So, instead of arresting people for murder we should attempt to audit their thoughts preemptively? That's the general problem they're pretending to tackle.
I mean at some level, how can a cop be disqualified by having private racist thoughts? They're even likely to pick up such thoughts from the job itself.
But then how do you determine whether those thoughts influenced a specific action or not? This is the ultimate problem with all attempts to police thoughtcrime - you're effectively past the demarc point, with ambiguous enforcement that just ends up eroding respect for the rule of law ("haha Joe the idiot got written up by the racism inquisitor again").
You're essentially saying "we can't arrest our way out of the murder problem". The Scandinavian approach of rehabilitation does make a lot of sense - the sheer majority of murders are prevented via societal values. But the ultimate check is still that criminals are arrested and punished. This feedback loop has been broken for police themselves, which has allowed their culture to degrade into absolute shit.
I like hackuser's analogy of "Building quality into the process" vs. playing whack-a-bug.
I don't have any idea how to fix the process but here's some stories that we can throw in the backlog:
- As a homeless individual, I'd like stable shelter
- As a low income individual, I'd like higher quality housing opportunities
- As a mentally ill individual, I'd like support and treatment to manage my illness
- As an unemployed individual, I'd like a job where I can earn enough income to support myself and family
- As a member of a victimized population, I'd like my peers to refrain from perpetuating a cycle of violence among ourselves
- As a parent with limited means, I'd like my child to attend a high quality school
- As a working parent with limited means, I'd like quality child care
- As an hourly wage-earner, I'd like consistent full time hours so I can better plan my schedule, finances, and future
- As a working individual, I'd like affordable, reliable, and timely transportation options to travel between my home, work, and school
It's a good analogy, but the general push for engineering quality comes from larger feedback cycles (say root cause analysis, or even economics itself). The "omg racists" take on this topic is hoping that checking the schematics more will guarantee a good outcome.
FWIW user stories inherently passivize the user. The thinking that makes sense for a singularly-designed product most likely does not work for decentrally-emergent society.
Silliness? I'm talking about something quite fundamental - to get desired behavior, should we punish actions or control ideology?
I assert that the latter is the path to madness. It should not really matter whether individual cops are racist or not, iff they're actually subject to the law they purport to uphold. I cannot kidnap someone for four hours, say I'm "dropping charges", and then consider the matter closed.
The police/justice system insist that while they've created a culture that did something very bad (racism), they'll promise to reform internally. But if this were possible, then how did it get to this point? And is the reform we want really just getting the "correct" number of white people unjustly hassled and arrested?
You can't fix policing without aligning incentives - as I said, stop externalizing the collateral damage from policing by a low-probability reverse lottery. In a just society, we would expect to see underemployed people insulting cops while smoking oregano, hoping to get incorrectly arrested and earn money for their wasted time.
I mean at some level, how can a cop be disqualified by having private racist thoughts? They're even likely to pick up such thoughts from the job itself.
But then how do you determine whether those thoughts influenced a specific action or not? This is the ultimate problem with all attempts to police thoughtcrime - you're effectively past the demarc point, with ambiguous enforcement that just ends up eroding respect for the rule of law ("haha Joe the idiot got written up by the racism inquisitor again").
You're essentially saying "we can't arrest our way out of the murder problem". The Scandinavian approach of rehabilitation does make a lot of sense - the sheer majority of murders are prevented via societal values. But the ultimate check is still that criminals are arrested and punished. This feedback loop has been broken for police themselves, which has allowed their culture to degrade into absolute shit.