Discussion about this post

User's avatar
David R.'s avatar

You missed, as far as I can tell, one key point: by getting a bunch of well-educated kids, many of whom are likely going to end up in the progressive wing of the Democrats, to do something like this…

You’re going to create a medium-sized constellation of driven people within the coalition who support fixing policing but also have an understanding of the realities, sympathy for the people who do the job, and at least a decent idea of what reforms can and can’t work.

This is something that the progressive left just clearly does not have at present.

TL;DR: the important mechanism will be to change the progressive movement, not the police.

Expand full comment
J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

Counterpoint: a TFA model for policing could be a really really bad idea! TFA gives "elite" grads a crash course over the summer in teaching instruction and then throws them into the high poverty areas. Failures in teaching are relatively low profile, while an analogous policing failure would be all over the news. It's pretty easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story. And policing probably relies a bit more on camaraderie than teaching does (not that teaching doesn't, but you're not in a classroom with another teacher all day long). What happens when the existing police officers start hanging the PFA kids out to dry? Again, pretty easy to imagine.

Expand full comment
284 more comments...

No posts