It finally dawned on me what the outcome of, and exit strategy for, the “Defund/Abolish the Police” movement will be. First, there will be no wholesale defunding or abolishing of municipal police. There will be significant funding cuts, like we have seen in Austin, Texas. What has to be understood is, if you cut a police department’s funding by say, 30%, you cut its effectiveness by significantly more than 30%. One only has to look at the effect of sequestration on the military. A police department cannot magically reduce its capital infrastructure by 30%. Instead, it must carry the costs of that infrastructure for a significant amount of time, in some cases in perpetuity. A precinct building designed to support 50 precinct officers cannot magically be reduced in square footage, lease/amortization/bond interest, utility costs, etc., by 30%. The only variable cost is the labor expense of employees. What it means is instead of 35 officers, you get 25. The 30% budget cut results in a 50% cut in policing.
The first assumption is: “This is great, because now we can get rid of the bad/dumb cops and retain/hire only good/smart cops.” But the reality is, when the cuts come, the good/smart cops will voluntarily leave first. We saw this with the Cold War drawdown’s voluntary VSB/SSI programs. I recall a squadron commander in 1992 lamenting the voluntary separation programs because the only ones who took them were those who were talented enough to be confident they could quickly find employment elsewhere.
Net-net, we will end up with a much smaller police force comprised of less intelligent, less competent, officers.
How will this affect society?
The first, most obvious is, simple math. Fewer police equal less response, and a longer time to response. Those two things create conditions which will result in an increase in crime. Don’t believe me? When was the last time a police precinct was successfully robbed?
As crime rates increase, there will be a societal response to protect itself. And I am not talking about people buying guns. Guns are a “last ditch maneuver” when it comes to layered home defense.
The first response will be an increase in monitored home security systems, among the middle class.
For those who cannot afford the cost of a home security system, I expect a return to the use of “burglar bars”. These were all the rage in the second half of the 1970s. I remember ads on TV for them. I also remember the news stories about little old ladies dying in house fires because they could not get out of their windows. Burglar bars became controversial. I remember a TV commercial for a politician either running for governor or attorney general. It showed a close-up on his hands, gripping what appear to be prison bars. Then it zoomed out, and you saw the politician standing in the window of a house window with burglar bars. The politician said if he was elected, his crackdown on crime would mean “People would no longer be prisoners in their own homes.” Despite the debate, burglar bars are cheap security, and are likely to find their way back into popular use in low-income areas.
In the early 2000s I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Air Force Reserve duty, and we went to lunch at a local sandwich shop located in an upper middle-class area. There were many small, detached homes on tiny lots. Each home was surrounded by what I would describe as a “medieval” spiked fence. These were about eight feet tall. Some were decorative black wrought iron, with long, sharp, pointed spikes. Others were more modern, shiny steel that curved outward at the top, where they came to a razer sharp edge. The fences included a gate at the driveway, but these were manual, not automatic gates. While it is hard to imagine such fencing in the continental U.S., I do believe we will see more fencing and driveway gates. I see some larger older homes with elaborate fences and automated gates in the suburbs of Atlanta, and in neighborhoods like Buckhead. I could easily see these fences upgraded to the “decorative, but deadly” spiked fences seen in places like San Juan.
In December of 2005, I traveled to Johannesburg South Africa on business. I stayed in a hotel downtown (the old tower of the Intercontinental Hotel), but our event was at a resort on the edge of the city. I had to take a cab through and out of the city to the event. As we were driving through obviously middle-class neighborhoods, I noticed these homes reminded me of the ones I saw in San Juan. Same small lots, though many homes were two story, compared to the one-story homes in San Juan. The same medieval fences. But something else. Most of these homes had signs for ADT Security. No big deal, many homes in America have the same, blue, hexagonal signs. But these were different. They didn’t say “This Home Secured by ADT”, they said “This Home Secured by ADT Armed Response”. ADT Armed Response. Private policing, in a municipal neighborhood. Not a private gated community, but right off of a city street. This was the frontier. Because the police were not adequate nor reliable. That picture has stuck with me for 15 years because it was so unusual. It was like the edge of an old map, which said “Beyond this point lie dragons”. This was not America, where on the remote edge of available law enforcement, people rely on guard dogs and guns. This was literally a private company filling a vacuum. Don’t think it can’t or won’t happen here. I bet ADT is planning such offerings right now for cities that defund and reduce police.
Terry Rostand: Oh no, I'm not a peace officer. Yeah, this badge isn't a meaningful symbol. We don't enforce the law, we just execute company policy for homeowners.
Martin Q. Blank: When are you authorized to use deadly force?
Terry Rostand: Oh well, you know, taxes provide your basic services, you know, police and whatnot, but our customers, they need a little bit more than that, so we catch you on the property, we do what we have to do.
I don’t know how real that concept is, but it seems a likely growth area if municipal policing is weakened.
The idea of iron bars, spiked fences, and private police may appear dystopian. I only offer them as examples because they are real. But what else might occur?
More gated neighborhoods. There will be a move to develop more upscale gated townhome communities and gated detached home neighborhoods. There will be moves to install gates at existing neighborhoods. This will be made possible by technology to reduce the need for staffed gates by using remote camera technology. One staffed gate house controlling two remote camera based gates.
