Bitcoin and the Opportunity to Create Effective Policing
tl;dr: Bitcoin as economic liberator for dissatisfied communities and an approach to providing safe policing.
This idea came to me while I was walking in the park the other day. At the time, it seemed inspired.
Now that I have to actually write it out, I’m not so sure. It’s kind of half-baked, but what the heck.
Maybe someone will build on this somehow.
Also, it’s an obviously sensitive subject and there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to deal with the criticism or accusations that might follow, since I just blog as a practice.
But, I was inspired by David Berkowitz’s recent missive to the Serial Marketers community.
David passionately and authentically wrote:
Running a marketing community, on one hand, makes it seem like there’s little to do. I don’t want to just share some platitude. On the other hand, there’s quite a bit.
We have a diverse, passionate, supportive group of people who are sharing their perspectives with others, and most of us are in the business of creating and spreading messages that lead people to action.
Serial Marketers stands with #BlackLivesMatter.
If you have ideas for how this community can contribute to the solution and help speak out against oppression while lifting the voices of those who need to be heard, please comment here or DM me.
Serial Marketers
So I thought, “ok, let me think about this for a bit.”
Keep in mind that I am far from an expert and just throwing ideas out there.
Police Reform. Police Necessity.
If the challenge of policing is, as many claim, a problem of systematic and institutionalized racism, then perhaps the solution lies within the funding model for police.
Though there’s some evidence from the National Academy of Sciences that “there is ‘no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police'” (source), that doesn’t matter.
I am not here to argue about that. The perception is that there is and perception always beats reality.
Ok, so what to do?
One option is to weaken the police by through the effort to “defund the police.”
I certainly understand the motivation, but I am concerned about the implications.
Though police defunding doesn’t necessarily mean “reduction in police services for areas with high African-American populations,” it’s hard to believe that the same level of police coverage could be provided at a lower cost.
It’s possible to augment some of the drop in active police presence for increased use of drones and surveillance cameras, but that’s an entirely different can of worms.
The bigger challenge seems to be that a reduction in police presence leads to far greater amounts of crime and homicide, particularly “black-on-black” crime, as Jason Riley describes in the WSJ, referring to a newly published study by two Harvard economists.
“After surveying more than two dozen federal and state probes of police departments across the country, the pattern became clear. When police were investigated following incidents of deadly force that had gone viral, police activity declined and violent crime spiked. It happened in Ferguson, Mo., after Michael Brown was shot by an officer. It happened in Chicago after a cop gunned down Laquan McDonald. And it occurred in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody.
Mr. Fryer [the Harvard economist] stressed that it isn’t the investigations themselves that are the problem so much as the circumstances under which they are launched. Investigations that weren’t prompted by well-publicized events resulted in little change in police behavior and violent crime.
“But when I look at cities in which the investigation was preceded by a viral event,” he said, “homicide goes up considerably. Total crime goes up considerably.”
What happens, he said, is that police effectively pull back. They don’t stop doing their jobs, but they become less proactive and curb their interactions with civilians.
In Chicago, there was a 90% drop in police-civilian contacts immediately after the announcement of an investigation, and “Baltimore literally went to zero” after a probe was announced there, he said. In cities where these contacts fell the most, homicides increased the most. Sadly, the decision to launch departmentwide state and federal inquiries into the deaths of Brown, McDonald and Gray resulted in numerous additional deaths.”
If those facts are accurate, and while there is no public blockchain to verify them, it seems verifiable and thus worthy of believability, then defunding could create bigger problems of a different kind.
Alternative: Decentralize Policing
If a certain community is unsatisfied with the model of policing, there are options.
One, of course, is defunding.
“It has been almost six years since the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, and little has changed in how poor communities of color are being policed. It’s time to rethink superficial and ineffective procedural police reforms and move to defund the police instead.“
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/defund-police-protest/
The other is to “rethink superficial and ineffective procedural police reforms” and hand the power of policing back to the people who are being policed.
Don’t Defund the Police.
Decentralize the Funding of Police.
Hey, I told you it was crazy.
So, imagine this.
Let’s say that the majority of the 3rd precinct of Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd died, believes that the police can’t be reformed.
But many people there would, presumably, still be in favor of some type of law enforcement to address the issues that Riley raises above.
So, what could be done?
Give the community a way to “bootstrap” its own network of police officers, accountable to that community.
3 Steps to Bootstrapping Decentralized Policing in Dissatisfied Communities
Here’s one way of how that could work.
If a community believes that the municipal police department is biased, give that community a chance to opt out.
Every member of that precinct gets a tax rebate/credit based on the pro-rated amount of the city budget that goes to the police force.
But here’s the twist.
- The money that the municipality sends back to a disenchanted community is paid in Bitcoin.
It’s a symbolic gesture on one hand.
I mean the dollar could be thought of as “white man’s money” (15 of 16 Fed chairmen have been white men.)
Plus, the stimulus money that is going into the economy now from the Fed leads to the evils of the Cantillon effect. If you want evidence of this, take a look at Mati Greenspan’s recent newsletter on the Monday following the first weekend of protests.
The rich keep on profiting no matter what. I even heard one analyst this morning excitedly declaring that the protests are good for stocks because they will “unleash the next tranche of Fed stimulus.”
https://mailchi.mp/d889a4c75975/hot-off-the-press-qe-episode-12512851?e=76bdb56998
But it’s actually more than that.
It’s a step towards economic self-empowerment for the Black community.
But don’t take it from me, Isaiah Jackson wrote a book called “Bitcoin and Black America” and I know for a fact based on previous conversations that he’s not the only one in the Black community who sees the connection.
Plus, Bitcoin brings a whole slew of benefits with it such as censorship-resistance and “hard money.”
Now, there will be plenty of people in the community who may not want Bitcoin. That’s fine. There will be an instant market for it because there will be buyers as well as sellers.
But here’s the second twist.
2. The police force in these communities will need to get compensated in Bitcoin.
So, if you want to “defund the police,” don’t send any Bitcoin to the police department in your neighborhood.
If you want to fund them, send it to them. It’s entirely optional, but it’s a function of how much policing you want to fund.
Yes, there will be freeloaders and the invariable “tragedy of the commons,” but at least there will be choice and empowerment.
But wait, there’s more.
3. For every company/brand out there that has offered up a platitude of “we stand with Black Lives Matter,” here’s an opportunity for them to put their money where their mouths are.
The way they do that is by saying: “anyone who lives in a community that has defunded the municipal police and taken economic empowerment back into their hands has our support, which means we will accept Bitcoin as a form of payment in our stores.”
Otherwise it’s just “thoughts and prayers.”
Getting the Ball Rolling
With those pieces in play, there is the potential for a “circular economy” to take off.
People have Bitcoin. People have a place to spend Bitcoin and people get police protection with accountability via Bitcoin.
And it all happens in a currency that is independent of the US government.
There’s probably a whole conversation here about how this would/would not fit into reparations as well as the tax question (e.g. could be tax-free like commerce on a Native American reservation).
But that’s outside of my scope (as is this whole idea, if I’m being honest)) and I realize that there is a LOT of distance between today and this crazy vision I just outlined.
However, at a time like this, it seems like lunatic ideas are necessary.
There’s so much pain and suffering and it’s clear that the old models are broken (see “From Story to Setting” for more on this).
I suspect that the lack of economic empowerment within large swaths of the African-American community is also a root cause of many of the challenges we are seeing today.
The moment (Floyd) and the technology (Bitcoin) and the need (financial empowerment) may be meeting.
Or at least it’s possible.
Maybe Neeraj is right…
