> Right. So changing the details of the mechanism won't fix anything. And while I suspect the author would like to return to "let the police do what they like, and trust their judgement", that also has problems.
Yes but I feel this is largely resolved with his desire to remove police powers. If police, or at least the majority of, have no powers to abuse, then the potential for abuse is significantly lower.
>But it's not the administrative detection that's the issue there. If you make those arrests/charges you have exactly the same problem. The problem is deciding it's more important to solve 42/43 crimes than solve the murder, and that decision is happening outside of the police power structure.
You miss
>And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day.
The issue isnt with the goal, like you suggest people want these crimes solved. I dont want to pretend laws on the book exactly match community expectations but that is the idea. The issue is that the scheme as described doesnt just require the high manpower option but incentivises it.
His whole shtick is that you lose the intangibles. The parts of policing that cannot be measured. The crimes that are deterred by that beat cop not spending 4 hours after every interaction writing paperwork that needs to be analysed and reviewed by other people.
You take that guy off the street, and then a new crime occurs, another cop has to be dispatched, he needs to follow those leads, file more paperwork etc etc ad nauseum.
Its like, taking vaccines off the shelf because you need statistics about diseases.
Heck your own analogy "doctors save more lives by telling patients to lose weight than by everything else they do put together" is much like the authors assertion that cops preventing more crime just by being a visible presence than all their other work put together.