Private security. Some of these gated neighborhoods will have their own dedicated private security patrols. But I expect security companies to provide both the gate guards and regional private security patrol/response forces. Such a regional approach could get economies of scale to make them more cost-competitive.
For those not in traditional neighborhoods, but with poor policing, the ADT South Africa armed response model could happen. There are some very expensive homes in Atlanta, on very large lots. The owners of these homes could probably afford very sophisticated, and very capable security.
Where will these companies get qualified, trained applicants? Something tells me there will be a number of recently retired, and recently laid-off former police officers to choose from. Over the long-term, a hiring pipeline and ab-initio training could be a challenge.
But what about those who cannot afford private police solutions? This is where I see the emergence of what I call the “Private Surveillance State”. You may have heard about how local police departments partner with Ring and other smart doorbell systems to access their data to assist in policing. There is an understandable privacy concern, however these devices not only surveil the owner’s property, they also surveil the public area beyond the owner’s property (street and sidewalk). On a cul-de-sac, it is possible to get almost a 360 degree view of a suspicious vehicle and person if each home has a smart doorbell. One of the guiding principles of how “big data” works is many low resolution data points are better than one or a few high resolution data points.
What I anticipate is the smart doorbell service providers providing a subscription access to their data to private security companies like ADT. The biggest problem right now is every security provider is a walled garden. ADT wants to sell you their hardware. Meanwhile someone else sells some other hardware. And then there are DIY systems where there is no monitoring company. But imagine if your local security system monitoring company also has access to you DIY wireless cameras and not only your Ring doorbell but can pull the video from neighboring homes? Imagine if it is augmented by real-time AI?
When it comes to limited policing, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you walk into a police department and sit down with a detective with gigabytes of video showing the make, model, and license plate of the car, video of the theft of property as it happened in your home, and high resolution photography of the perpetrators, you are more likely to get the police to take action than if you come in with one grainy video clip and nothing else.
If a home security company can taut it gets agreement from the police to pursue 80% of robberies and of those 75% are apprehended, that will sell. If a neighborhood is able to promote that crime in its neighborhood has dropped because of a higher arrest rate than other neighborhoods, it will command a premium in home values. If the metric is outcome based, it sells.
If people are fearful, they will be less concerned with the privacy aspects of opting in on sharing their video doorbell footage. It is human nature that an increased fear for personal safety will motivate people to trade a perceived increase in safety for a perceived decrease in freedom. If people really don’t care if an across the street neighbor sharing doorbell video, which includes footage of their house, with a security organization, if the perceived loss of freedom is small or insignificant, in exchange for a measured increase in safety, people will make that trade.
Already, many upper middle-class neighborhoods which are not gated are using a photo-based monitoring system to record pictures of every vehicle which enters the neighborhood. This system has a high enough resolution to discern the license plate, as well as the make and model of the vehicle. These images are stored and are only accessed at police request. But such a system, by incorporating AI, along with a database of vehicle registrations of neighborhood residents, could provide real-time information to a private security organization to know when non-residents enter a neighborhood.
It is not unlikely to see some neighborhoods incorporating their neighborhood entry surveillance with individual home security monitoring, through discounts, or even through an HOA requirement, not unlike a garbage collection service.
Ultimately, what this is likely to result in is an inequity of public safety, not unlike what existed in the later 1970s. Poor people will have burglar bars, and guns. Rich people will live in gated communities with private security guards, augmented by the private security state. The difference will be in the middle class. The upper middle class will also live in gated communities. And the lower middle class will live in neighborhoods primarily protected by the Private Surveillance State.
Even today, the police disproportionately protect the lower socio-economic classes, because more crimes are committed in lower socio-economic areas. Defunding and/or abolishing police is more likely to negatively impact these areas. Higher socio-economic areas, like wealthy suburbs, are more likely to keep higher levels of police funding. The Private Surveillance State is not likely to be needed in a wealthier suburb. However, in the places in between is where the Private Surveillance State will bloom. In-town luxury apartments, townhome communities, gated neighborhoods, old, wealthy neighborhoods, etc. And the highly virtual Private Surveillance State will create virtual gated neighborhoods in average middle class and even lower middle-class neighborhoods.
Technology will drive down the cost significantly over the next decade. However, it will never drive the cost down to a level to allow it to benefit the working poor, and the non-working poor. Which means they will become a relatively less defended target, and therefore, more targeted. Inequity will increase.
Of course, it is likely the progressive state, in its cargo cult thinking, will seek to place similar virtual security in place in lower socio-economic areas. We will hear stories about government contracts to outfit subsidized housing with this technology. Then will be the stories of failure and cost over-runs.
Then what? The impoverished will demand more policing. Not better policing, not more and better policing, just more. Now. They can worry about the better part later. We have seen this story play out repeatedly in urban areas. What then? The conservatives will not want to increase government spending, and the progressives will. The conservatives will be more libertarian, and the progressives will become more law and order. But in between this cycle, there will be lost property, lost opportunity, and lost lives.
Human nature is a roller-coaster. For some, it is an unusually cruel roller coaster, because they only seem to catch the downhill parts. For some, when they reach a peak, they are able to see ahead, and understand there will be ups and downs. Some will anticipate and take advantage of the thrill ride, profiting from the variations, buying low, and selling high. For others, disorientation, nausea, and just wanting to get off.
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