I was listening to the radio this morning and they’re talking about police abuse. 👮

I don’t agree with the tough tactics against so called bad officers or saying that there are just some bad apples in the force that can just be rooted out. That’s terribly unfair to the individual officers and leads to zero accountability to governments they represent.

Too often institutions crucify individual actors rather than have accountability. Why reform police departments, when you can go after bad cops? It’s the perfect excuse for government agencies that are resistant to rooting out corruption.

B. F. Skinner and the behavioralists in the 1960s pointed out we are all creatures of our environment – we’re just rats in the Skinner box. Police officers are just workers in their institution, they enforce the laws and norms they are tasked to do in the way they are told to do it.

If we want to fix things, we need to look at reworking and replacing bad institutions rather than making scapegoats out of individuals.