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Conversations with Tyler

Rachel Harmon on Policing

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. "You could call it a random walk," she says, "or you could say that I'm really interested in the structure of things." But despite her experience and training, even she can't identify a single point of leverage that can radically reform the complicated system of policing in America. "We have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments, so I don't think that we're going to suddenly fix this by flipping one lever."

She joined Tyler to discuss the best ideas for improving policing, including why good data on policing is so hard to come by, why body cams are not a panacea, the benefits and costs of consolidating police departments, why more female cops won't necessarily reduce the use of force, how federal programs can sometimes misfire, where changing police selection criteria would and wouldn't help, whether some policing could be replaced by social workers, the sobering frequency of sexual assaults by police, how a national accreditation system might improve police conduct, what reformers can learn from Camden and elsewhere, and more. They close by discussing the future of law schools, what she learned clerking under Guido Calabresi and Stephen Breyer, why she's drawn to kickboxing and triathlons, and what two things she looks for in a young legal scholar.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded June 8th, 2020

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:08.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:12.6

Learn more at mercatis.org.

0:15.2

And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit

0:20.4

ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.

0:28.1

Hello, everyone.

0:29.1

I'm speaking today with Rachel Harmon, who is a professor of law at the University of

0:34.2

Virginia.

0:35.2

She is director of the Center for Criminal Justice and one of the nation's leading experts

0:40.3

on policing.

0:41.3

Rachel, welcome.

0:42.3

Thank you.

0:43.5

Simple question.

0:44.5

Why is the United States so bad at gathering data about its police?

0:49.2

Well, for one reason, we have more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

0:55.1

And so that's a lot of data to collect.

0:58.0

It's a very diverse.

0:59.6

And so it's hard.

1:01.8

We'd have to have a national effort to do it in any sort of coherent way.

1:06.6

And we haven't had the will to do that.

1:08.6

Is it that they don't want to do it?

1:10.3

And is the bottleneck at the level of the individual police officer, the department, somewhere

...

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