IF COMPETITION IS GOOD FOR EDUCATION, HOW ABOUT THE POLICE?
We expect the police to be close to the population that they serve to create order and peace. Photo Credit: class M planet via Compfight cc
If competition would improve public education, would it also improve police services?
Certainly with issues of public policing continuing to rise throughout the U.S. from Ferguson, Missouri to Baltimore, Maryland, the question about how to improve policing is rising along with concerns.
But we have not heard much of anything about creating private competition for publicly-funded police departments as a way of improving them.
If, as school choice advocates maintain, competition is good and transformative for public services like education, why not for the police?
Creating order in a society easily drawn to chaos
We look to the police to maintain order.
The best police departments are made up of members of the community they police. They represent the brightest and the best of what society can produce.
Our modern violence-centered media saturation causes us toassume that the most important thing a police officer carris is a gun.
It isn’t.
It’s the badge.
The badge design usually has a symbol of the city that issues it, and for good reason.
The symbol of the city reminds anyone who views it that theofficer’s commitment is to the city and those in it.
And those who wear it are reminded that they neither representthemselves as individuals, nor small fragments of the city they serve.
They represent the whole of the public in that city.
That’s why creating competing police forces have not been tolerated. Those whose job it is to promote order have a singular purpose that should not be fragmented by competing police If competition is good for education, how about the police?:
