The Bull Case for Public Safety
Hi,
Welcome to Roll Call, a newsletter about the state of policy and technology in public safety, and the people shaping it. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…
Today I’m going to present the optimistic case for public safety, both as a profession and as a sector of the economy. To be clear, there is an equally pessimistic case to be made. However, for a number of reasons, I think the only defensible position a human being living in 2019 America can take is to be optimistic about the direction of public safety. In fact, public safety will make the country better in 2050. I am willing to bet with my career that first responders have the most important job in 30 years.
“Wow,” you might be saying. “The most important job? What about doctors or lawyers? What about teachers or farmers or truck drivers? Seems brash to decree public safety as the most important job.” Fair. Compelling arguments could be made for any of those alternatives. However, there are three massive waves lifting public safety to the top spot: automation, immediacy, and localization.
Automation
First, Robocop will never happen. Even Robocop the movie couldn’t make an actual autonomous cop work; ED-209 was shut down immediately after maybe the worst product demo of all time. Instead, Officer Alex Murphy becomes Robocop. “Part man, part machine, all cop” is much closer to possibility than ED-209. But prosthetics and brain-machine interface technology are not the bottleneck. No, Robocop won’t happen because society will never allow the laws of man to be enforced by not-man. Law is a subjective application of our values. Annoyance crimes like jaywalking or going five over the limit aren’t worth enforcing. So you got a speeding ticket by camera and it was sent in the mail. But were you served by a human? You weren’t? Then you didn’t get a ticket - at least in Arizona. Justice is too subjective, too human, too important to allow a machine to carry out.
Just because Robocop is impossible doesn’t mean public and private entities won’t try. The allure of perfectly applied, bias-free justice is too compelling. And Omni Consumer Products’ CEO has a yacht to feed - err, family to upgrade. No wait…
I will make the argument that despite this (hopefully) well-intentioned pressure, automation will not replace first responders. One way to measure a job’s importance is by how many people the sector employs. Here’s the breakdown of employment by industry in 2018:
Underlined in purple are those industries that modern society absolutely can’t do without. Everything else is good and helpful and unnecessary. Almost all those in the basket of indispensables are predicted to be automated by 2030: manufacturing, construction, transportation, utilities, agriculture. We’re starting to feel the effects in everyday life. You’ll notice that public safety isn’t specifically called out here, but my guess is that it sits within public administration.
There’s a fantastic paper by David Autor that gets at the heart of automation’s effect on certain careers. Here, I’m condensing some of his points in order to ground the rest of the discussion:
Automation replaces labor when the cost savings of that labor matches the difficulty/cost to build the automating software. Expensive, simple, repetitive tasks are automated first.
Automation hollows out middle-class careers because they are comprised of the most automatable tasks. Employment shifts to the poles, where labor is cheap or skill is high.
Polanyi’s Paradox: “The tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense.” This rule takes precedence over the first two.
The graphic below, published in a 2019 Brookings report, adds a little more color and detail to the picture. Each triangle splits out into different jobs within the occupation group. I popped patrol officers and school teachers to compare public safety with an industry that can make an equally strong claim for Most Important Job in 2050.
Notice that even the least susceptible careers are still above zero; this is because all careers have tasks within them that can be automated. Autor predicts that middle class jobs comprised of tasks that are easily unbundled will be likelier targets of automation. Truck driving is a good example: the job has a handful of discrete tasks that are well understood. Considering the trends in both graphics, I’m confident that most of the purple industries are going to go first; the name of the automation game is repeatability. Jobs in changing physical environments, based in human-centric contexts which require lots of subjectivity will survive. The more judgement and flexibility required, the safer the job. Teachers and first responders certainly fit that bill.
Let’s take it a step further. Education is a wildly underrated profession that deserves higher recognition in today’s society. I am not trying to pick a fight with the educators of the internet. But if by dark magic or draconian policy one occupation disappeared tomorrow, which would you prefer remained? A majority would choose first responders. Emergencies are a part of life, and the backstop of calling 911 and getting a human response is a crucial part of our social fabric.
That being said, I hear and empathize with the arguments of people who feel unsafe when police are present or would rather there was no dedicated agency law enforcement agency. In many communities, that trust has been badly damaged. The mission of law enforcement must be re-evaluated to better align with the values of those it serves. The societal value of public safety and first responders in this context should be derived from an emphasis on both emergency and response. I’m happy to engage in more detail on this.
