Ranting On...Defund the Police

Social media is a terrible place to form opinions, and yet, it's kind of the only place they seem to matter in 2020.  In a world where we now live in our houses, and don't leave them for days or even weeks at a time, where friends are now six inches tall in Zoom calls on our iPads & where the most eye contact you have on a weekend is with the (blessed) cashier washing down the self-checkout at Walgreens, the place where we most oftentimes express ourselves is social media.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit-these are the vehicles for our social identity, and frequently they become the place where we show who we are and what we believe.  In 2020, in a presidential election with a man in the White House who becomes somehow more polarizing each day, and in a year where a pandemic and global protests against racism & criminal justice have become the dominant news stories, making sure that you are putting your voice into the chorus is important, and it sometimes means that you either don't have room for questions or doubt for fear that you'll be "cancelled."

This isn't entirely social media's fault, to be fair.  In many ways, "I'm just asking questions" has become the excuse of people who want to stir up controversy, who want to try and trick someone into saying something they don't really mean & then use that against them (I don't watch Fox News, but I have seen enough of it at the gym to know what's going on).  But there does need to be space to learn about a subject before you have an opinion on it, and that's what I have been doing the past few days with the "defund the police" movement.

I'm not going to get into the "why" behind how the "defund the police" movement has become a thing, and really I feel it's insulting to question too hard the motives as to why people are angry at law enforcement, particularly communities of color.  George Floyd is one of hundreds of names of black people who have been victim of a racist judicial system that doesn't see them as worth protecting, doesn't see them as worthy of the same "protection" that white people expect from law enforcement.  And the behavior of police forces, firing rubber bullets at members of the press, pushing down senior citizens walking down the street, spraying tear gas into the faces of protesters from behind the window of an armored car...you can keep your platitudes about "there are some good cops."  In the same way the Catholic Church and Hollywood's male producers needed to put up with criticism of the industry even if they are the "good apples," only the most stubborn of police officers or their supporters would admit that the current system is working and should be above criticism.

I support judicial reforms.  I support the Black Lives Matter movement.  I support Campaign Zero, and their prerogatives, amongst them limiting use of force, body cams for all police officers, ending for-profit policing/prison systems, and the end of broken windows policing.  I support decriminalizing marijuana and prostitution.  I start this conversation very open to the idea of reform, and I don't have much sympathy for the position that law enforcement finds itself in, but I also hear a phrase like "defund the police" and am curious as to how that would work.  And while I have seen the memes attacking people who say "how will that work?" and comparing them to people who are stopping progress in past conversations about equality, I don't see myself that way and I think it's a bit obtuse to lump all of the people questioning the "Defund the Police" movement into such a category.  Because, for real-I am just curious how that would work.

It turns out that while there are some people who support abolishing police departments, many of the goals of the "Defund the Police" movement are not exactly about abolishing police departments, but instead seeing if there are better ways to handle crime in the United States, and literally, in the process, moving the money that has gone to police departments (which almost always dominate city budget conversations) and moving that to other avenues that may be better-prepared to both address crime and perhaps reduce it.

I did a lot of research that I'm going to attempt to synthesize here (I am not an expert in theories on criminal justice, just someone who wanted to be informed), so I suggest if this article doesn't address your concerns you go and find other conversations that do, but essentially the idea here is that in a lot of situations, police officers are an inappropriate response for a host of problems.  Police officers address everything from homicide to your cat going missing-the scope of their job is enormous, and as a result, they are not properly trained to address all of the issues that they might encounter on the job.

For example, many police officers are called in to deal with people who are on chemical substances, or suffering from chemical withdraws.  If these people are not violent or don't pose a danger to the community, why is the police involved at all?  A police officer is not going to have the years of experience dealing with someone who has chemical dependance issues that a drug treatment counselor would have, and it's worth remembering-when someone is using an illegal substance, our goal is not to punish this person, it's to help them (or at least that's what I hope the goal is).  There's no real reason that if this person doesn't pose a danger to the community that the police should be involved at all.  Shifting that funding to someone more qualified to address the problem (like a mobile mental health crisis team) could solve this better, and thus are a better use of public funds to address these citizens' needs.

Mental illness is at the center of many police fatalities.  One in four people who die in police shootings do so while suffering from an acute mental illness.  We have police deal with people who are mentally ill rather than psychologists or mental health professionals-why?  The American Psychiatric Association is very firm on the fact that most people who suffer from mental illness are inherently non-violent, and yet disproportionately we see mentally ill people harmed by the police.  Is it a case where we're sending out the wrong people to address this problem?  Who is more likely to resolve a situation with a mentally ill person in a way that will minimize harm (to the person or others)-a police officer with minimal training in mental health, or a psychologist who has spent a decade of their education preparing to interact with such people?  "Calling the police" is such an engrained part of our lives that we don't think about these very logical answers to problems, and part of that is because the public has not been funding things like drug treatment and mental health response in a way where we assume these occupations (who are trained for this exact situation) can handle the response.  A way to solve that problem is to shift funds from police departments into these other public services, or to "defund."

And this is what is at the core of the "Defund the Police" movement.  You can criticize the name of it all you want, but keep in mind that similar sorts of criticisms were levied at the Black Lives Matter movement or the Gay Marriage movement-choice of words, particularly making them more provocative, has a power to stir conversation.  The "Defund the Police" movement is still malleable-there does not seem to be a consensus around its ultimate goals in the ways that the Gay Marriage and Black Lives Matter movements eventually entailed, but this is a conversation worth having, and I encourage you to not ignore or fear a response on social media, but instead research it.  The "Defund the Police" movement is just one of the many groups espousing criminal justice reform, and I think they are bringing a conversation worth having.