>It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.
The George Floyd protests were huge. I don't think it's a simple matter of the public being too complacent.
I'd say that insofar as the protests were unsuccessful, it's because their energy wasn't being directed strategically. There was so much discussion of "defunding the police" without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime.
From a systems-level perspective, telling everyone that police officers are jerks seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice people place a high priority on being well-regarded by others; jerks enjoy opportunities to abuse their power. The "ACAB" slogan exacerbates the problem it describes.
One question I wonder about is whether jurisdictions where the chief of police is elected tend to function better than jurisdictions where they're appointed by the mayor. There are so many dimensions along which mayoral performance can be evaluated, and public safety is just one of those. By squeezing all the dimensions into a single vote, we're limiting the amount of signal that voters can send to their government.
I don't think policing inherently needs to be a malicious activity. My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance, and that police quality changes depending on which US municipality you look at. One wild idea I sometimes dream about: Imagine if each city had multiple competing police departments, and every cop wore the logo of the department they worked for prominently on their shoulder. Then for each local election, voters vote for one or more logos, and police work + funding gets distributed to the competing departments accordingly. Every time you call to report a crime, it gets assigned semi-randomly to one of the departments, and you're told which department got the assignment. Basically, make police brutality and police corruption into a customer satisfaction issue. The very best police chiefs could make millions of dollars starting police companies which effectively served and protected cities across America.
Yeah, I know HN dislikes capitalism. But it's interesting that policing as an industry has very little capitalist competition -- it's entirely organized by the government -- and yet no one seems satisfied with it. I'd argue capitalist competition can work great if companies are competing to succeed at the correct metric. Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.