By David K. Shipler
Imagine
walking into a police station for help as a victim of crime and also getting
help as a victim of poverty. Think how policing would change if, under the same
roof, assistance were available for the problems of hunger, housing, health,
addiction, and joblessness.
This
sounds like pure fantasy, especially as unjustified police shootings continue,
the country erupts in protests, and white supremacists threaten Black Lives
Matter demonstrators with violence that turns deadly. In many black
neighborhoods, the police are seen as the enemy—just another gang, as some
residents have said.
But the constructive reform of
policing need not be lost in the fog of fury. It needs to be kept as a focused
goal whose achievement will take unprecedented cooperation among community
activists and law enforcement, including police leadership and officers in the
ranks.
The problem has two parts. One is
the use of force by cops who are scared or bigoted or poorly trained or all of
the above. A great deal of study and thinking has gone into that issue, and
lots of sound policies have been proposed, though too rarely adopted, in
scattered jurisdictions among the nation’s 18,000 police departments.
The other part has been mostly neglected, however: the clustering of diverse services so that officers can be relieved of onerous tasks for which they have no expertise. It’s a good bet that you won’t be able to find a police officer who loves being called to a “domestic dispute,” where parachuting into a home without context can mean encountering unpredictable, split-second dangers. Nor do cops relish dealing with people suffering from mental illness, who account for a large number of encounters. In short, police are confronted by issues they cannot address, and need tools and training they do not have.
