What with all the conflict in the world surrounding BLM I figured I should link to a black person writing about his struggles with police. Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote a piece on this topic, and one of the key things it nails is how racist policing can't be explained away by 'but the police need to question suspicious people' and similar attempts to ignore the problem. Tyson's story includes an example of him being questioned for carrying books into a building on campus. This isn't a thing you would imagine any police officer randomly getting involved with, except that Tyson is black, and the police felt sure that black people don't belong near a physics department. That is for white people!
Here it is.
One thing I have found interesting in all this is looking at the way people talk about their proposed solutions. 'Defund the police' has become a refrain from the protesters, and I am totally behind that.
Sometimes I have seen people saying "Well, obviously we want to redirect most police funding to social workers, health workers, etc. and shrink the police force, but we don't want to *eliminate* police." but others truly want to get rid of police entirely. No armed law enforcement at all.
You see similar arguments with regards to prisons. Prison abolition strictly means no prisons, and some people advocate for exactly that, while others want significant reductions in prison populations.
I am certainly in the 'significant reductions' camp. There are deeply evil people in the world that cannot be dealt with via fines, classes, apologies, or other similar techniques. The Jeffrey Dahmers and Robert Picktons of the world can't just be left alone. We need prisons for such people.
We also need armed law enforcement. When somebody has a gun and is ready to shoot other people, we need people who are trained to fight them.
But we need so few of those people, and such a small amount of prison space. The desperately evil and incorrigibly violent are rare.
Traffic control does not need to be overseen by armed law enforcement. Responding to people who are drunk or high or otherwise causing a fuss does not require guns and clubs, it requires someone trained in social work. There are so many police functions that simply should be overseen by somebody else, probably somebody with actual training that applies to the situation at hand.
We could reduce prisons populations and police personnel by 90% and it would make me happy. We do need those both of those things for the extreme cases, but there are way too many cops and they are way too involved in everyone's everyday life.
Changing how the police operate is certainly a good goal. There are so many things we could do to try to reduce the damage police do in each interaction. However, the simple fact is that we can do a tremendous amount of good by drastically slashing the number of interactions the police are involved in, and we do that by stripping away the vast majority of their budget and putting it towards programs that bring far greater benefits and far fewer problems.
Great blog, and I enjoyed it, as usual. I see some of the ins and outs of policing in my work in the ER. And I agree that much of the work they are tasked with could be offloaded to those with more specific or different training, or addressed in a more collaborative way. We have a police officer-social worker team who go out on calls together which is very effective. The only point I disagree with is that those who are drunk or high can be managed by a social worker and not someone able and ready to exert physical control if the situation becomes dangerous. I, and my colleagues in the ER have been hurt, or nearly hurt by people who are intoxicated. When people's brains are hijacked by substances (particularly stimulants) there is often no amount of verbal de-escalation that will work as their higher reasoning centres are offline. I think the combo team however, of someone specialized in counselling, crisis management and de-escalation along with someone trained to protect the person from themselves, and others from them during the process of intoxication or withdrawal is a great way to proceed and should become more mainstream.
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