Episode 1069 Scott Adams: How to Reimagine Police Work to Free Resources for Social Services

Date: 2020-07-24 | Duration: 16:03

Topics

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Rough Transcript

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Transcript

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• Reimagine Policing

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[0:05]

hey everybody this is a special unexpected uh live stream i want to talk about one topic and one topic only today it's the topic about defunding the police which of course is a provocative thought some people want fewer police presence or less of it some people want more of it
it so the country is being torn apart and i would like to suggest that this is not a question of left or right even though we've made it that way the question of defunding the police should be a technology and systems question in other words we should be thinking of it in terms of a puzzle to solve and not a left problem or a right problem and the puzzle is this how do you get more bang for your buck a very basic corporate business decision how do you take this thing we've been doing policing how do you get as much benefit as you can at the lowest cost and i would say that just thinking of it that way

[1:05]

of it that way would make a big difference and so i would like to say we should think of it more as reimagining the police not defunding them defunding is sort of a
a those are fighting words and we don't need that but i would suggest that we already have in place everything we need or very close to it to be able to do something that really radically reimagines the police so what i'm going to tell you are some things that already exist so if you say to me scott scott scott we will never be able to develop these things you're already behind the times everything i talk about already exists we just have to think about it in this way and it's going to be able to to move us forward it looks like this so you have a current police force with a current budget and a current way of doing things but at the same time there's a little satellite around them of private companies who are doing functions they have in some cases wide

[2:07]

functions they have in some cases wide application but they're also really really good for police and i'll talk about a few of these in a moment if you'd use this model where you let private companies develop new technologies that would make policing way more effective cost effective so it gets the job done at a much lower cost would you like to see these kinds of things experimented with inside the police force in other words inside a government-like entity or would you like to see private entity doing the development and taking the risk it's a rhetorical question the last thing you want is a government entity or something like the police force doing technology innovation right you don't want it there you want it where it is in the private industry now there are a few developments that really make the idea of changing or reimagining how police work is done very practical so when the left says hey

[3:09]

very practical so when the left says hey let's defund the police and make money available for social services i say that is completely doable it is completely doable without losing a thing in policing and because of this new technology that i'll talk about in a moment you can actually get far better police results and i'm talking about multiples of better i'm not talking about a 10 improvement i'm talking about a five times improvement sort of situation here are some examples let's take dna if you are a serial rapist it is possible that the police already have several records of you with your dna because you might be leaving it at each of these sex crimes places but it would be very common for the police to have three separate dna samples for three separate crimes and not know who you are because knowing

[4:11]

and not know who you are because knowing your dna doesn't automatically make you findable approximately 15 percent of sex crimes you can take the dna and actually find the person 85 percent of the time it's just a data and a record and it's a dead end can't find the person but
but the newer dna technologies and we won't get into specific companies i'm going to talk generically now the newer dna they could take the dna from the suspect and they could find their family members and if you find somebody's family members because there are enough people who have dna in different places etc that are accessible if you can find their family members you can pretty much find the suspect almost every time because you just go to uncle bob and you say hey bob do you know anybody in your family who might live in this neighborhood and uncle bob will say yeah that's that's my nephew jason and then

[5:12]

that's that's my nephew jason and then you go check on jason and you've got your suspect so imagine the uh that level of improvement to go from about 15 percent of your cases are solved if i i'm talking about violent rapes 15 1-5 is how many they can identify an external company can get them all can get them all now nothing's 100 right so when i say can get them all you should translate that into your head to you know maybe 90 or something but to go from 1 5 to 90 percent how expensive would that be and here's the kicker not very it's not very expensive in fact there are hundreds of thousands of rape kits in other words the the sample that's been taken from the crime that have not been tested hundreds of thousands of them now most of them will be tested and

[6:14]

now most of them will be tested and they'll go through the system but they will not result in any kind of a match they could go to an external company and say for this reasonable dollar amount can you solve all of our worst cases so you could take for example all of the records that have multiple crimes associated with the same dna and you can say to this company look we've got five dna samples from five different rapes and we don't know who this is how many drugs do you how many crimes do you prevent if you take a serial rapist off the streets maybe a lot you could end up solving or not solving but preventing 10 rapes by getting you one serial rapist and likewise i suppose if it's some other kind of violent crime that leaves dna so imagine how much is being left you know sort of on the table of free money because this isn't

[7:15]

of free money because this isn't completely being used at the moment and that's just one example imagine having facial recognition widely available for the police imagine the police have a suspect get a photo somehow and they can identify them now you have the problem with african-american faces or harder to identify but apparently that is not common to all of the different facial technologies there are some that are actually good at distinguishing african-american faces and some are not so if you hear some stories about facial recognition has problems with black citizens that's true but it's not true of all the technologies or at least not as true and and certainly uh there's something about the process that can be done better right and we i talked about this on a separate periscope that if you have a match you think you have a match and you go to the suspect's house to find out if your facial recognition got the right person you should at least bring the picture

