary, even to people suspected of lawbreaking.

We should disarm the police. Three out of four cops have never fired their weapon on the job. Among those who have, a surprisingly high proportion have done so repeatedly. In the United Kingdom and 17 other countries with unarmed policemen, being a cop is as safe a job as any other. Separate SWAT teams can respond to unusual situations like hostage standoffs.

“Three strikes” laws turn fugitives into desperados with nothing to lose. These statutes, which incentivize shooting a police officer, should be repealed.

The police should be demilitarized in every respect, including their equipment and their uniforms. When I see a NYPD officer wearing Kevlar, it conveys that he sees me and other New Yorkers as a threat rather than a taxpayer who pays his salary. Cops should lose the bulletproof vests in favor of uniforms designed to look friendly and approachable.

Use of anabolic steroids, which cause aggressive behavior, should be banned. Current recruitment policy, which favors officers hired straight from the battlefields of the Middle East, should be abolished in favor of cultural, social, class, racial and gender diversity.

No little girl or little boy dreams of becoming a cop to write speeding tickets. Municipalities should wean themselves off revenues from traffic stops but until they are able to do so, they should assign their cash-gouging duties to separate traffic enforcement agencies and speeding and red-light cameras. Free the police to focus on public safety.

Similarly, no one ever became a cop because they wanted to deal with crazy people in a psychotic crisis. Social workers and other mental health professionals should be recruited into new social-service agencies specialized in dealing with the mentally ill.

Unless we enact these and other forward-looking changes to American policing, we will continue to see promising young people like Tyre Nichols destroyed by the people paid to protect them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)