Conversations with Tyler17 Jun 2020

Rachel Harmon on Policing

Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. "You could call it a random walk," she says, "or you could say that I'm really interested in the structure of things." But despite her experience and training, even she can't identify a single point of leverage that can radically reform the complicated system of policing in America. "We have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments, so I don't think that we're going to suddenly fix this by flipping one lever."

She joined Tyler to discuss the best ideas for improving policing, including why good data on policing is so hard to come by, why body cams are not a panacea, the benefits and costs of consolidating police departments, why more female cops won't necessarily reduce the use of force, how federal programs can sometimes misfire, where changing police selection criteria would and wouldn't help, whether some policing could be replaced by social workers, the sobering frequency of sexual assaults by police, how a national accreditation system might improve police conduct, what reformers can learn from Camden and elsewhere, and more. They close by discussing the future of law schools, what she learned clerking under Guido Calabresi and Stephen Breyer, why she's drawn to kickboxing and triathlons, and what two things she looks for in a young legal scholar.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded June 8th, 2020

Other ways to connect

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Tyler on Twitter
Follow Rachel on Twitter
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(288)

Shruti Rajagopalan talks to Daniel Gross and Tyler about Identifying and Predicting Talent

How can one identify and predict talent? On a search to answer this question and others like it, Tyler Cowen joined venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross to explore the art and science of f...

1 Sep 20221h 7min

Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky

As a little girl, Cynthia Haven loved reading classic works of literature. At sixteen, she began her career as a reporter. And years later, those two interests converged as they led her to interview a...

24 Aug 202244min

William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation

When Tyler is reviewing grants for Emergent Ventures, he is struck by how the ideas of effective altruism have so clearly influenced many of the smartest applicants, particularly the younger ones. An...

10 Aug 202250min

Leopoldo López on Activism Under Autocratic Regimes

As an inquisitive reader, books were a cherished commodity for Leopoldo López when he was a political prisoner in his home country of Venezuela. His prison guards eventually observed the strength and ...

27 Jul 202249min

Matthew Ball on the Metaverse and Gaming

Fighting fires meant a lot of downtime for Matthew Ball. Stationed at a forward operating base in the woods for two weeks at a time, he spent long hours amongst fellow firefighters with whom he shared...

13 Jul 202255min

Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life

Growing up, Barkha Dutt was totally rootless. She spoke English, not her parent's Punjabi. She devoured Enid Blyton and studied English literature during college, but read few Indian novelists. She di...

29 Jun 202251min

Marc Andreessen on Learning to Love the Humanities

Like the frontier characters from Deadwood, his favorite TV show, Marc Andreessen has discovered that the real challenge to building in new territory is not in the practicalities of learning a trade, ...

15 Jun 202251min

Jamal Greene on Reconceiving Rights

What does it mean to uphold disability rights, or the right to economic liberty? What framework should be used when rights appear to conflict? Constitutional law expert Jamal Greene contends that the ...

1 Jun 202248min