[8:16]

you should at least bring the picture with you so you can hold it up and when the person answers the door you can say uh okay we didn't get a match this time it's obvious i'm looking at you i'm looking at the picture it's not you sorry to bother you so there's something that could be done differently in the system to make the technology even more bulletproof likewise police are already using drones you can imagine uh private drone companies being able to take the risk away from the police and to just try some stuff and it works or it doesn't work and then the police can watch it they can decide to do more of it or less imagine if you will i'm just brainstorming here imagine if you will if private drone companies made a bunch of deals to put drones on rooftops just staged in various places around the city i'm just making this up this doesn't exist and imagine if there was a crime and the police force had a deal with the drone company and they said look we've got a crime in this neighborhood

[9:18]

we've got a crime in this neighborhood can you get us some eyes on it drone takes off and takes pictures and they get the best look at look at things that they can if the drone has a good camera then you got your facial recognition all right so some of these are being done in some fashion but what you'll find is uh you're gonna say to yourself well scott you've just described a perfectly good system so is this already working is it isn't this already working because why wouldn't it be the police know about these technologies in most cases they know about them why aren't they using them some are some are not but why isn't it just like widespread just this is the way you do it and the reason is bureaucracy the reason is the left and the right the battle over you know turf the nobody wants to be to lose their job on the old system that's not working how do you how do you get anything done in a bureaucracy it's all that stuff

[10:19]

in a bureaucracy it's all that stuff but as as these technologies prove themselves with the police entities that do use them and they're all being tested somewhere as they're being tested it will be impossible to ignore them because if you have one city that is solving all of its sex crimes just think about that suppose you had one city that said we don't have any backlog we solved them all just give us the dna we'll solve it for you too how does how does chicago just to use an example how do they not do this if some other city let's say baltimore tries it out and it just works and they not do something that's so obviously good and works and saves money now the idea is that each of these technologies is so much more effective than what the police are doing already that it should take the amount of resources they need way down would the police be in favor of this let's say the individual police officer not talking about bureaucracy not talking about left or

[11:21]

bureaucracy not talking about left or right or the mayor or anybody else would the individual police officer be happier if these technologies were more widely deployed i think yes they'd be happier on a number of levels number one if you're a police officer don't you like to solve crimes of course you do what what is better if you're a police officer than actually doing good work and solving crimes and making your community a better place you probably get a raise so that's all good but i would argue that also there's a secondary benefit which is really big it's really big which is if you're a police officer all of these entities which you would then be working closely with become a career path because wouldn't it be good to have a you know experienced police officer working on your drone startup you know working on any of your other startups that have policing technology involved

[12:24]

so this is the basic idea uh you'll notice there's some themes i'm pulling together one is that uh a b testing is always the way to go if you can if something can be tested and to do it large you know and to roll it out everywhere would be really expensive well then test is small this is the perfect situation for testing as small now the other thing that's working here the other big theme is changing the system of course it's a it's a change in the system instead of moving all of the functions of police within the police organization and budget you can move some of it out to private corporations and de-risk it in other words the private corporation can take all of the risks that a police entity could not and i'm not talking about life and death risks you know nobody should be taking those i'm talking about just something that might be embarrassing if it didn't work something that if if a police put their budget into it and then it failed

[13:25]

and then it failed well that'd be bad for the police bad for everybody so you take that risk and you just move it into places where people like risks venture capitalists entrepreneurs they like risk so move it where they like it and it won't hurt the rest of the the people until it's proven um i'm looking at the comments it says scott does not talk about the real problem which is the wickedness and the hearts of people well that might be a different periscope somebody else is going to have to do that but i do make the following claim that there are a lot of things that look like there are problems of the left and problems of the right and not not agreeing this is not one of them this is a problem that has artificially been put into the world of politics because everything is but it has nothing to do with politics there's nobody in the world who wouldn't like better police police effectiveness with less violence

[14:27]

police effectiveness with less violence and a lower cost there isn't anybody who doesn't want that and so if you take it out of the political realm and put it in the economic realm the entrepreneur realm the you know the realm where ideas actually work and can be tested well then you've got a solution that works for everybody and of course language gets us in trouble because it is what i just described a case of defunding the police kind of yeah because the ultimate result would be the police would be far more effective and there's also another impact on top of this imagine you're a criminal some of you might be criminals so it's easy to imagine imagine you're a criminal and in today's world if you did a violent rape you could get identified 0.15 not 0.15 15 of the time that's not much of a disincentive is it because a lot of people who are you know inclined to crime if they see there's

[15:28]

inclined to crime if they see there's only a 15 chance of even by being identified you might be you might be willing to do the crime suppose you had a 90 chance of getting caught would you do the crime some people will and they'll be caught they'll be caught but they won't do a second crime because they got caught after the first so that's my idea i thought i'd put that out there for a comment and i'd love to see your feedback so give me your comments and we'll go from there