So right off the bat, we should be able to rethink our commitment to anything resembling our current notion of policing. Billions of dollars are wasted so cops can bust people for minor quality of life offenses, weed, petty theft, and other non-violent activities.

Let us start with the basic unit of policing — the actual police officer — and actually allow smart people to be cops.

Most municipalities don’t invite high intelligence applicants to interview on the theory that highly intelligent people will quickly get bored and leave the job after costly training. As I point out, in the piece, this is an insult to intelligent people as it insinuates they lack discipline and diligence; and may in fact contribute to the costliness of the training where average or only slightly-above-average intelligence recruits are trained by seasoned veterans of average or only slightly-above-average intelligence. It’s a mutually enforced non-virtuous cycle of average-ness. With such in place, who could expect anything better than what we now have?