With the constant calls against police brutality and radical “friends” on social media calling for the abolition of police mixed in with the postings of example after example of cops being anything but the noble heroes we make them out to be, this makes me ask the question “Can there ever be a police or law enforcement apparatus that is perfect and that won’t cause vivid scorch marks on the nation-wide police badge as a whole?” and the short answer is no. There are around 686,665(1) sworn cops in this country which is about the population of Boston, Massachusetts, with other estimates as high as 850,000 cops (I will use the 686,665-number rounding to 690,000 for all further hypothetical numbers, rounding up to the nearest thousand). I am personally fond of saying that “people are people,” and what this phrase means is that within human nature you’re going to find the best and the worst humanity has to offer. It won’t matter the race or the job description, you’re going to have your racists, your jerks, your scum of the earth mixed in with the most compassionate, most trusting, best person you want within that realm of race, culture, religion, job profession, etc.… and cops are people like everyone else. If you have a force the size of a major city policing a country the size of continental Europe, then you’re going to have some poison soaked toxic apples mixed in with the most sweet honest people you can find. Even if it were just 1% of the police force that was bad then that is still nearly 7,000 people (and chances are it’s more than 1%). Now would it be practical or even realistically feasible to even FIND, never the less expel, these people? No, it’s not, and that is not even taking into account full on Gotham City corrupt to the bone cities and police departments. Of course, we can always do more to try and raise the standards to get the best quality of people, or have better training, and/or prosecute the cops who are bad apples, but bad cops will slip through the cracks and good cops will get unjustly fired. We don’t live in a perfect system and we never will. It sounds cold and callous to say “I’m sorry, we’re just going to have to deal with it and try to do better,” but as of right now that is the best we can do. 7,000 bad cops should not be a reason to defund every police department across the country. On top of that, above 5% is what is usually statistically significant (for our hypothetical that is 34,500 bad cops). So, unless we can create a perfect system the harsh reality is that injustice involving police officers will continue, and if we can keep the number of unjust interactions under whatever that 5% threshold is then we are actually doing pretty good, nationally. With that being said within that less than 5% there will always be very specific instances that people can yell and scream about until they’re blue in the face. In closing, there will never be a perfect system and there will always be bad police officers and unjust police actions and a broken, unfixable, justice system to protect them with little to no justice in this life. We should always strive to do better and have higher standards, but people are people and every system will be broken because people are broken.
(1)https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/
3 replies on “The Myth of Perfection”
If we ‘abolish’ police in places like Minneapolis, where the threat is real, we will end up with sharia law, no-go zones (because there will be no police to go into those areas). And in other places, we will end up w/ vigilante justice…
Defund or abolish police; watch the crime rate skyrocket. Watch crime rate skyrocket, see complaining go through the roof and vigilantes take over. See vigilantes take over, see call for police. Meanwhile during all of this more people die who shouldnt, more property lost to theft and destruction. Wild West all over again with the good citizens cheering when a sheriff comes to town. And the cycle starts anew.
Mr Bradley is correct, it’s not possible to achieve “perfection.” The desire for such impossible flawlessness traces back to Plato, who invented mental abstractions he called “Forms” then made the disastrous mistake that has infected thought ever since: claiming that these abstractions actually exist in reality, in some sort of mystical realm that is inaccessible to humans and is, said Plato, more real than the actual reality we inhabit., who are inferior because they live in the realm of “appearances” – what we know as reality. For example, according to Plato, though triangles we draw in the sand or on paper have rough edges and are made of points and lines that have more than one dimension, “perfect” triangles do in fact exist, though we can never actually detect their presence in any way.
This is incorrect. Sadly, it has driven the ideas of very nearly all influential thinkers from Plato to Aquinas to Kant to Chomsky.
Instead, these “perfect” triangles only exist as conceptual objects in human minds. They have no actual, real existence, anywhere. When a mind that holds such concepts dies, the concepts in that mind go out of existence, though they remain in the minds of the living. This is true of anything that is supposed to exist in some sort of extra-physical “realm” or “plane.” It only exists in the human mind.
My point is that we are long past time for reexamining the way we think of perfection. Regardless of the actual percentage (e.g. in Mr Bradley’s post, 5% of police officers are bad), the goal must be to identify that portion of whatever we’re dealing with that is less than perfect and cannot be eliminated, and start thinking of perfection as an engineering term. In engineering, which deals with real things in the real world, the name of the game is to have everything fit within tolerances. If components fit within those bounds, those components are perfect. Not in the Platonic sense but in the only sense that … well … makes sense … in reality.
Naturally we must strive to make these tolerances as small as possible. That is, if we can get the number of bad cops below 5% then we should. But that number will never be zero – that’s the nature of reality. And reality is all we have to work with.
Sooner or later, too, we run up against that unavoidable economic concept, the law of diminishing returns. Just as we accept that there will be automobile deaths every year and to eliminate them would cost too much (in the broad sense of cost, not just monetary), we have to accept that there will be bad cops. Just like we would have to prohibit all driving to eliminate all automatic deaths, we would have to do away with police altogether to have zero bad cops. The consequences of that, the cost, would be far worse than having that small percentage of bad cops.