The attached image is the subject of today’s blog post. When I first heard the term “defund the police” I immediately thought that the term meant to eliminate the police as we know it. It meant taking their money away. Which is the financial equivalent of putting a knee into their throat and waiting eight minutes. Which then felt like a natural emotional reaction to the seven millionth black person blown away by police in recent memory. So the solution to corrupt police unions is to invite anarchy. No police. And crime would just magically disappear…or we’d all be on our own.
But then I thought to myself: That can’t be what these people mean. And I did more research and indeed I found that the word “defund” was used where the word “reallocate” should be. And that brings me to back to the image. During the recent past, police have been asked to deal with a greater and greater number of issues that are somewhat ancillary related to their actual field. The phrase “protecting the community” sounds incredibly noble (and carries a great political charge), but the problem is that the problems of the community can be fairly extensive, and those issues are interdependent of each other. And those issues stem outside of simply keeping the peace; beyond what any police officer was trained to do. And despite these truths, we’ve asked cops to take more and more responsibility for dealing with these issues.
Crime can be connected with so many issues, a great deal of which aren’t evil masterminds. Those who have mental health issues aren’t evil; and cops aren’t trained to handle mental health (or if they are, its not enough, and they shouldn’t be expected to be that trained); and those who are desperate and make poor decisions out of desperation aren’t evil. Those who are poor, from broken communities, and more, aren’t evil. The image shows that these particular issues can be solved by letting the professionals in those areas access to greater funding so they can do their jobs (which they are trained for) and for police to get back to what they are trained for.
Education and job opportunities can solve poverty issues that lead to theft and other crimes that are driven by desperation. Fixing a broken healthcare system, prices that are out of control, forcing people to choose between bankruptcy and live-saving procedures, and access to quality, effective, and non-stigmatic mental health services, can help eliminate crimes performed by those with mental health issues, and those who commit crimes to pay medical bills. Access to quality social work can lead to fewer broken families. Access to affordable and humane housing, from freeing landlords from being cruel middlemen, to humane housing for everyone will lead to less homelessness. And by fixing a broken criminal justice system, that is as racist, as it is built on a completely ass backwards system of retributable justice (that is the punishment fitting the crime) we might have less criminals, and return incarceration to its original purpose: rehabilitation.
So don’t “defund” the police. That won’t solve the problem. Reallocate the resources to support and strengthen other areas of public health and civil service to allow the police to get back to the job they were trained for. Make education a social priority, and fund it as such. Make it so that teachers make as much as doctors, because shaping America’s youth and the next generation is just as vital of a purpose. Teacher can affect the next generation. Teachers can help society grow and change. Teachers hold the future in the palm of their hands. Through education, people can pull themselves up out of poverty. Through education, they can get the tools necessary for good jobs that can secure their families’ financial future. Through education, they can learn how to stand up for themselves against greedy corporate institutions that seek to keep themselves rich and powerful; they can unionize legally and effectively.
We need a government that prioritizes creating jobs that are fruitful, manageable and humane. People who work contribute fruitfully to society, and can take care fo themselves. More jobs and more diversity in those jobs means less people on welfare. And it means welfare can be reserved for those who actually need it, not those who are too lazy to work for a living because they learned to con the system. If we do that, there will be less Joe Chills for the police to chase, so that the cops can instead take down the Falcones and the Jokers of the world (although I guess you can make a claim that the Joker is a mental health situation). We need the police to take down evil; we need the government to take care of its citizens to eliminate social problems that are connected to crime.
We need to fix a broken healthcare system, where prices are out of control, and insurance companies have a monopoly because they aren’t regulated effectively. Maybe then people won’t have to feel like they have to choose bankruptcy or a life-saving procedure, or even relatively simple, routine care. We need to find a way to make it universal, affordable without skyrocketing taxes. The top 1/10 of 1%, I’m speaking to you. We’ve spent enough time realizing that as we watch Dr. House work on imaginary patients on TV that, we’d never have the money or the resources to see a diagnostician like him. We’d be the people who would die at home and probably alone. That isn’t right. Why should only the rich and powerful get decent healthcare?
