I’m angry and sad by what feels like stalled progress towards more equitable policing in this country. And have been feeling discouraged which doesn’t help anybody. Thanks to the push by @itsafronomics, I’ve thought more about how economics can help improve policing.

Bocar Ba has great work documenting how difficult it is to report police abuse and the benefits of making it easier: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rado79zmhynkb89/final_BBa_2018.pdf?dl=0

Officers involved in high profile use of force incidents almost always have a long history of complaints https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/officer-charged-george-floyds-death-used-fatal-force-before-had-history-complaints/

The issue is these officers keep their jobs despite the reports.

Economists have been influential in advocating for performance-based pay and job retention in education.

Police officers are in similarly strong public sector unions. But their bad performance can result in innocent people dying and creates distrust between communities and the government.

We should similarly advocate for replacing police officers with bad track records. This hopefully could have political support from both parties.

Improving the police force should actually be easier than improving teaching. There are about 3.5 million teachers and about 800,000 law enforcement officers.

@EmilyWeisburst shows there is a lot of heterogeneity in police behavior. We should invest in recruiting the best of them!

While there is debate in the literature, Bocar and coauthors show that a more diverse police force may reduce the use of excess force: https://www.dropbox.com/s/up3t05nuyps1hph/BKMR_RacialEthnicDiversityPolicing.pdf?dl=0