Community Policing?

 Ever since the racial troubles began this year in the United States there have been people down here who claim the police should defunded! (Some of the zealots think this means doing away with cops altogether.)

Now this is a really stupid idea folks because what they were actually suggesting was to take some of the administrative, social and mundane police jobs and put them in the hands less experienced and lower paid individuals! 

Then we would have all the cops ready for the dirty work!

Let's take an objective view of policing and seperate the necessary jobs from the fluff stuff that cops do now! 

Remember, there are lots of things that could best be left to people like social workers, medics, traffic, domestic and by-law personnel.

By Roge Karma:  VOX

1) Create specialized traffic patrol officers

There is no justifiable reason why armed police officers should be in charge of road safety. Police officers are not hired for a particular talent in highway navigation, accident report taking, or citation writing. And deploying armed officers to perform such routine tasks introduces the risk of unnecessary lethal force into many millions of encounters every year.

2) Deploy community mediators to handle minor disputes

A huge number of calls to the police involve relatively minor interpersonal disputes: disputes over noise levels, trespassing, misbehaving pets, or rowdiness; disputes between spouses, family members, roommates, or neighbors. Without a mediator present, it is possible that what starts out as a minor dispute can escalate to violence. But there is no particular reason the job of mediation has to be assigned to armed police officers; if anything, traditional police tend to unnecessarily escalate these situations, resulting in arrests or worse.

3) Create a mobile crisis response unit 

A police officer’s role bleeds over from mediation into something that resembles social work, usually involving populations like those who are homeless, intoxicated, substance abusers, or suffering from mental illness.

The results can be disastrous. About half of prison inmates were diagnosed with a mental illness. Around a quarter of fatal encounters with law enforcement involve someone with a mental health condition (those numbers are possibly severe undercounts). A disproportionate number of police calls and arrests in cities across the country involve homeless populations. In Portland, Oregon, the city’s homeless population made up 52 percent of the city’s arrests in 2017 even though they comprise less than 3 percent of Portland’s population.

“You wouldn’t try to build a house with just a jackhammer,” says Zachary Norris, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and author of We Keep Us Safe. “But that’s what we’re doing when we task police officers with dealing with public health issues like substance abuse, homelessness, and mental illness.”

AND FINALLY:

4) Experiment with community self-policing

Those first three ideas involve solutions that local government officials could incorporate fairly easily into their existing policing models. 

But what if we changed the model completely? What if, instead of policing communities, we gave them the resources to police themselves?

A little over 20 years ago, the Australian government did just that.

The history of the indigenous community in Australia is thick with repression, brutality, and violence at the hands of the state. Descriptions of Indigenous-police relationships read as though they could be pulled straight from the contemporary African American experience in the United States (not to mention the US native communities). As Harry Blagg, a criminologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia, writes:

Historically, policing was an instrument for controlling, limiting, denying or supervising Indigenous egress into the white domain. According to criminologists, this has left a legacy of over-policing of Indigenous people in the public realm – where they may constitute a threat to public order – and under-policing (under servicing might be a better term) of Indigenous people within their own communities.

This began to change in the 1990s when a government commission found that Indigenous people were highly overrepresented in prisons and jails as a result of systemic bias. The authors concluded that the only way to end this injustice was to entirely reimagine the way Australians interact with the criminal justice system.

One recommendation they made was for the government to fund local forms of community self-policing, like the Julalikari Night Patrol in northern Australia. The idea behind the night patrols was simple: to enhance public safety by establishing a buffer between Indigenous people and police forces. This is how Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey described his visit to the Nyoongar patrol in Perth, Australia, in his 2018 book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence:

I joined a team led by Annie and Rachel, two extraordinary women who were remarkable to watch in action. I looked on as they tried to calm a shirtless man who was drunk and belligerent in front of a crowded bar. I saw them talk to a man who looked unwell, lying on a bench in the middle of a city plaza, and stay with him as the emergency medical technician asked him questions and eventually took him to get treatment. …

The challenges that emerge over the course of a shift change on a nightly basis, but the overarching goal of the patrol teams is to maintain a presence in the public spaces where young people hang out, to search for Aboriginal people who look as if they could use some help, and to give anyone who is causing trouble the chance to cool off or to go home before the police get involved. At times the patrol team’s intervention comes with a stern warning, but usually it comes with a warm smile.

When reading that description, it’s hard not to think about how differently things would have gone for Rayshard Brooks or Dion Johnson if members of this local night patrol had been on duty. 

Maybe they drive Brooks to his sister’s house to spend the night. 

Maybe they take Johnson to a local shelter to sober up with a warm breakfast. 

EITHER WAY...the police need never be called.

The way I see it anyway!