I like Mr. Yglesias' post of cops here, and I think he gets it pretty much right. I think he give liberals too much credit by claiming they have a virtuous desire with regards to cops, BUT I read it as kind of a push narrative to try to box liberals into a virtuous direction.
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/10/28/355903/cops-and-robbers/
There aren't a lot of champions for "Internal Affairs" -they're generally the villians (even when they're the "good guys" they're not set up to be the fan favorites) in entertainment, so I can't hate on Mr. Yglesias in his attempt to label them natural agents of a neoliberal agenda.
It's smart and virtuous for Mr. Yglesias to link study of police reform to study of education reform -although I'm a bit turned around by good arguments from his comment section that US education already performs really good by global standards, and so it may be rather wasteful to overfocuse on "educational reform" relative to more "real" and low-hanging American deficiencies. I don't know if the same or true or not regarding a comprehensive look at policing in the US.
But overall, a comprehensive look at police is legitimately macrosocial, and hence likely defensible as an object of regular attention, in contrast to something like the death penalty, which effects a tiny percentage of Americans and people in the world and yet attracts mindshare for non-technocratic reasons, it seems to me.
I was thinking of you when I saw that post. People were complaining about how teachers are not like police (or teaching badly is different from committing a crime) but his point about monitoring the providers of public goods still stands.
ReplyDelete