<p><pre><code> > In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order.
> They were everybody.
</code></pre>
Attributed to John Peel in his establishment of London Metropolitan Police:
“To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to
<i>the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are
the police</i>, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give
full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in
the interests of community welfare and existence.”¹<p>¹ <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles</a>
"<i>Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included.</i>"<p>This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police dangerously disobey the traffic laws. I see them do rolling stops, putting on their lights briefly to get through a red light, or speed up and pass me on the left as I'm making a left turn.<p>One way to do this would be to allow anyone to report traffic violations that they caught on video. So if I record the video of someone committing a violation, I upload the video to the town's website, they send the owner of the license plate a ticket.<p>That said, I thought that most of this article was pretty weak, a lot of meandering, incoherence, and conflation of different ideas.<p>One of the best articles I read on morality, game theory and evolution was here: <a href="http://jim.com/rights.html" rel="nofollow">http://jim.com/rights.html</a> The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.
Have everyone empowered to dispense justice is an interesting proposition, but there's a big difference between insects and people.<p>People aren't all logical, analytic creatures, especially when they operate in groups. They tend to act on emotion rather than logic and it often isn't clear which information is factual and which is rumor. People tend to be susceptible to groupthink, and often go with the crowd.<p>Having everyone dealing out justice might work if everyone was calm, rational, logical, and well-educated, which is often what game theory supposes, but that's not how things work. In reality, I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.<p>Not everyone agrees what is correct behavior and what isn't, so what would be acceptable to one person would not be acceptable to another. We'd get a lot of uncertainty whether our behavior is acceptable or not.<p>If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed by majorities just because they had different standards of what is acceptable behavior. Goodbye civil rights, because those would count for nothing if a member of the minority did something that offended the majority.<p>It seems to me that this is what happens in anarchical places in the world where authority has broken down. Anyone can and will dispense justice. Violence because someone was offended by someone else's behavior (which I find completely non-offensive) is common and mob violence is common.<p>Strong authority often breeds corruption but a lack of authority can also breed disorder and chaos, an environment where people who can gather followers become a strong authority and become corrupt. It's bad either way.
This article, like many, mentions the idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) but does not convincingly connect it to the particular nature of police corruption.<p>An interesting article; still, I tire of seeing so many articles introduce and anchor game theory based on the PD or one particular configuration of it. The PD is frequently overblown, misunderstood, and misapplied. Game theory is much more than the PD.<p>I think it is also worth mentioning that game theory isn't the only game or theory in town when it comes to thinking about society and collective action. For example, systems dynamics is also quite interesting; see Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.<p>To get a handle for police corruption, I'd argue a theory probably should explain how and why:<p><pre><code> * corrupt police do/don't get caught
* corrupt police do/don't rat each other out
* police are/aren't monitored
* police are/aren't incentivized</code></pre>
We don't have to speculate about how widespread power of prosecution might work out; there's history. <a href="http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./Englan...</a> <a href="http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html</a>
It seems like the ubiquity of small recording devices that nearly anyone could own and use (like a cellphone) will have a larger impact on corruption than anything else we could do.<p>You may not have any direct power over the cop that just shook you down for a few hundred, but discretely recording that interaction and posting it on YouTube is likely to end his career in any society.
to be relevant, this same author writes a very interesting piece about pregnancy seen as a war of conflict between mom and infant<p><a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-between-mother-father-and-baby/" rel="nofollow">http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-...</a>
> The results were startling. <i>By making a few alterations to the composition of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a state called ‘righteousness’</i>. In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn’t pay.<p>Is this saying that the justice system <i>is</i> the problem, not law-enforcement?
Can someone tl;dr this? I skimmed it but the florid prose and the lack of any, you know, concrete suggestion (that I could find) really, really put me off (and I'm normally a huge fan of aeon).
This only works if all members of the population share the exact same set of values. Even then, it might be undesirable.<p>Mob stoning individuals for extra martial sex is an example of this behavior.<p>I don't think that would be desirable ..
What is funny is that, if we sum it up with another article of this site :
<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a-good-turn/" rel="nofollow">http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a...</a>
we conclude that a society without corruption (where every bad or coward behaviour are punish) is also a society without creativity !<p>By the way, this is one of the greatest article I have ever read in hacker news. Loved it.
This article has interesting implications for the current attempts to revive community policing, which promotes the idea of police getting more involved and integrated into the communities in which they work, with the hope that they become more trusted and aware of the social landscape in which they are operating.<p>By integrating themselves with the community, they would necessarily fall under the influences of some of the community's norms, and perhaps be better tuned, and also more accountable, to it's norms of righteousness.<p>That may work in many cases, but the article seems to assume that most individuals in any community will promote righteousness in the community's interest.<p>What happens if the community lacks the social norms to enforce righteousness, especially with respect to the property rights and justification of violence? What happens when the "community" is hardly a community at all, but, due to its socioeconomic circumstances, is a place where suspicions of neighbors and incentives to cheat the community are pervasive?<p>Whose job is it to establish the norms of righteousness where they are lacking, or significantly degraded?
On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil liabilities and is priced accordingly.<p>It seems somewhat perverse at first glance, but might actually be a good incentive if carefully structured and actuaries are also one group of people that might actually get somewhere with demanding actual figures from police.
Long story short: If you enable every member of a society to punish abuse, you get a righteous community.<p>But this has been known for quite some time: Transparency can fight corruption. That's why it may be a good Idea to put cameras on policemen, and that publishing public budgets is an inevitable step towards reducing corruption.
Game theory as a subject is something I wish was taught as standard curiculum. It contains so many answers to so many deep and vexing questions and problems of our age, and it holds the promise of so many more. It is among the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.
If your mental model for something is so malleable that it can explain cancer and police corruption the same way, maybe it's not actually providing any insight and all you've done is distort reality to fit it. Just saying... Game theory is so easy to invoke
tl;dr<p>The main strategy:<p>Here’s how it might look in practice. Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another.
The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. This sounds almost laughably simple, and yet the model indicates that it ought to do the trick. It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many online communities.
I thought the article was too lengthy/wordy, so I didn't read it all. I was curious if it described the same anti-corruption approach that I know was once suggested in India: "legalize one side of the corruption". That makes those in a corruption scheme think twice (or more) -- now both sides are equally punishable (thus create a bond by bribing/taking-bribe).<p>That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!
Pretty sure cops see other cops break laws far more serious than speeding and say nothing, every single week.<p>How can you expect any cop to be honest if they watch others break the law and say nothing?<p>You'll never change bad behavior if there is no penalty for that behavior.
Did anyone else read this and think about the ending of The Stand? It's the same problem; as society scales, policing scales and problems start to arise.