Defunding debunked

I'm pretty sure the reporters on the story that has a modest piece of front-page real estate in this morning's Washington Post would disown my title, but their article was headlined "'Defund' ideology collides with reality." (They might also disown the headline writer, but that's a Post problem.)

As I've written before, defunding the police is a really stupid slogan (read "ideological statement"). The reality is that we need the police, so what we need to figure out is how to de-escalate the violence they have become an increasing part of; this is a real problem. The solutions lie in the direction of demilitarizing the police and decriminalizing a large portion of their interactions with us citizens. Being crazy isn't a crime, never mind a crime that calls for chaining a person naked in the street in wintery weather and hooding their head and standing around on smoke-and-joke time while they die. Similarly, suspicion of wanting to bring a knife to a gunfight doesn't seem to me to be a seven-bullets-in-the-back offense. These and the bulk of the sad litany we have been listening to are the reult of the over-militarization of policing and, because the sole tool of the military approach is the firefight, every problem presents itself as hostile action.

Police abolitionists suggest replacing sworn officers with psychiatric interventionists and degreed social workers to handle what is a huge part of what police officers do with their time. An excellent report that came out in the New York Times this past June showed that responses to serious violent crime calls occupied a mid-single-digit percentage of police time. Property crimes and other crime take up 20-30 percent; so about a third of sworn officers' time is spent on responding to criminal reports. Another third is spent responding to non-criminal calls. The rest is taken up by traffic and other, including medical, issues.

There is some obvious truth to the idea that a lot of police work doesn't require, or even benefit from, a militarized approach. However, it is the relatively modest part of the workload requires the disciplined application of force that most of us consider the absolute requirement on the police.

So, a smallish cadre of highly trained paramilitary police and intervention and social work for the rest? Doesn't really work. That's the collision headlining the Post article. Too many of the interventions have the potential to turn ugly even with the best intended therapeutic modalities. The police are sent to these calls because they are effective and part of the effectiveness is the show of force. Counter to that is the "only tool" problem; when "open fire" isn't the right thing, the police need to do something else. And they need to know which set of tools is the right one in the often dangerous and always situations they encounter in the two-thirds of their load that isn't criminal.