# Are there any practical improvements that can be made to American policing? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 26, 2014, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698 "2014-11-26T18:01:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Habeed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@Habeed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Habeed)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/21 "2014-11-27T05:40:45Z")
> [@XT](#): > > We were looking at costs more like $25-30k per year per officer in the end when you factored in everything (i.e. this was the cost of doing this as a project projected over 5 years)…this was like buying them a new car every year for 5 years. You were looking at doing it using the most expensive and least efficient possible way to do it. Why would you expect every police department to maintain their own digital evidence vault? That is simply asking for possible problems, as well as costing about 10x as much. Taser International offers [evidence.com](http://evidence.com), which is centrally managed by their own people. If you don’t trust them, there are or will be competing providers. Frankly this is probably something that should be overseen by a federal agency, to ensure that no one is able to delete information without many layers of vetting. ---
**Author:** ![handsomeharry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9c0ed/32.png) [@handsomeharry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handsomeharry)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/22 "2014-11-27T08:35:30Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > The Ferguson shooting has ignited a lot of criticism of our police officers. I’d like to discuss if there are any practical improvements that can be made. > > A few comments to get us started. > > 1. Internal Affairs has steadily improved policing in the past 70 years. A lot of the graft and payoffs associated with the cop on the beat are pretty much eliminated these days. Most cops don’t walk a beat anymore and don’t have that type of contact with shopkeepers. Same thing with unnecessary force. IA has broad powers to investigate any complaints of graft or excessive force. There may be room for improvement. I don’t know. > > 2. Cops absolutely must believe that their bosses have their backs. This is just basic common sense. If a cop has to use deadly force a fair investigation is warranted. But, automatically assigning a special prosecutor and putting the cop on trial for murder isn’t. There has to be some latitude in judging what the cop did. The cop is the person risking their life and making the split second decisions. Only the most egregious and clear violations of police procedure should be prosecuted. Terminations are certainly an option for cops that routinely rough up suspects. There’s no excuse for excessive force unless their live is in jeopardy. Once again, IA is already in place to investigate any complaints or allegations. > > Otherwise it’s going to be almost impossible to find people willing to serve as police. Nobody is going to do this job if a murder trial is automatic after the use of deadly force. > > What can be done to improve policing? Are more powers needed for IA? Maybe an independent review? What will help? > > I know Brown’s lawyers called for a special prosecutor to investigate police shootings in their press conference. I can’t see that working. It would destroy police moral. No one will do this job with that kind of legal sword over their head. 1. More firings for shooting/tasing unarmed citizens. Cops are too prone to shoot non-assailants. 2. Prosecute officers using EXACT standards as non-officers. 3. Have officers trained to wait, rather than go in all cowboy and shoot up the place. It’s much cheaper/healthier for the cops to wait, even at the risk of a standoff, than to kill somebody who ‘could’ be a danger. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/23 "2014-11-27T09:35:18Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Back of the envelope math ([link](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/12/police-body-cameras/15522059/)): > > Adjust this out for the roughly 780,000 cops in the US, and it would be about $2.6 billion. Lots of money, sure, but this isn’t a cost per year, and for the whole country, it’s about $8 per capita. Over 5 years. Not really that much. Different country, I know, but since the Nigerian Oil Industry managed to slick away $20 billion earlier this year, I’m sure the money could be found somehow. Maybe big companies could be persuaded to sponsor the project; as they do sports and art. > [@XT](#): > > Say that 1 hour of video at a decent frame rate and high definition is about 10 GB of storage. I’ve seen 1080p video files on the internet that now average about 860 MB for 20 minutes. Down from around 1.3 GB a year ago. Encoding is leaping ahead. No doubt the NSA spends an awful amount on storage with no complaints. > [@Terr](#): > > Add to that costs for maintenance, depreciation of equipment and hiring tens of thousands of people to deal with storing/maintaining all this data. So, more jobs ! ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/24 "2014-11-27T14:07:40Z")
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is community based policing/outreach. It’s been successful in my city. The focus is on building trust and relationships within community. The hope is to avoid the alienation and anger that’s seen in Ferguson. Keeping funding for the neighborhood alert centers is challenging, but they seem to work. > **[City of Little Rock, Arkansas - Capital City - Pulaski County | City of...](https://www.littlerock.gov/)** > > Littlerock.gov lets you can pay city fines online, gather information about various city services, or meet the Mayor. Sign up to receive up-to-date e-newsletters, adopt a pet, or learn more about a city task force. > [@](#): > > Community Oriented Police (COPP) officers work out of the Neighborhood Alert Centers to develop a working relationship with neighbors for overall safety and crime reduction. The Little Rock Police Department implemented the program, originally consisting of nineteen (19) Police Officers assigned to intensified patrols in various neighborhoods throughout the City, in June 1992. These original patrols areas were selected on the basis of citizen requests for service concerning targeted offenses (drug, property crimes), crime statistics, the proximity of schools and recreational facilities, and the anticipated locations of Alert Centers. Depending upon the specific areas and the terrain, these Officers either walk, ride a bicycle, or ride a horse to accomplish their patrols. Officers on horseback are often assigned to parks or hilly areas of the City. The Bicycle Officers are often assigned to central portions of the City where the streets are flatter and there are fewer sidewalks. The foot patrols are assigned to neighborhoods much smaller in size where they can be visible and serve as a crime deterrent. > > Although Officers in the community policing program work substantially smaller beats, community oriented policing is not simply a “cop on a small beat” program. Instead, the smaller beats provide residents with the opportunity to get to know an Officer and for the Officer to meet neighbors and become aware of neighborhood issues and dynamics. The program fosters bonds between the citizens of the neighborhoods and the Police Officers who serve them, opens new channels of communications and understanding, and provides neighborhoods with an effective resource tool to assist in improvements in the physical appearance, safety and sense of security in the neighborhood. As community oriented policing is to be a pro-active approach to fighting crime and an attempt to get to the root causes of problems, COPP Officers are encouraged to actively participate in neighborhood activities and projects and to explore solutions to area problems beyond the traditional law enforcement framework. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/25 "2014-11-27T14:43:32Z")
My neighborhood has benefited from these new programs. Various city officials and police have met with our neighborhood association. We had a park that was on the boundary of our neighborhood. It was a source of drug dealing and prostitution. We worked with the city 15 years ago to adopt the park. Neighborhood volunteers spent weekends picking up the trash and bottles. The city installed gates to block the road and keep people out late at night. Volunteers from our neighborhood association lock the gates each night and open them in the morning. Suspicious activity during the day is reported and we’ve turned things around. Code enforcement works closely with us to keep the neighborhood looking well maintained and not run down. It makes a difference in the crime. Its a daily battle keeping this neighborhood from going under. A lot of our long term residents (many of them original home owners from the 1950’s) are dying off and their homes become rent houses. Rent houses typically aren’t maintained like private homes. We request increased patrols when break ins start to rise. They are also trying to help with the gang problem. This is all part of community based policing where multiple resources are used to save neighborhoods from inner city blight. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/26 "2014-11-27T16:43:00Z")
> [@Habeed](#): > > You were looking at doing it using the most expensive and least efficient possible way to do it. Why would you expect every police department to maintain their own digital evidence vault? That is simply asking for possible problems, as well as costing about 10x as much. > > Taser International offers [evidence.com](http://evidence.com), which is centrally managed by their own people. If you don’t trust them, there are or will be competing providers. Frankly this is probably something that should be overseen by a federal agency, to ensure that no one is able to delete information without many layers of vetting. Their price is $20 per 10 GB…that’s actually more than the example that Terr used and not even close to 10x as much as our solution. And you are also going to need the infrastructure to upload all of that data to them, since they are a cloud based solution. A lot of police stations I’m familiar with still have T1 or even DSL links unless they are connected to a larger county or state network, and even then the norm is something like 100mb/s for the high speed sites. We are talking about terabytes of data for what these guys are