Police and the Post-Scarcity Economy

Police and the Post-Scarcity Economy

I am going to slow-down on the number of bad cops stories I post.

At this point I think I have done my share to raise awareness that the abuse of power by our police is far beyond a few bad apples.

Just the staggering stat that 50% of the women married to cops report domestic violence - it begs the question how many cops do not beat their wives?

Then you get into the 1100 citizens executed last year.

And the wholly idiotic trade of 9 of our Constitutional Rights 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 13th and 14th for an illusionary 2nd.

And finally you get to the War on Drugs that wreaks chaos and evil across the entire western hemisphere with tens of thousands killed and millions incarcerated for corporate profit.

USA Police are broken. It is terrible, change the channel right? No. Please don’t.

This abuse and terror that we are experiencing with our police are at the very center of the transition from a scarcity based economy to a post scarcity economy. The police are the unwitting scouts going forward into the darkest territory of surplus people we just do not need. I think the police are going to serve a critical role in our survival of the existential pressures from post-scarcity economics.

We do not need the police.

What!? Many of you will stop reading here.

Or at least we do not need ~90% of them.

How is that possible? Every year we hire more and more cops, War on Crime! Fear!

So what do the cops actually do?

For the most part they issue traffic fines and arrest people for non-violent drug offenses.

For scale, total property crime in the USA from 6m crimes resulted in $15.5 billions dollars of property loss. Or about the budget of NASA is stolen from properties crimes. Big number. Scary. Good thing we have all of those cops out there stopping property crimes right?

Let’s dig into these numbers a little bit.

But first, I have personally stopped and physically citizen arrested 2 purse-snatchers, 1 attempted vehicle theft, as well as stopped a home break-in. So, I am definitely not to be accused of being soft on thieves and robbers. Plenty of people do the right thing and step up when they see a crime in progress. I don’t have any handy stats, but I suspect the vast majority of thefts that are stopped are stopped from citizens. That only makes sense because cops can’t be everywhere.

So thieves cost us $15.5B a year in property losses. But did you know that the police collect $6B a year from us just from *speeding* tickets. It is challenging to find a national revenue report from all municipalities from the various fines, and given that in California running a red-light even at low speed runs a minimum of $550 and is double a CA speeding ticket, I believe it is a fairly conservative estimate that the police themselves take ~$15B a year from us in traffic and parking fines.

In Oakland at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse, where Commissioner Taylor Culver reigns over his courtroom with sarcastic humor. During a red-light camera trial on a recent afternoon, when one defendant asked for a reduction in his fine, Culver boomed, “Nobody here is special or better than anybody. There’s nobody here special but me.”

In another case, Culver cut off a defendant’s comments by saying, “Just tell me about the money. How are you going to pay?”

On top of the traffic fine revenue, the police have been seizing more and more of our assets through asset forfeiture is running at $500M and growing. Even with the recent announcement that Federal Government would slow its role in asset forfeiture, actual cash seized is expected to continue to rise from the state and local level.

Seizing cash from citizens is such a big business that many small and medium sized towns are addicted to the revenue flows and would go bankrupt without this money. So many stories are out there with a casual google search. It has gotten so bad that even many red-state legislatures have passed laws capping how much revenue a town can extract from motorists passing through.

Then you have the War on Drugs with just 7% of our 2.3m incarcerated for violent crimes. Between the police and prison industries we shell out $150B a year in tax spending. *AND* then we pay another $15-17B for traffic, parking, and asset forfeiture. So altogether we are spending $170 Billion a year to protect us from $16B a year of property crime.

We are spending $11 to stop losing $1, and we still lose that $1.

Obviously that is an simple analysis, but I like to frame problems at a high-level before digging into the small stuff.

Sure cops bust do some good, otherwise all of 2nd amendment citizens would have risen up and taken out the police by now. (Right?)

7% of the 2.3m incarcerated prison industry is protecting us from violent crimes, but not rapes - too long to discuss here, but our law enforcement industry simply does not do its job when it comes to processing crimes against women & girls, and even rapes against men and boys. So we cannot give them much credit there. How about crimes of child abuse? No, not much credit can I give them there.

How about stopping murderers and serial killers? Well, frankly we would have at least 10x less homicides if we enacted rational gun regulations, and the police themselves represent 10% of the gun homicides. Fine, let’s keep the detectives that investigate rapes, murders and serial killers. That is less than 10% of the police.

Now, we could stop here and argue back and forth for a while. But this is not the interesting point. That was only background material to get you to question what net value add are the police delivering today against their costs today. Now, imagine that their value gets diminished another 10x.

Driverless cars are going to kick 90% of the police to the curb. We *already* do not need the cops when they can go on strike in NYC and issue 92% fewer tickets and NYC just happier - no mayhem. Imagine when there are no opportunities to issue tickets for traffic or parking. They will not even be able to ticket for broken tail-lights, because it is inevitable that we no longer personally own cars. The nationwide fleet of cars will be reduced by 99% and those cars that do exist will be owned by Uber, Google and Apple and they certainly will not put up with bullshit tickets.

