What's The Lesson Of The Central Falls Firing?

Open Left has a great post up about the inevitable conclusions one should draw from the mass firing of the Central Falls staff. It's a fairly long post, but well worth going to the link to read the whole thing.

The bottom-line reason given for the firing [of the Central Falls High School staff in Rhode Island] in many news reports was a 48% graduation rate. Now, that rate is nothing to be proud of--even though it would have been quite respectable for the "Greatest Generation", which sent a lot of high school dropouts off to war. But 48% is still almost halfway to perfection. Contrast that with the violent crime rate for Oakland, California, 1917.8 per 100,000 in 2007 (the most recent year for which statistics are available in the DOJ online database). You'd have to double their performance (cut their violent crime rate in half) eleven times before you'd get close to perfection, a violent crime rate of less than 1 per 100,000.

Obviously, the entire Oakland Police Department should be fired. No other conclusion is possible. It's a no-brainer.

But why stop with Oakland?

The safest community in California is Laguna Woods, and it's violent crime rate is 16.4 per 100,000. You'd have double their police performance four times to get close to a violent crime rate of 1 per 100,000 and five times to get under 1 per 100,000. If perfection's your measure (and why shouldn't it be?) then the Laguna Woods police are spectacularly worse than the Central Falls High faculty and staff.

The conclusion is obvious: Every police department in America should be fired en masse.