Will We Ever Have A Healthy Public Safety System?
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Imagine a husband who beats his wife. He physically assaults her, manipulates her, isolates her from friends and family, controls her. She tells herself that it’s okay, because he puts food on the table. She tells herself that maybe she deserves it when he hits her, and that she just needs to be a little better.
Now imagine that this abused woman is given help from someone else. Someone tells her that she can get away from this man. This person gives her money to start a new life. But instead of doing any of that, the woman gives the money to her husband. She tells him that he needs to go to counseling. So the husband uses the money to design a counseling program for himself. He writes up a curriculum, teaches himself in class, and gives himself a test. Lo and behold, he passes. He’s changed. He’s reformed.
Do you think this woman’s life would be any better after that?
This ridiculous scenario is what we are doing every day with police departments. There is overwhelming evidence of the problems that police departments have, of the abuse that they administer, and yet our solution is to give them more resources. Our solution is to trust them to fix a problem that not only did they create, but that they…
