The semester has ended, and I have time to do some writing. For some time I’ve been pondering whether Americans generally, and conservatives in particular, are asking the right questions about life in the 21st century. In this series I’ll be looking at different policies and areas of life and asking -are we really thinking about these issues the right way? Today’s installment is about what we need the police for and how that should influence the way we think about police.

Nominally, this line of thought is provoked by the botched raid in Louisville, where Breonna Taylor – an EMT – was shot and killed by police officers searching the wrong house for drugs from a person who had already been arrested. Really, it’s a disaster, and the family is probably morally owed a huge amount of compensation for that screw-up (whatever the law actually says). However, the question is much larger than this particular case. Discussions of the police often bog down in the details of the use of force policies, opinions of drug prohibition, use of surplus military equipment, qualified immunity, and overall discussion of the “warrior cop” ethos. These are all, however, technical questions. The actual question is what we want the police to achieve so that we can answer the technical questions to suit that aim.

Police officers do a lot of things, and I imagine if you asked police officers what they do, you might get a lot of different answers that all fit under “police officer.” I’d like to suggest a few such goals: