Yes, Defund the Police

 

I heard the demonstrators demanding, “Defund the police!” They can't be serious, I thought.  The very notion seems radical and dangerous on its face, and if carried out would surely leave us vulnerable to violence in our homes and streets. And that's the pitch, of course, that Trump is using to try to get re-elected as a law-and-order President, this from a man who regularly bends and breaks the law, and whom I hope to see some day making a perp walk.

But is he right about de-funding the police? The question is as urgent here in my home Suffolk County as it is in Minneapolis where George Floyd died.

New York  Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered  every municipality in the state to conduct a comprehensive review of the role of the police in public safety. A plan for “reform and reinvention,” says the order, must be completed, presented for public comment and passed by the County Legislature by next April 1, according to the Governor’s order. 

What are we paying for?

For me to weigh the idea of de-funding, it's necessary to ask first what we are exactly funding in the first place. What do our police actually do on a routine basis for all the money we spend on them, an especially relevant question here in Suffolk where police are paid more than any other force in the country.

Fortunately, the FBI keeps statistics that bear on the question. The statistics show that very little of a police officer’s day is directly devoted to the kind of crime fighting dramatized by television and movies. I like such shows from old classics like Hill Street Blues to Major Crimes and CSI to historic ones like Murdoch Mysteries. But according to FBI statistics for 2016, for each of the 701,000 police employed that year, on average, less than two (1.78) violent crimes were reported. Again, that's per year, and includes murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. But reports, few as they were/officer, resulted in even fewer arrests--only a little more than half a million arrests, or less than one arrest/year for each officer.

As for property crimes, for each officer, on average, less than one property crime per month (11.3/year) was reported. That includes burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson. And, these reports resulted in less than two arrests/officer through that whole year. 

Now, I'm not minimizing the importance of fighting such crime, but the statistics lead to the question of what exactly police officers are doing every day. That is a complex and layered question, and the answers, of course, include highway and traffic patrol, crowd control, and patrol of neighborhoods. In New York City, neighborhood patrol involved millions of stops-and-frisks until recently that have been found not to reduce crime while oppressing Blacks and other minorities. 

According to Alex Vitale, a sociology professor, author of The End of  Policing and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, the police are actually spending a lot of their time trying to solve all sorts of community problems like drug addiction, homelessness, and mental health crises that they are ill-equipped to handle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBazDnubww

Such problems could be better handled by those trained for the job: social workers, housing specialists, and mental health workers who are now among the lowest-paid of workers.  

It is especially notable that the highest number of arrests each year are for drug abuse violations, a result of our on-going War on Drugs. This so-called war was started by Richard Nixon, according to historians, as a racist and political tactic to continue the discriminatory effects of Jim Crow laws that could no longer be enforced due to public outrage. This suggests that decriminalizing drug use would eliminate the need for all this police intervention, not only eliminating the arrests of drug users and traffickers themselvs, but also cutting the number of thefts and burglaries by drug users desperate for money to support their addiction.

Professor Vitale argues that police have been given too many roles than they can safely fulfill with the limited tools at their disposal. Through training and practice, they turn to coercion, violence and the threat of violence to solve problems.  This is why we have so many tragic outcomes, such as a mentally ill person undergoing an episode of schizophrenia who is confronted by an armed police officer, and the situation gets out of control. Police should be the last resort in such cases, not the first. But when a mentally ill person becomes threatening, there is no one but the police to call.

Reforming the Police

But why not simply reform the police instead of de-funding? Minneapolis tried all the recommended reforms, and yet George Floyd died under the knee of an officer. The city now plans to replace its police with a department of community safety and violence prevention, which will prioritize a "public health-oriented approach" to situations involving the mentally ill and drug abusers. 

Vitale asserts that reforms including de-escalation training, body cameras and anti-bias training cannot solve the fundamental problem: modern policing in the United States is a continuation of what began as slave and border patrols that have been used to control and harm Black people and other minorities for generations. In 2016, Terrence Cunningham, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, apologized at the group’s annual conference for the historical mistreatment of communities of color, calling it a “dark side of our shared history” that must be recognized and overcome. Cunningham noted that police have historically been a face of oppression, enforcing laws that ensured legalized discrimination and denial of basic rights.

In recent years, modern policing has become even more dangerous because of militarization—officers in gear developed to protect soldiers in war zones, tank-like vehicles and weaponry designed to stop enemies—not our own citizens. The 2016 apology by Cunningham appears in Re-imagining Public Safety: Prevent Harm and Lead with the Truth A five-step policy plan for policing in America, https://policingequity.org/images/pdfs-doc/reports/re-imagining_public_safety_final_11.26.19.pd published by The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. This is but one of many blueprints for reinventing our systems for public safety that have been around for years but have been ignored.

 It has become clear to me that there is no substitute for wholesale re-organization of how we keep our communities safe. Addicts and people suffering from mental health problems should be handled by professionsals trained to do so. And, if we de-criminalize drug use and prostitution, we eliminate not only all the arrests for those crimes, but also eliminate the incentive for millions of burglaries and robberies.

Yes, we can de-fund and be safer and have money left over to invest in our communities. The question now is whether, even with continuing demonstrations and new public consciousness, our leaders will be able to make the fundamental changes to policing that will prevent an endless repetition of tragic police killings. ##