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I’ve been thinking about the call to “defund police” a lot. I think only the most simple thinkers equate this to “remove all police” or think law enforcement can serve no positive purpose in upholding our various social contracts geared toward safety of communities and citizens. https://twitter.com/nmercad/status/1268394855182499840">https://twitter.com/nmercad/s...
All the things I said in June basically hold true regardless of whether you call it defunding police or describe better budgeting their resources, and reapportioning funding to other initiatives mentioned.
I don’t think we should defund the police in the sense of take all money away from law enforcement and agencies aimed at protecting and serving us. I think we should do the hard work to figure out what is wasteful spending, and what are constructive purposes for spending.
At some point, police are just people. They’re not all born bad, or violent, or dangerous. They’re built that way because of the training/lack thereof, prior social determinants etc. We aren’t always drawing the right candidates And we are adding them to a flawed environment.
We certainly aren’t training them to fill constructive purposes protecting and serving our communities. We aren’t using merit to determine who gets the privilege of the badge and who doesn’t. We don’t condemn things that aren’t reflective of what the community pays them for.
We should feel compelled to celebrate people that put their own health and safety at risk to help others. Law enforcement should be part of that. But when we allow anything to go unchecked, the worst of it tends to run rampant and create the most glaring problems.
This is all pointing to what defund police is really about: instituting sweeping structural changes to law enforcement. Ones that get it more strictly in line with the purpose, code of ethics, and job requirements we always intended (or at least pretended to).
There’s a parallel to health care professionals. Their role is to preserve human life. They’re: rigorously educated and trained; licensed and accredited. They take oaths that they must uphold. They’re held accountable civilly and sometimes criminally when they screw up.
If you replace healthcare professional with police officer the basic process to qualify someone in the role and hold them accountable shouldn’t be dramatically different. The overarching purpose of the roles aren’t miles apart. Just the inputs specific to the role are different.
