Service Design Quick Sketch: Replacing the Police

6 min readJun 29, 2020

Resolve most disputes on the spot.

Parties can reach an accommodation — using tools that combine game theory, wisdom of the crowd, disintermediation, asymmetric negotiation, and AI-based intermediation.

In neighbor, tenant, employee, and family disputes, there tends to be a lot of emotion but not a lot of law. People end up calling the police, who have no way to assess the situation and are exhausted from fielding perhaps a dozen random calls that day. Too often the problem escalates rather than dissipates. Often, what people are really looking for is a way to help them solve the problem with another person. By making sure every citizen has the tools to resolve their own disputes, we can drive down the need for third parties like police.

There are no “police”. There are citizen certification levels.

Citizens of all ages can become certified in resolving every kind of problem including cat-in-tree-rescue, grass-measuring, speed-limit-enforcement, on-demand marriage counseling (this will be popular), on-demand friendship dispute resolution, on-demand jury of neighbors (income stream idea: the new court tv will be streaming from your local street corner lol — just show up if you want to be on it) with possibility to appeal, on-demand logistics/intelligence sharing, non-injury accident, injury accident, first aid, mental illnesses of different kinds, hit-and-run-tracking, highway patrol, burglary, armed incidents, victim assistance, criminal capture, murder investigation, and everything in between. Actually, I think we can still call them/us Police, since there is nothing inherently wrong with the word. But there will be many more, because it will be all of us, as certified and well-rated. Someone’s going to think this sounds very USSR. I see what you mean, but just try to see it in a way that would be good. Your ultimate skepticism is useful though; with something so delicate and important we need as many communicative detractors as possible.

The City can determine what qualifications and dependencies each certification requires. One thing that’s overlooked in current police training is the fact that many recruits are coming from the same place as the criminals. They are young adults in need of more basic things than police training, like ethics, community, rolemodels (not to mention proper nutrition, safe living quarters, and continued education). It would be good to spend the first few years of police training doing civic tasks, working with the community: vets, moms, elderly, kids, people with disabilities. Maybe their first year they should just hold doors for people and rescue ducks; perhaps that is not practical. But a certification system could require, along with technical training, these ethically-expanding activities as preliminary certifications.

Police calls work like Uber. When you call with your emergency, the nearest certified person will be dispatched to you. This will reduce wait times. Like Uber, certified people will be called to hotspots where there is a lot of activity or no responders. Responder pay TBD — e.g. could be paid for successfully resolved calls. But that would create a misincentive for the polis to produce crime in order to solve it, and we don’t want to re-create the misincentives of early firefighters, who would prevent another firefighting team from getting to the scene first so that they could “get the job” and get paid (big polis-to-service-provider incentive misalignment!), so perhaps a flat monthly or annual amount with a requirement to respond to a certain % of calls or something of the sort would be better.

How would we track certifications? We can borrow concepts from any certificated program. Here’s an interesting one — app intro begins at 5:55min:

There is no 911.

There is a central clearinghouse for all city calls.

Call or text <area code> # <priority level 1–9>.

Level 9 priority levels will receive the fastest service, level 1 (neighbors’ grass-height e.g.) the slowest.

The call-receiver will check the services required (e.g. dispute resolution, mental health: schizophrenia, child safety, etc.) and a person or multiple people certified in all the needs of the caller will be dispatched.

There is no police stations and no central meeting location.

Instead, there are neighborhood certification centers. These are residential or commercial properties converted into learning centers. Anyone can get certified and training goes on indefinitely. Those with the highest certifications teach those with the lowest. Instead of police hanging out with eachother at the station, highly-certified individuals will continue their training and teach people of all ages self defense and combat, ham radio, and every other certifiable skill. This will foster so much neighborhood camaraderie and give vulnerable people a positive place to learn from role-models. Because it is manned with security 24/7, in addition to being a 24/7 learning center, it can provide 24/7 victim support services and deploy victims to safe houses in the area or host them there (perhaps a small bunkhouse). With this safe spot to go to — not just when a crime happens — to have a safe place to for citizens of all ages be and learn and grow into a productive and societally-networked person we can expect much better citizen communication and camaraderie. Crime will plummet from this innovation alone. These neighborhood secure community centers can also provide training for and deploy emergency materials and services in conjunction with state and federal departments and organizations.

To get a comprehensive idea of the city’s functioning, the highest-certified individuals meet in eachother’s neighborhoods on rotation. This will be like a nonexclusive “council” of “elders”. It would be great if elected representatives came from these ranks.

It’s important that there is no central place to meet, because as soon as there is, there will be centralization which will lead to separation.

What is required

certification design
an Uber-like app
purchase of community centers — every 1–3 sq miles; restore blighted properties where possible
a budget (for reference: Seattle’s $400M budget could fund 200 community centers @ $2M each)
personal breathalizers that measure for multiple substances, reporting of use of debilitating prescription pharmaceuticals, and/or other means to ensure high-level responders are fit to respond