And all the while driverless cars are coming down the pipe, Americans are no longer willing to put up with the bullshit War on Drugs, it is obvious that Marijuana will be legal across the USA inside of a generation, and that alone destroys 50% of the product-line of the prison industry.

Now imagine:

1) no more traffic and parking ticket revenues

2) no more war on drugs

3) sensible gun regulations (homicides approach a first world country)

The prison industry would shrink to no more than 50% its current size (and you still would be keeping way too many people in prison to feed the slave labor market), the 90%+ of the police would not have any work to do, and the municipalities couldn’t pay for them because they no longer have the traffic and parking fines or drug arrests.

Police and prisons are a huge industry of mostly high-school educated, blue collar workers who will have been trained to be militarily aggressive and practice a regressive tax collection regime. A particular skillset indeed.

We would only really *need* 10% of them to handle violent crime and follow-up on property crimes (just from current stats). We *do* need more work on cyber security and identify theft crimes, but that is not a role that local police would be able to serve in a meaningful capacity. Why? They do not have the education, and cyber crime is not bound to a locality for the most part.

So what will we do with 2 million unemployed cops and prison workers? Their skills - being armed as a military unit, and having unlimited powers over citizens including summary execution is an airplane laden with explosive fuel looking for a runway. They are going to land that plane one way or another. We already have chronic problems with (too many) police being organized criminals themselves - from Serpico to modern pedophilia rings.

It will get worse. If you consider that the police are responsible for 10% of gun homicides now and that their property thefts are equal to all other property crimes now, with 2 million former cops unemployed and low on cash they will use their skills they know.

Like in Mexico, the ex-police will resort to kidnapping and extortion to get money to replace their lost incomes.

Everyone knows about Somali pirates. What people do not know is where they came from: During and after the civil wars, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other nations’ industrial fishermen started fishing in Somali waters. As the Somalis were distracted and devastated from war, they couldn’t afford to fund their own coast guard. Emboldened the asian fishing fleet moved closer and closer in, until they were taking freaking shellfish from the Somali shores. Hungry, war-torn and altogether desperate Somali fisherman looked at the AK-47 in their hands, and their fishing boat empty of fish, and the asian flagged fleet off their shore and connected the dots. They fought back against the internationally illegal poaching of their waters. They had to out of *existential* need. This caused them to gain even more skills on water-borne guerilla warfare - piracy! Now they are good at it.

Now imagine if we had helped the Somalis during their civil war. Not too much mind you, what if we had simply acted on their behalf and been their coast guard. Their fisheries would not have been violated and they wouldn’t have been trained into being effective pirates.

We will probably need to expand the ranks of the FBI and ATF to combat and reign-in disillusioned police would become redundant and cannot find their way in the new economy.

But a better path would be Basic Income. We can ignore the fate of the police and tell them to fuck themselves, learn to code! But that is just silly immature Libertarianism. We will need to actively engage with these redundant police. Sure some of them will learn to code. Some can learn sustainable organic permaculture, some could go install solar panels and windmills. But most of them we will just not need. Some may be willing to work for minimum wage service jobs, but due to automation we will have *fewer* of these jobs available in the future and we will have more and more people competing for these shitty, low-paying jobs.

We will need to pay the police do nothing. And they will not be happy with food stamps and some scraps of welfare. They will want their past standard of living of middle-class Americans complete with vacations, sick time, 3 bedroom homes with a pool, and all of their benefits today.

We will need to pay 2 million police ~$50-80k a year to do nothing.

And that will be GREAT.

Basic Income is inevitable and the police are a perfect marriage between existential needs and threats, backed up by a good veneer of romantic imagery of public service.

So, the cops today do not know it, but I believe they are the tip of the spear that will usher in Basic Income, not just for themselves, but for all Americans. By 2050 I think we will have the equivalent of ~$50k basic income for all citizens, and the minimum wage if you choose to work will be ~$25 per hour. There is enough money in the economy to do this today, and if you consider the explosive effect of all adult Americans with $50-100k of annual income instead of median $35k today, the economy would expand aggressively for 2-3 decades.

Honestly, the downside to all of this would be increased CO2 from our expanded economy, but that would be for another post.

Some References Below

Below are some links, but it is easy enough to verify these stats on police for both right and left side of the political spectrum is near the breaking point with the police.

Audited asset forfeiture amounts to ~ $500M a year:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/holder-ends-seized-asset-sharing-process-that-split-billions-with-local-state-police/2015/01/16/0e7ca058-99d4-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html

Total revenue collected from just *speeding* tickets - $6B per year (from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

http://www.statisticbrain.com/driving-citation-statistics/

The average cop in America brings in $300,000 of revenue per year just from speeding tickets.

It is so bad that state legislators across the nation have put in a series of caps on ticket revenue to local jurisdictions:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2011/10/19/town-that-lived-off-speeding-tickets/

In 2012 the FBI reported that the total value of the 9 million incidents of property crimes had a loss value of $15.5 billion

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/property-crime/property-crime

Originally posted on Facebook on February 08, 2015.