Reimagining Policing

I’m one of those who is concerned that calls by some progressives to “defund police” is handing a gift to reactionary politicians who want to scare voters with the specter of their being left at the mercy of dangerous criminals as police departments are abolished. While there are some activists who actually are calling for the abolition of police departments as we know them, what most progressives mean when they talk about defunding police is drawing down the budgets of police departments and redirecting the money to programs that would promote public safety while also advancing racial equity.

It would be irresponsible to simply starve police departments of the funding and resources they need to do what we require them to do, but it would be entirely appropriate to reconsider what it is we require them to do. Rather than “defunding police,” a better description of this approach is reimagining how we ensure public safety.

A friend of mine had a sister (who was white) with a history of mental health issues. Last year after her family, who did not live nearby, had not been able to reach her for a few days, they called her local police department and asked them to do a health check. When she didn’t respond to the police officers’ knock at the door, they entered her house and found her wielding a knife. They shot her dead. The police reported that she had attempted to attack one of the officers, and that he became trapped with no means of escape. They had no choice but to shoot her, they said.

This episode demonstrates that the problem with modern policing is not only one of racial discrimination. It also has to do with the degree to which police officers are inclined to resort to deadly force, and the extent to which our current approach to public safety relies on officers equipped with deadly weapons to deal with a range of situations that arguably do not required an armed response.

Imagine that a municipality like Minneapolis compiled an inventory of everything their police officers do over the course of a typical week, and how many person-hours were required to perform each activity. Now imagine that they identified on this list all those activities that do not require an armed response, and created other municipal departments, staffed with appropriately trained personnel, to handle those activities, reallocating funds from the police to those other departments commensurate with the shifting of the work involved.

Do we need armed police officers to respond to fender-benders? Insurance adjusters also investigate automobile accidents, and they don’t seem to need guns strapped to their belts. Do we need armed police officers to do a home health check? Might a mental health professional be a better person to handle that job?

Critics of these proposals may argue that one never knows when a responder might encounter someone who is armed and dangerous. But it’s not necessary that public service personnel who are asked to enter uncertain situations be entirely unarmed. It’s simply not clear that they need to be armed with weapons explicitly designed to kill.

With the introduction of tasers, public safety personnel for the first time had the means of stopping would-be assailants from a distance without shooting them. But I’m not satisfied that we have invested as much as we could in non-deadly alternatives to guns. The American culture and the culture within police departments resist the idea of reducing our reliance on guns as a law-enforcement tool. But if much of what is today considered the province of police officers — patrolling residential neighborhoods, writing traffic tickets, responding to noise complaints — were performed not by police officers but by personnel equipped only with non-deadly alternatives to guns, I am confident that extraordinary advances would quickly be made in the development of such alternatives.

To be clear, I am not overlooking the fact that George Floyd was not killed by a gun, and I am not suggesting that systemic racism is not a huge problem in law enforcement and in our society generally. What I am saying is that it is not the only issue underlying the long list of tragic deaths at the hands of police. George Floyd wasn’t killed with a gun, but he was killed by an individual who had been trained and empowered to use deadly force, and who operated within an institution that considers itself the “thin blue line” between civilization and chaos. That’s not the kind of person we need to respond to a complaint about someone trying to pay for a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. It is past time to rethink how we ensure public safety and civic order in American municipalities.