 Tell me something right now that the police are good at, other than whooping ass. A lot of us were asked if we could imagine a future without police and I answered yes to that question. One even broader idea that's going to momentum right now is defunding the police. Instead of abolish the police or defund the police, how about privatize the police? You know, policing is not a marketplace. You can't choose another police force to take care of you to watch over your neighborhood. Actually, private policing is more common than most people realize and it's a proven way of making law enforcement more accountable to the communities they're paid to protect. A lot of people think that law enforcement specifically must be provided by a monopoly from the government but it turns out in history and even in modern times there's plenty of private examples of people working to create order and safety in society. Edward Stringham is the president of the American Institute for Economic Research and the author of Private Governance, Creating Order and Economic and Social Life. If you look closely in many cases you see lots of private sources of order that goes all the way from simple things like unarmed security guards that goes all the way up through very advanced sets of private legal self-regulatory organizations. So certain places like Harvard University, MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital have fully deputized private police. Stringham also points to what happened in San Francisco during the gold rush. They actually didn't have a police force at all. So by the late 1840s, early 1850s, they started creating a small government police force but they were basically powerless and so at the same time the private citizen said we need to create our own private police force. In Chinatown the government police were not very into helping the residents of Chinatown and they also relied on private policing. So this is something that is not just abstract and theoretical but something that has been around in San Francisco since the very early days. Private governance is pervasive. It's all around us in history and in modern times and the better it works the less we see it. We don't police people, we protect them. Police are law enforcement officers so essentially their task is based on negative metrics and arresting people for drugs or violence that has already occurred which is not protection. Dale Brown is the founder of Detroit Threat Management Centers which has been providing private protection in the Motor City since 1995. We find ways to protect people even from prosecution. Essentially we create conditions where no violence occurs and no prosecution occurs because no violence occurs. Detroit Threat Management Centers operates as a for-profit security company that provides bodyguards, works with homeowners associations and secures precious cargo delivery but it also runs an educational academy in which graduates volunteer to provide free security to domestic violence victims and other vulnerable individuals who Detroit City police don't protect. We hunt predators out of the community. We deny them the opportunity to rape, rob and kill the families. That's our primary function. In 2017 Detroit Threat Management Center employees stopped carrying guns. You really want to avoid the use of force and violence whenever possible. It's positive, it's appropriate, it's what creates a better quality of life for everyone. One of the main problems that we see with bureaucracy and monopoly is a lack of concern for consumer well-being. Well accountability and responsibility are intrinsic in the private sector. We have real-time audio and video in each vehicle. They're actually all watching each other while they're on duty and I train my staff members constantly and then you have to know law so we constantly study the law. We go through scenarios and they're constantly coached into better performance so I don't have better people. I have a system and that system is what makes us capable. We already have more private security in various forms in the United States than we have government police and we can think about ways that we can continue to expand in that direction. For those people who are worried about militarized or violent police and thinking about ways to replace them with alternatives, we don't need to dream up some abstract ideals and think about how things might be. We could actually look at how private security, how private policing already exists, draw from best practices and say look we do have markets and we can rely more on markets and less on a coercive government monopoly.