Defunding The Police Would Benefit Policing
If you’re like me, you’re in favor of defunding the police. That phrase has been interpreted and reinterpreted a number of different ways already so that seemingly every conversation is free to adjust it to fit their argument. I’ll circle back to something close to a definition later, but the thing I’d like to offer is that police should be in favor of defunding the police as well. The logic works something like the following:
We should be able to defund the police because they shouldn’t need the level of funding that they request because they shouldn’t be responsible for all that they are responsible for. The police aren’t always the right tool for the jobs we the public have given them.
Police are armed avatars of legal authority. From its origins in this country (which yes, can be traced to enforcing slavery,) the police force has been a pseudo-warrior class. While a warrior might be useful at times, considering that a collection of recent studies put “responding to violent crime” at somewhere between 1% and 5% of a police officer’s time, why are we sending warriors to the other 95% of police duties?
Why is armed authority the response when someone didn’t use their turn signal? Why is a person with a gun the right reaction to noise complaints? Why is someone who has been trained to see threats around every corner the best response when someone with a mood disorder didn’t take their meds and is running naked through the mall?
The simple answer is that it’s not the right response. But it’s the only response we as a society have. We’ve defunded social workers, counselors, welfare resources and virtually every other institution that would be the proper response if not preventative measure for those kinds of situations. We’ve tasked the police with cleaning up in the absence of those institutions. They have responsibilities they were not trained or equipped for.
A couple years back, I used a similar argument regarding the idiotic approach of arming teachers as a way of preventing school shootings. Teachers are among the most underpaid civil servants out there. For many students, school is the only place to get a square meal. School is the only safe four walls they have access to. School is the only place where that student can find support. That’s in addition to all of the academics that may or may not go on.
If things remain as they are, this fall we’ll also be asking teachers to become tech experts and infectious disease detectives.
In both situations, policing and teaching, we have groups of people trained to do one thing that are then tasked with other responsibilities by a society that would rather not think about it. The big difference is, when the police (who handle mostly nonviolent assignments, remember) ask for military grade assault vehicles, they get it. When teachers ask for paper and pencils, we tell them to buy it themselves.
Education could actually be a big asset to police. Consistently, areas with a higher accessibility to quality education see less crime. Instead of “defund the police,” maybe it should be “fund education.”
Broadly speaking, many “defund the police” movements are heading in that direction. Instead of all money going to people with guns, take some of it and invest in things like social and welfare programs and education. Policing desperately needs to be reformed to root out the systemic racism, misogyny, classism, and many other issues. One first step would be to defund the police so we can fund less violent societal support systems.
