I guess first things first. It's ugly out there. Rather than Trump's calling in the national guard, or de Blasio doubling the police force in New York City, how about the government just reopen things. Fully. Many columnists have suggested such. Indeed, Trump himself has said that this country is not built to exist in lockdown. Trump is right about that at least.
I have thought from the jump that, instead of trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (e.g., shutting down the economy, building makeshift hospitals that were never used, etc.), perhaps the correct move would have been to build makeshift morgues and prepare new graveyards to accommodate the [expected] deaths. Does such a strategy sound heartless? Fast forward to this coming winter when a second peak may come and we still do not have those facilities in place. Nature always wins. The equilibrium will be reached.
All this said, police brutality is the subject -- and a byproduct of these efforts to control a virus. The answer is to reopen the economy, but looking at the issue of security in isolation, the answer is private security. George Floyd wasn't the first victim of government security, of course. The subject of one of this first posts of this blog was Philando Castile who was shot and killed by a cop while he sat in his car. For those who think private security cannot work, name one thing that the government does better than the private sector. The key difference between public and private security (or any good/service) is that if people do not like the private security firm they have employed, they would simply switch to a competing private security firm. The result would be that the security firms best at de-escalating situations would thrive, while the ones full of hotheads would be out-competed. But what about the courts, how would they work? Same argument.
The world is going to change because of blockchain technology. It is hard to predict exactly how security will look in the new world that offers hope because right now government security "crowds out" private security. But the world will be a better place for everyone in time.