proposing. There are pros and cons to doing it the way you are saying, and it’s really not as much of a no-brainer as you seem to think. Regardless of whether you build it yourself or you pay a provider for it and build your infrastructure to allow of massive amounts of uploaded video data it’s going to cost a hell of a lot and won’t be as easy as some in this thread obviously think it will. I can’t speak to whether or not it will be useful. If we are trying to prevent or find out more about cop shootings, I think this is throwing a lot of money at a pretty small issue numbers wise. That said, I think that this technology can and should be used (I’ve been pushing for it in my state, as well as a reliable wireless data network the police can use and a more reliable and extensive simulcast radio network, especially for the more rural areas and counties where radio communications are either non-existent or poor/unreliable). The biggest hurdle is funding. People here seem to think that money just pours into the police and fire/rescue and they are swimming in the stuff, while the reality is the opposite and they have to fight for every penny. In addition, these guys are cops, with a cops viewpoint and attitude…they would MUCH rather have a new car or weapon or body armor, etc, than, say, data communications in their car or cameras either in the car or on themselves, or even a radio system that has greater coverage, requires less manual manipulation from dispatch and just works better. They just don’t think in those terms, so you have to convince them that they DO need that stuff…and then they have to convince the money people in turn. ---
**Author:** ![Habeed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@Habeed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Habeed)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/27 "2014-11-27T17:53:41Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Their price is $20 per 10 GB…that’s actually more than the example that Terr used and not even close to 10x as much as our solution. 860 megabytes per 20 minutes as given above. 2.5 gigs per hour. $60 per 12 hour shift. $22k per year. Fair enough, it’s much more expensive than I thought. The simplest fix for this would be to keep 2 versions of each video, a high quality version and a low quality version. (or transcode the high to the low later). For videos that are not “of interest”, after about 6 months you delete the high quality version. (the low quality version would retain a good audio stream, and it would store both a low resolution 30 fps video and a series of high quality key frames taken every few seconds) You could save 10x the space doing that, reducing the storage cost to 2.2k a year and a no brainer. Any arrest where a use of force report was made, a search was performed, etc should automatically be kept in the high quality version forever. The reason you cannot just delete the videos entirely - and you should record an officer’s entire shift - should be obvious. This is not just a matter of stopping a “handful” of wrongful shootings. It’s about maintaining the public trust. Did Wilson say “get the fuck out of the street” or did he ask more politely? Did an officer really have probable cause to search? Were the drugs really the suspect’s or were they planted? Even if almost all cops _are_ honest, an indelible record of their words and actions lets us verify their integrity and disprove the countless accounts of misconduct made against them. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/28 "2014-11-27T18:04:13Z")
You are preaching to the choir…I love technology solutions, and love doing this stuff. I’m pointing out that the reality is you aren’t going to get the public or the elected officials to pony up the cash to do any of this. I’d love for it to be funded, but I know how funding works and what a fight it is to get really, truly necessary equipment and technology, and how often it doesn’t get done or gets done half assed. [QUOTE=Habeed] The simplest fix for this would be to keep 2 versions of each video, a high quality version and a low quality version. (or transcode the high to the low later). For videos that are not “of interest”, after about 6 months you delete the high quality version. (the low quality version would retain a good audio stream, and it would store both a low resolution 30 fps video and a series of high quality key frames taken every few seconds) You could save 10x the space doing that, reducing the storage cost to 2.2k a year and a no brainer. Any arrest where a use of force report was made, a search was performed, etc should automatically be kept in the high quality version forever. The reason you cannot just delete the videos entirely - and you should record an officer’s entire shift - should be obvious. [/QUOTE] The trouble with all of this is you are assuming you can arbitrarily change statutes and laws based on technical ways to save money. In my experience you can’t. A lot of government agencies (especially local ones) don’t want to even store electronic images (hell, I’ve had elected officials complain about storing VOICE MAIL) because once you do that a whole lot of regulations and statutes kick in because of stuff like freedom of information. It’s a huge hassle and it puts large costs onto things to comply…and while there are plenty of ways to engineer better or cheaper solutions the folks who monitor the statutes and regulations don’t give a shit (many or most of them aren’t tech people and a lot have an almost innate distrust of technology…they like paper and files). ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/29 "2014-11-27T18:27:12Z")
