I like this, particularly as it incentivizes keeping people alive, though I think there ought to be some kind of safety net for officers that are found not guilty of wrongdoing. It’s also not always obvious how to assign blame reasonably. What if eight officers are at the scene where a man dies from a police gunshot, and only one fired their weapon? What if one cop screams at a guy, another pins him down, a third puts on cuffs and a fourth puts him in a squad car, where he has a heart attack? How do you phrase the law so that a cop cannot be penalized for unsuccessfully giving medical assistance to someone in distress?
Separate investigation from policing. Investigation of crimes is a separate function of government from their prosecution, and takes place in a separate institution with separate budget, management, and reporting.
Aren’t there three functions here? There’s ‘protection’ — stopping or mitigating crimes/disputes in progress — as well as ‘investigation’ and ‘prosecution’. For minor crimes, the first two seem hard to separate. If I call the police and say “I see someone breaking into a shed”, I expect officers to arrest the guy if they arrive early enough to catch him, but investigate if they are too late. For a protection unit to leave and be replaced by an investigation unit would be inefficient/expensive. But also, to the extent that investigation is separate from prosecution, that also strikes me as a possibly expensive amount of coordination. For serious crimes it sounds worth extra expense for impartiality, but for misdemeanors, maybe not.
[supplementary article] A surprising number of respondents seem to believe that police officers cannot possibly get along without frequently using potentially lethal levels of force on suspects not visibly armed. This does not strike me as very compatible with the fact that, for example, British police officers do not carry guns, and this seems to work fine.
The problem is surely that Americans are far more likely to be armed than British? The prevalence of guns must greatly raise the prior probability in cops’ minds that any given suspect is armed.
