So What Do We Do with the Police?

I see a whole lot of protesting, but let's get to some actual suggestions:

1. Do away with police unions. The clown heading up the union in Minneapolis might have helped this cause along quite a bit. One of the problems with trying to reform the police is that the unions have quite a bit of political clout:

Quote:

Take the case of Cecilia Iglesias. As I write this, she’s still a city councilmember in Santa Ana, California, a mostly Latino city of 333,000 in the heart of Orange County. (Full disclosure: Iglesias and I work together at California Policy Center.) By the time you read this, Iglesias will officially be removed from office, a victim of the Santa Ana Police Officers Association’s $500,000 recall campaign against her. Iglesias’s crime: She tried to reform her city’s police department.

Think about that for a second. Santa Ana's police union was able to raise $500,000 to vote out a city councilmember. How were they able to raise that much dough?

Quote:

In February 2019, Iglesias, a self-declared conservative, voted against the police union’s demand for a pay hike. “My reason was simple: we can’t pay what we don’t have,” she recently wrote. “Looking at the city’s already high taxes and massive public debt (what the watchdog group Truth in Accounting called ‘a sinkhole’ and among the worst in California), I could do nothing else.” Echoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, she has openly wondered how much longer the city could underfund essential services in order to pay its government employees — how long before it destroyed from within the public safety it was paying for with higher police salaries. She was outvoted, and the police got their raise.

Gee, can't imagine any other city councilmembers voting against pay raises for the cops anytime soon.

Quote:

A few months later, in October 2019, Iglesias called for the creation of a police-oversight commission. Santa Ana’s police have a difficult job, operating as they do in a dense, relatively poor city. But even grading for that challenge, the police have failed too often. Iglesias figured civilian oversight might eliminate bad cops and offer good ones the hope of reform.

IMHO, you have to get rid of the unions first and that is going to be insanely difficult unless the current national movement pushes in that direction. Citizen Review Boards are fine, but if they don't have real power to fire and/or recommend charges be filed against officers then they are useless.

2. Getting rid of the police. Now an editor at Vice was forced to apologize for saying this was a poorly thought-out idea, so I won't make that mistake. In fact, it is an idea that shows no sign of having been thought-out at all.

Other ideas?

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