Friday, December 31, 2021

Chokeholds Reconsidered - 2021 New Year's Resolution Fulfillment

I fulfilled my perpetual, annual New Year's Resolution in 2021 by changing my mind on the desirability of banning police chokeholds. 

The list of improvements we could make to reduce police state abuses is long. However, one specific policy that I no longer endorse is to ban police chokeholds in all circumstances. It is my view that banning chokeholds for police is a net negative as that leads to more violence including more deadly violence but also the use of batons and other instruments that can inflict long-term damage. 

Forbidding chokeholds negates the ability for a single even well-trained officer to subdue a violent noncompliant subject without using deadly violence. I came to this conclusion after listening to this Sam Harris interview with Rener Gracie, master of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu whose grandfather invented it and who has trained police officers around the country. 

This is not to say that chokeholds should be used often or without extreme reservation. It also is not to say that chokeholds are in any way a non-violent police tactic. Yet completely taking this tool away seems likely to cause more harm than good.

This does reinforce and speak to my bias that banning things is a bad, blunt-force instrument. The world is more complicated than that. And unintended consequences almost always result from such actions.


BONUS: Additionally I changed my mind on my reaction to treating kids with Adderall, et al.  I still think we over prescribe drugs to kids in these circumstances for selfish reasons and we don’t have nearly enough tolerance for deviations from a desired norm—quiet, obedient children. But the dose makes the poison and there are very legitimate uses of dangerous things including of course many drugs. I thank Scott Alexander and his post on how much drugs problematic drug users actually use for changing my mind.