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Turn in your gun and chalk

It is always super when someone outside the educator ranks "gets it." Dan Carpenter, op-ed columnist, has been with The Star since 1976 and has worked in various capacities, from police beat to book editor to assistant city editor. His writing has won dozens of awards.

Mostly people who wrote in to the paper just spewed their usual bile.

Dan Carpenter

It's high time we held the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department accountable.

Yeah, yeah, we heard the mayor and the police brass promise last week to get tougher and smarter against this rising tide of murders and assaults. But tell me: Are they going to win? And how will they define winning? Statistics? How big?

Up or down, monthly or yearly, the fact remains: There is crime. Lots of it. This city's mayors and law enforcement agencies have had decades to reduce the scourge of theft and mayhem to a minor nuisance, and still there are streets where one dares not walk after dark.

How much longer will we tolerate the intolerable? We pay these people to stop crime. Crime doesn't stop. Then we keep them on. We nod when they tell us how hard and dangerous their work is. We support their union. What a bunch of saps.

I say, we should get with the spirit of the political times and tie these public employees' pay and job security to performance.

And put a number on it.

Give every district in IMPD one year to lower homicides, aggravated assaults, armed robberies, burglaries, drug trafficking and drunken driving by, say, 50 percent. In any district that meets the threshold in each and every category, bump up all salaries by 10 percent.

If any district fails to meet the yearly standard of achievement, even in a single category, declare it a failed beat and dismiss every police officer working there. If a shortage of sworn personnel results, look for replacements in the large pool of armed civilians. That's a source of payroll savings.

Surely, these merit-based incentives and sanctions will produce the public safety we are paying for and end the insanity of throwing tax dollars at crime. They will send a clear message to law enforcement: Nobody would ever shoot me or T-bone my car if you all were doing your job.

OK.

If it sounds like a simplistic answer to a mountain of a problem, then consider it a refresher course in the analogies portion of your school days.

Making outcomes the measure of income, and even of coming and going, is all the rage among public school reformers in seats of power, from the White House to the Indiana Statehouse. In Florida, it's such a litmus conservative issue that Gov. Charlie Crist may have cost himself a shot at the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate by saying no to a measure to tie teacher pay to their pupils' standardized test scores.

For teachers, like cops, there are lots of ways to gauge performance without demanding numerically measurable change in the social landscape in which they work. Such change needs to be the goal; but no single element can achieve it. Thank heaven for firefighters; arsonists would destroy whole blocks in some communities without them; just don't blame the firefighters for arson.

Self-defense, redux: One more quick note in the analogy department. It was a relief to see the opponents of gun control hold armed demonstrations last week and return home safely. When the Black Panther Party and the Mississippi-based Republic of New Africa tried that in the 1960s and 1970s, lots of them wound up shot by the police or behind bars. Should have tried the national parks, I guess.

— Dan Carpenter
Indianapolis Star
2010-04-25
http://www.indystar.com/article/20100425/OPINION05/4250332/1039/OPINION05/Turn-in-your-gun-and-chalk

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