End the territorial monopoly on the use of force and remove barriers to entry for competing private security firms. ---
**Author:** ![Habeed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@Habeed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Habeed)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/30 "2014-11-27T18:35:44Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > End the territorial monopoly on the use of force and remove barriers to entry for competing private security firms. Are you saying that just to troll or do you have genuine arguments to make? If I pay a subscription fee to a specific private police service, will they turn a blind eye to any crimes that I have committed? If I get into a dispute with someone and we have subscriptions to competing police services, will the competing cops each try to arrest the other service’s client? What if management pressures the private cops to make more arrests (because they get to collect fines per arrest and thus increase their profits) or pressures them to make less arrests (because it reduces costs)? Have you thought about how policing, like roads, power lines, utility plumbing, and other services occupies a natural monopoly? It isn’t efficient to maintain 2+ independent services for the same area because you have to duplicate all patrols, duplicate all administrative overhead, and so on. What this means in practice is, in most areas there will only be 0-2 private police forces competing with the public option. That in turn eliminates most of the benefits you get from a free market, leaving you with something that actually costs more and provides worse services than the government in many cases. Poor and destitute people won’t be covered at all by private police forces, right? This includes people who _were_ productive members of society last month until they ran out of money to pay their subscription fees. And so on. ---
**Author:** ![Grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/31 "2014-11-27T18:47:54Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > End the territorial monopoly on the use of force and remove barriers to entry for competing private security firms. Lovely. Let’s give the poor yet another aspect of the justice system they can’t afford. ---
**Author:** ![Habeed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@Habeed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Habeed)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/32 "2014-11-27T18:49:10Z")
> [@XT](#): > > (many or most of them aren’t tech people and a lot have an almost innate distrust of technology…they like paper and files). Yikes. I was thinking the next, obvious thing to do would be to use the high quality videos as part of the arrest reports themselves (which would be digital). The arrest report would just be a summary written by the officer of the highlights of the incident and details such as what they were thinking and things not visible in the video. They’d embed links in the arrest report to a specific timestamps in a specific video. (and the act of doing so would prevent the high quality copy from being deleted for the sections of the video the arrest report links to) Ditto for everything else. And it would all work using cloud apps that store the application state for a specific officer on the cloud, with the officer using an android tablet or desktop as a thin client. (that way if an officer’s tablet breaks he could just log in to a different one, it would download from the cloud all his application settings so that everything is exactly like it was on the previous system) Document edits would be layered as snapshots on top of each other so that nothing can ever be deleted. Mouldering paper files that can get easily lost and tampered with and require a person to physically sift through them to find stuff? No thanks. Plus for every piece of paperwork an officer fills out that is electronic, you could have the system automatically fill in repeated information. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/33 "2014-11-27T19:18:22Z")
> [@Habeed](#): > > Are you saying that just to troll or do you have genuine arguments to make? > > If I pay a subscription fee to a specific private police service, will they turn a blind eye to any crimes that I have committed? Crimes you committed would be against the property of another. Their service would take issue with this regardless of whether you have the same service for obvious reasons. > [@](#): > > If I get into a dispute with someone and we have subscriptions to competing police services, will the competing cops each try to arrest the other service’s client? It would be beneficial for both firms to have agreements with competing firms on how to settle these disputes. > [@](#): > > What if management pressures the private cops to make more arrests (because they get to collect fines per arrest and thus increase their profits) or pressures them to make less arrests (because it