“Okay, Mitch. I agree that public safety likely won’t be automated before the mega-employment sectors of today. What if I define ‘most important’ as most expensive, like doctors and lawyers?” Hold these New York City salaries in your mind:
Average Attorney Salary (Indeed) - $100,702
Average Physician Salary (Indeed) - $151,000
Average NYPD Salary (nyc.gov) - $85,292
Let’s weigh a different definition of importance in the context of automation. We previously defined importance in terms of economic mass with top-line employment numbers, which maps to high repeatability in tasks and low difficulty in automation development. Now we’ll use economic value. This maps to high repeatability and high cost savings; equally vulnerable! To be specific, there are tasks within these high-value jobs that are equally at risk of automation. This makes sense: the payscale for these careers is astronomically high, so almost any cost of software that does a comparable job is tolerable. This NYT article is two years old, but it puts lawyers under automation’s microscope. Natural language processing for search, predictions about judges’ rulings, memo writing: “Technology will unbundle aspects of legal work over the next decade or two rather than the next year or two, legal experts say. Highly paid lawyers will spend their time on work on the upper rungs of the legal task ladder. Other legal services will be performed by nonlawyers — the legal equivalent of nurse practitioners — or by technology.” The kicker is that the loss of entry-level legal work will increase the value of established and experienced attorneys. It will grow more difficult to break into the profession, while powerful tools enable fewer attorneys to do the work that used to require a whole firm. One more anecdote from the article:
Mr. Yoon, who is 49, stands as proof. In 1999, his billing rate was $400 an hour. Today, he bills at $1,100 an hour.
“For the time being, experience like mine is something people are willing to pay for,” Mr. Yoon said. “What clients don’t want to pay for is any routine work.”
But, he added, “the trouble is that technology makes more and more work routine.”
We won’t go deep on medicine, but the story is similar to law. These are two well-protected, expensive professions that will be unbundled to a certain degree, but not enough to erode their importance, right? Well, sorta. Automation will force specialization at the edges of the medical or legal fields, where it becomes difficult to say a specialized Contract Lawyer or Colorectal Doctor is more important than standard Police Officer. Here’s an interesting question. Who actually does law and medicine first?
Immediacy
This shouldn’t come as a shock, but first responders are in fact the primary applicators of those two valuable professions. Telecommunication officers and dispatchers evaluate calls for service and allocate resources. They determine the urgency of the incident and direct the appropriate units. Police officers are the human extension of the municipal code. They observe, enforce, and represent the city or county in court. They are the law, (usually) without a legal degree. Firefighters and emergency medical services are the first line of medical defense. They are the tourniquet of the city or county that ensures survival until a doctor visit is possible. They are medicine without a medical degree. Dispatch, law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical services (EMS). The human infrastructure of society. The most tangled, spooky, messy parts of civic life.
To put a semblance of order on complicated human situations while navigating nuanced medical and legal questions is the most important job in modern life. It’s brutally difficult and requires a commitment to community service unmatched in any other line of work.
I will stretch the word immediacy to also include the need for emergency-ready technology. First responders need military-grade tools at city-level budgets, designed to lengthen lives instead of shortening them. This is a borderline psychotic ask of tech companies. “We need mission critical communication devices that are prioritized over every consumer device. We need a way to record every interaction with a citizen to prove that we deserve the trust we are given. We need to be ready for an earthquake, a sexual assault, a pipeline explosion, a bank robbery, a heart attack, or all of the above during the same shift. [raises hand and holds thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart] What do you have in this price range?”
No other job I can think of has the same mismatch between the reactive pressures of real life and the proactive pressures of political bosses. First responders work from call to call to call, and are simultaneously expected to ‘solve crime.’ The immediate problems always come first, which makes public safety’s case for Most Important Job 2050 even stronger.
Localization
Globalization is dead, long live globalization. The backlash to decades of exporting manufacturing jobs crested in the 2016 elections in the US and UK and has put the world on a new, unfamiliar course. Nationalism, manufacturing, tariffs, oh my.
Globalization isn’t leaving a vacuum. Economic and political power that was concentrated at the national and international level is shifting downward to the state and city level. Think about all the areas in which cities and counties are legislating beyond federal and state governments: higher minimum wages, sweetened beverage taxes, tighter restrictions on auto emissions, etc. Is this bad? No, it’s different. It’s different in a way that is conducive to more experimentation in government. It should be a net good for American citizens over time. In the short term, the flow of power from global to local introduces change. Populist groups are exploiting this fear and uncertainty, and will continue to do so.