And we need to, once and for all, de-stigmatize and effectively address mental health. That doesn’t mean that we go crazy over a simple headache, or apathy to doing what you have to do. It doesn’t mean we that stop encouraging people to “push through it.” It means that we recognize that this day in age, there are more things going wrong with the brain than was ever documented in the past, and its time to diagnose and deal with it. We still don’t understand the brain nearly as well as we should; its the final frontier of modern medicine. And while physical injuries are easy to diagnose and treat, mental health injuries are buried under the surface and require careful tension to behaviorism; because even the patient knows when they are bleeding; they don’t always know when they are mentally unhealthy, because the part of the brain that informs them something is wrong is the very part that is messed up.
Quality social work and resources will help put broken families back to together and get people the help they need. Domestic issues (including violence) is still one of the most insidious issues plaguing society today. Quality social work can identify a wife-beater before they get out of control; they can assist all types of people getting out of bad situations before something terminal happens. They can put families back together by breaking the cycles of violence, anger, resentment and more by coaching them in healthy dialogue. And maybe, just maybe less broken families, means less crime stemming from those type situations.
And we must deal with the housing crisis. By creating affordable housing that allows tenets access to quality affordable housing, and landlords to be freed from being choked as the middlemen, we can eliminate homelessness. Homelessness is also driven largely by mental health issues, so you can see where these issues start to overlap. It’s unbelievable that in the 21st Century, affordable housing can’t be made available to everyone.
And finally, we need to seriously consider the broken criminal justice system. In addition to a system that has racist tendencies (that is, that its fairly well documented that similar crimes committed by offenders who are white are generally carry lighter sentences than offenders who are colored), we also have a problem with our way of matching the crime against the punishment. One of these areas is the way we consider substance abuse cases. It can no longer be ignored that different drug offenses should carry lighter or heavier sentences. Marijuana, for example, has less of a nefarious effect on the individual and society, than cocaine or heroine. Hell, weed is now legal in several US states and heavily regulated and poses little more risk and threat than alcohol which is completely legal. Since the war on drugs has been largely ineffective, and people have a tendency to use the drugs despite efforts by law enforcement to stem the tide, why not take the same approach as alcohol and tobacco? Legalize it, regulate it, and tax it heavily. The taxes might just be enough to thwart its usage, and this way the government can profit on people’s poor decision making. This should be done in concert with additional education for children (and everyone), and regulation to discourage a black market from forming and other insidious practices from taking place.
Incarceration needs to return to its original rehabilitative purpose. You break the law (especially for a minor offense), you are incarcerated for the eventual purpose of remorse, regret and eventually changing your ways and returning to society. While I am not in favor of any rights being bestowed upon those who are incarcerated, once prisoners have served their time, they should be afforded the rights and privileges of a full citizen. That doesn’t mean that society should trust them implicitly; they will have to earn back the forgiveness of society, and if that means they are treated like pariahs, then so be it. But eventually, they should be able to earn their way back. There will be some who are below remorse, and those should never be allowed back in society. While I frown on the death penalty for these, I also frown on them living on the tax dollars of society endlessly. That only punishes those who pay the taxes; not those who broke the law. But even if there are still some evil bad apples who can never rejoin society, and those who commit crimes from which there is no return, there is a large majority who would benefit from a more rehabilitative system. And they can contribute to society productively.
To summarize: look at the image. See what the police officer is carrying at the beginning, and then see what the police has to be responsible for at the end. And see how society comes together, rather than putting so much on one area of civil service. This post doesn’t cover the need for police departments to take a close look at themselves, to find ways to protect the community, and to eradicate racist tendencies that so many of them have. If they can do this, and perhaps wield deadly violence less often, the ones who have lost the confidence of the public will have it restored. And those many, many departments and police who strive to (and succeed in) doing the right thing every day, continue your good work to be a beacon of hope to the communities you serve and an example for everyone else to follow. To the rest of us, let us not be manipulated by our emotions, by the media, or anyone else who seeks to turn public opinion. Let’s do the research, look at the facts and make informed decisions ourselves. And let us strive to use our words precisely.