Choking on Bureaucracy and Policy

Over my Holiday break, I got sucked into the YouTube world of police bodycam videos. There are endless freak-show videos out there of drunk drivers and car chases. The vast majority of arrests, DUI stops, etc... are probably pretty boring and mundane where the person being arrested or charged with DUI realizes the gig is up and tries to minimize the damage to their life. The videos that make it to YouTube are certainly the extreme cases. There are lots of DUI women in these videos, for example, but the vast majority of DUI arrests are men, it's like 80% men according to published stats, but every DUI arrest video I watched was a woman.

Anyway, one of the themes in these videos is "the system" is pretty broken. I think this is a pervasive problem. Anytime there's a "system" at all it ends up broken. Rules and policies can't replace judgement and thinking. They also create the perverse scenario where criminals easily out-compete "good" people who follow rules and laws.

Police go through hours of kabuki theater nonsense to arrest some completely shitfaced drunk drivers, who then get a slap on the wrist even after multiple DUIs, driving with no license, etc...

Many states and cities seem to have insane and nonsensical policies that lead to high speed chases that endanger the general public. For example, in one completely insane video, cops in Illinois intervened in the middle of a robbery at a Porsche dealership but obviously made the overall situation much worse.

Since the cops there seem to be really restricted in their use of deadly force, they allowed the thieves to drive off in cars at high speed and endanger the general public. One of the thieves managed to steal a cop car and then he crashed into a random person's car. It easily could have been a fatal accident.

Ohio high speed chases seem especially insane and dangerous. The cops pursue at a distance rather than try to end the chase as quickly as possible. That allows the driver to amp up their speed while moving through traffic and neighborhoods which leads to obvious bad outcomes. The city of Columbus has some policy that prevents police from deliberately crashing a driver if they are in a high center of gravity vehicle... so anyone in a lifted truck can flee essentially indefinitely.

When I was in middle school many of my friends and I played Dungeons and Dragons, which has an "alignment" system. It made quite an impression on me because it's a pretty good representation of reality. Even when I was 11 or 12 years old, I thought the "lawful" alignments were the worst and I tended to favor the "neutral" axis. That concept persisted through my life.

Anyway, once there are too many laws, rules, policies shit's fucked. It's like the scenario in the previous post--engineered solutions will fail fastest compared to a pile of rocks. The law and rules are more of a symptom than a cause though.