Value over replacement cop

Plus trust fund accounting, the value of chill alarmism, and the meaning of charisma

kali9

I’m going to take the opportunity to offer a niche complaint here.

D.C. Public Schools recently released its schedule for the 2025-26 school year, and during the final week of school, there is class on Monday, then Tuesday is a day off, then Wednesday is the scheduled last day of school, then Thursday is a records day (meaning no school for students), then Friday is Juneteenth. If the kids need to make up days due to snow, they’ll return the following Monday and Tuesday.

This just seems transparently like an effort to encourage families to skip those final days and head out for summer a week early. This happens to annoy me because it will be my son’s last year of elementary school at a school he’s attended PreK-3, and I’d love for everyone to actually be together and say goodbye. But it’s also really bad to be cutting the number of instructional days. With all the problems of post-pandemic educational recovery, the absolute most basic thing we can do is actually have kids in school. That means setting normal, feasible schedules and encouraging everyone to show up. Not whatever this is.

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Common Margins: It seems like we are in a bad equilibrium where we either have to accept police doing nothing (pre-Lurie San Francisco) like the social justice reformers want or allow police to commit overtime fraud and violate traffic/parking laws with impunity (New York City). How do we get to a better place where cops are empowered to arrest bad actors but are not allowed to milk the taxpayers while the cops think of themselves as above the law?

What policies and programs would you implement to go about doing this?

Seems like you would you want to break the police unions while maintaining the support amongst the rank and file. Something like your Police for America, higher starting salaries especially for junior officers, a robust training and oversight program, combined with cracking down on overtime?

Whatever the solution, how would you advise a blue city/state executive leader to do it in a politically feasible way?

I think talk of “breaking” police unions is wildly premature. What I think almost everyone who is left of center and reality-based needs to do is start thinking of urban police management as more of a boring, normal management and human resources question.