I had a really hard time imagining how a government could function without police.

Luckily I have excellent friends and they helped me realize that the key issue with our criminal justice system is that it is centered on criminals.

The core questions we ask are all about the people who broke the rules, who are they, what rules did they break and how should we punish them.

Imagining a victims justice system was a key breakthrough for me. What if we instead we built a system that really centered the people harm instead and asked how we failed them and how we could mitigate that harm.

What if the important part of a crime was not that someone broke the rules but that someone got harmed. What if instead of finding and confronting the "bad guy" we instead had a force focused on finding and comforting victims

Sometimes you might also need to keep someone who hurt a victim separated but for the safety of the victim not for punishment.

If we replaced our police force with social workers and gave them access to the same spending power and the mandate to help those who need it and who have been harmed you could probably make some remarkable inroads

Because the hard truth is this, we are usually helpless as a state to prevent harm, the most we are able to do is respond to it and we get to decide who is in the center of that response. Centering the people who cause harm, cause harm.