reduces costs)? When you arrest someone you would have to show cause or else it would be an abduction case. Making less “arrests” or other interventions would mean a decrease in services provided, and likely customers lost. > [@](#): > > Have you thought about how policing, like roads, power lines, utility plumbing, and other services occupies a natural monopoly? It isn’t efficient to maintain 2+ independent services for the same area because you have to duplicate all patrols, duplicate all administrative overhead, and so on. You are a supporter of govt. For your own sake, do not bring administrative overhead into the mix. Natural monopoly theory is flawed in all cases, but it particularly falls short here. It’s not inefficient for competing burger joints, grocery stores, and credit unions. All have “duplicate” divisions. > [@](#): > > Poor and destitute people won’t be covered at all by private police forces, right? This includes people who _were_ productive members of society last month until they ran out of money to pay their subscription fees. A) Poor and destitute people have less to protect. Their fees would be much smaller than the neighborhood Wal Mart or bank. Yet, the Wal Mart and bank both have incentives to keep the neighborhood safe. B) the main attribute a consumer would look for when buying protection services would be trustworthiness. A firm that was seen as a stalwart of the community would enjoy revenues in excess of the marginal costs associated with a few delinquent payers. [And so on](http://mises.org/sites/default/files/Chaos%20Theory_2.pdf). ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/34 "2014-11-27T20:06:28Z")
There are plenty of police forces in this country and around the world that don’t have bad community relations, and have the confidence of their community. We should be trying to emulate these police forces, not throw them all out and try some experimental private security force with a profit motive that’s never been successful before. Do we really want to go back to the Pinkertons? ---
**Author:** ![InfiniteJest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/eada6e/32.png) [@InfiniteJest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/InfiniteJest)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/35 "2014-11-27T20:46:10Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Back of the envelope math ([link](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/12/police-body-cameras/15522059/)): > > Adjust this out for the roughly 780,000 cops in the US, and it would be about $2.6 billion. Lots of money, sure, but this isn’t a cost per year, and for the whole country, it’s about $8 per capita. Over 5 years. Not really that much. Come on. Econ 101. The NYPD likely already has a lot of the necessary IT infrastructure in place to handle processing and storing the captured footage. The cost of existing infrastructure likely isn’t included in the calculation. Your extrapolation is like saying hey, I can make five shirts an hour in my shirt factory. There are 7 billion people in this world, so if everyone made shirts, we could have 7 billion times five shirts a hour. Hold your horses, young 'un! ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/36 "2014-11-27T20:54:24Z")
> [@InfiniteJest](#): > > Come on. Econ 101. The NYPD likely already has a lot of the necessary IT infrastructure in place to handle processing and storing the captured footage. The cost of existing infrastructure likely isn’t included in the calculation. It was the NOPD (New Orleans), not NYPD. But extrapolating a moderate city’s police force out to a country’s police force is not that outrageous – at the very least, this shows that moderate to big city police forces could do this with significant but not break-the-bank costs. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/37 "2014-11-27T21:03:55Z")
> [@Habeed](#): > > Are you saying that just to troll or do you have genuine arguments to make? Do not accuse other posters of trolling outside The BBQ Pit. [/Moderating] ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/38 "2014-11-27T21:06:42Z")
> [@yellowjacketcoder](#): > > Whether you think that’s because cops stop beating people or perps quit making false accusations, it’s hard to be upset with the results. It’s probably a bit of both. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/39 "2014-11-27T22:39:39Z")
> [@XT](#): > > I just want to point out that this would be a huge cost. How much do grand juries, trials, hospital treatment and deaths cost? I’m guessing some body cameras would be an economical alternative. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2014, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698/40 "2014-11-28T00:08:50Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > How much do grand juries, trials, hospital treatment and deaths cost? I’m guessing some body cameras would be an economical alternative. Again, you are preaching to the choir. I totally agree, and I think they should have the things. I, however, know the reality, which is that the folks who decide whether to get them won’t pony up the money until something happens that makes them do it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-practical-improvements-that-can-be-made-to-american-policing/705698.md?page=3)