Where federal structure is stiff and manufactured; cities are flexible and organic. Looking at the boogiemen of the right and left, both Trump’s and AOC’s approaches to federal government are disastrous in their simplicity. Burning down the administrative state is not a sustainable solution to our problems. Neither is building society on a wholly federal foundation. (A brief aside to connect back to Robocop: “Although both Neumeier [writer] and Verhoeven [director] have declared themselves staunchly on the political left, Neumeier recalls on the audio commentary to Starship Troopers that many of his liberal friends perceived RoboCop as a fascist movie.On the 20th Anniversary DVD, producer Jon Davison referred to the film's message as ‘fascism for liberals’ – a politically liberal film done in the most violent way possible”) Far right and left ideologies highlight how fast municipalities can be in responding to local needs and wants.
The polarization of national politics increases the role of cities and counties in providing stability for residents. That increase in power comes with an increase in responsibility, and I mean that in the least Spidey way possible. The lifeblood of cities is tax revenue. Cities will have to compete harder for a tax base that keeps them solvent, which means they will put forward more interesting policies as carrots to attract talent. Tulsa will pay you to move there. Put another way in The Sovereign Individual:
Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.
People will vote with their feet and move. Where? You might think that civic growth is just happening in the mega-cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. It’s not. In fact, those cities are experiencing a combined exodus of more than 600 people per day. Growth stories are surprisingly distributed across city size. Here’s the top 20 fastest growing cities of the last decade:
Using a generous definition of major city, only 40% of the top 20 fastest growing metros are major cities. The narrative of big cities sucking smaller cities dry of youth, talent, and industry doesn’t hold. It is true that many small cities are not well-positioned in the zeitgeist to form and execute a reinvigoration plan, but those that have are reaping the rewards. We’re now deep in hypothetical territory, but I’ll put forward one hazy outline of a plan that seems to be working: an internal locus of concentration. What does that mean? If the tide is going out on globalization and localism is benefiting, it makes sense to have as self-sustaining an economy as possible. If trade - and thus specialization - is on the decline, then a focus on self-sufficiency and an inward gaze are helpful, if not necessary for success. Washington, D.C. and New York City: outward, global, declining. Austin and Orlando, Daphne and Charleston: inward, local, growing. This is basically Peter Thiel’s working hypothesis when it comes to cities. Long Texas and California, short Virginia and New York.
The pitch is that soon, cities will exert a more direct and powerful effect than does the federal government in the lives of residents. What kind of powerful effect? How cities and counties spend tax dollars determines the answer. City budgets are reflections of how residents prioritize initiatives. Let’s take a look at a handful of city budgets, paying attention to public safety. The graphic below, from this spreadsheet, compares the public safety budgets of six cities:
In every case, public safety is the biggest bucket of expenditures. The percentages of total budget range from just under 22% to nearly 47%. Generally, one out of every four dollars raised in city taxes goes directly to law enforcement and other emergency response. One out of four! The vast majority of goes directly to first responders as salary, but roughly 10% of that massive sum is spent on hardware, software, and services. We’ll dive deep into what comprises that 10% and how it’s changing over time in Roll Call. That 10% is what made Motorola and Axon the gorillas in the room. It’s how Tyler Tech and CentralSquare became modern conglomerates in public sector software. It’s how the next generation of companies will make public safety better - and hopefully less expensive. It’s fascinating stuff, and I’m excited to share that research.
Where does that leave us? Cities will increase in importance relative to nations and states, which makes city level budgets the battleground for the future of public safety. But I’m bullish on public safety because of the extremes of locality. I’m bullish because of the attitudes of those who commit their lives to serving their neighbors and community. Public safety matters most on your block, on your street, at your neighborhood elementary school. There is nothing more local than the grind of twelve hour shifts in early September humidity. The grind is what strengthens the bond between officers and their community. When officers live where they work and work for their neighbors, community bonds are mutually enforced. Everyone has skin in the game.
I’m sure there are more, but the two that best embody extreme neighborliness are Officer Patrick Skinner of Savannah PD in Georgia and Officer Tommy Norman of North Little Rock PD in Arkansas. Two threads from Skinner that drive home what the job is all about:
And there are countless more stories like these.
To 2050
There are many structural problems in public safety today. With clear eyes and full hearts we will examine the issues, address them, and find the tradeoffs that make for healthy neighborhoods and residents. If we are able to follow through, this profession will be the most important in the country. Let’s make sure it reflects the best of American values.
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- MA