Common Ground on Improving Policing and Communities

We don’t have to choose between defunding the police and accepting the status quo.

The conversations around policing and reform often devolve into the typical “us versus them” politics, where each side believes it is fighting for all that is right and good and the other represents something horribly wrong, if not evil. As in life, policy is rarely quite so simple, even when the issue at hand is basic human freedom and police confrontations that can end in needless death. To bring this point home, I want to explain a recent event that reveals the common ground between police and those who have spent many months and years protesting and organizing against police violence.

The incident

Over a recent weekend, I heard a man yelling outside of my home in Northeast Washington, DC. It was unclear whether the man is mentally ill or was intoxicated, but in either case, it’s fair to say that he was not in full control of his faculties. He was across the street, apparently screaming at no one in particular on my side of the street. He was pacing back and forth, with his shoulders pushed forward in an aggressive posture, as if preparing for a fistfight. He is a Black man, who looked to be in his 30s, wearing a grey hoodie and black pants, and both his hoodie pocket and pants pockets were visibly bulging. As it was a late night toward the end of December, it was relatively cold outside so he would occasionally put his hands in his pockets, likely to warm them.

Anyone familiar with the typical post hoc explanations for why a police officer shot an unarmed individual will recognize that the man was acting in a way that could legally justify deadly force. An irrational man posing a potential threat who puts his hand in his bulging pocket is so common an explanation for such shootings that it’s reasonably suspected to be boilerplate, whether or not the facts support it in any given case. For this reason, and because this man continued his behavior for upwards of 15 minutes, police involvement was increasingly likely and thus inherently carried the risk of police violence.

Unfortunately, scenes like the one outside of my window are common in many U.S. cities. Homelessness, drug overdoses, and people having mental health crises are persistent features of the urban landscape. Many Americans become inured to the daily plight of the less fortunate and afflicted, at least until their problems disrupt our lives or inconvenience us. When that happens, the police are typically the default responders to calls for assistance.

And as I suspected, officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) responded to this man outside of my window late one Saturday night.

At least two patrol vehicles responded, but there may have been other officers with smaller personal transportation (such as bicycle or Segway) that were not in my line of sight. There were no sirens, nor did the officers have their emergency lights going. The officers made themselves known to the man, but gave him plenty of space — 20–30 feet, by my completely unscientific and astigmatic visual estimation. At one point he turned to them and yelled at them as well, but they didn’t try to apprehend him or take him into custody, let alone draw weapons or initiate other escalations. After some time, the man finally stopped and, I believe, was able to walk away. (While it is possible officers may have detained him outside of my field of vision, given their actions and his general demeanor to that point, that seems very unlikely.)

After he left, the officers I saw stayed by their vehicles for a short while, probably making sure he didn’t return for an encore, and then returned to their patrols. What I saw was basically how reformers like me want officers who find themselves in this situation handle them: no escalation, no violence, and no unnecessary arrest. I commend the MPD officers for their patience and professionalism in addressing the unfortunate situation.

Good policing is necessary, but not sufficient

But everyone who understands and cares about these issues all know what the police did the other night is, at bottom, an inadequate community response to crisis. The officers effectively performed community triage, and they did it admirably, but the long-term problems that manifested in a man yelling at nobody remain chronic in D.C. and elsewhere.

The police are neither qualified nor equipped to provide the mental health and other long-term support many community members need to prevent episodes like I saw that weekend. Indeed, it’s frankly unfair to police that we expect them to do these things, but this is a big part of the job, especially in the least advantaged communities of our country. And officers get frustrated when they have to repeatedly deal with high-stress situations they’re not prepared for and feel vulnerable to political sacrifice after-the-fact if something goes wrong.

Of course, as organizations, police do more than respond to people in mental health crisis. Aggressive proactive policing like stop-and-frisk, jump-out cars, and zero-tolerance arrests are focused in the same areas that face the most pressing socio-economic problems. Such police efforts do not make communities measurably safer and may exacerbate many of the problems the community is facing. Moreover, these programs erode trust between police and the community, thereby discouraging public cooperation when police are investigating serious crimes. In short, even when police are faithfully doing what is asked of them by politicians and their own leadership, they are not and cannot be the solution to the crises facing disadvantaged communities.

It is against this backdrop that some activists and organizers promote “defunding” or “abolishing” police. The language is surely provocative, and there are seemingly endless (and contradictory) explanations for what the terms mean, at least in short- to medium-term policy consequences. For present purposes, it is fair to say that these activists oppose functionally depending on police to solve the social problems that law enforcement is unqualified and ill-equipped to address in any sustainable manner. And on that specific point, any honest assessment of the day-to-day jobs of police officers makes it nearly impossible to disagree with them.

The status quo: The worst aspects of ‘socialism’

Of course, there are serious and deep-seated philosophical disagreements about solutions to endemic societal problems. Specifically, the word “socialism” as political lightning rod distracts police advocates and market-friendly political types from confronting the very real problems at the core of the protests.

While it would be entirely be too far to say that everyone who joined protests and yelled “Black Lives Matter” last summer were avowed socialists, some activists certainly are. And while “socialism” too means different things to different people, perhaps it would be useful to think about socialism in the most uncharitable sense — that is, how its most vituperative critics understand it — to recognize precisely how the policing status quo should be universally rejected regardless of one’s personal ideology.

Whether one’s problems with socialism stem from a Hayekian perspective, that “constructed orders” necessarily and inflexibly impose flawed government solutions upon individuals, or the more basic belief that socialism crushes freedom by subsuming individual liberties to the power and prerogatives of the state, or — less dramatically — one simply resents “big government” spending money ineffectively and inefficiently, each of these critiques describes the current policing of distressed people in American cities. Put another way: if you hate socialism, you should want sweeping changes to American policing too.

We use armed government agents to address personal health crises, often resulting in putting sick people in jail cells. While many departments have adapted techniques and methods for making these confrontations less dangerous for both officers and the individuals in distress, the underlying failure to address the chronic conditions afflicting individuals renders the police role in such situations a Sisyphean chore no matter how well they perform it. Surely, there must be a better way, whatever your views of Karl Marx.

Perhaps in a more perfect Hayekian world, private institutions would be have the capacity and flexibility to fix these problems and meaningfully improve the most in-need communities and the affected people who live in them. But as it stands, no sustainable and scalable market solution to these enduring health issues has yet emerged.

We’re already using government to address the most acute and disruptive instances that are fundamentally symptoms of chronic mental health issues. It shouldn’t take a socialist to recognize that repeatedly sending police officers— individuals trained to interdict criminal behaviors and take away a person’s freedom— to address persistent health problems is a bad use of the public’s treasury and authority on a number of levels. Thus, solving these enduring community problems isn’t a “big government” or even “proper role of government” issue: it boils down to allocating public resources to the best benefit.

In this context, “defund” often means taking away money from counterproductive policing and reallocate it toward programs that work. In less provocative terms, one may think of it as “fixing government priorities.” Reasonable people will disagree about whether and how the money for better solutions ought to come from funds that may otherwise be allocated to law enforcement, and it’s easy to understand why police — like all other government organs — are jealous of their budgets. But when you strip down the complaints of communities, activists, reformers, and even police officers themselves, some of the most fundamental problems are clear to any stakeholder being honest.

Examples of redirected resources

Every community will need to address its specific needs. Given the decentralized nature of American policing, with approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies of widely varying sizes and at every level of government, a one-size-fits-all solution is neither practicable nor desirable. But some communities and organizations are experimenting with alternatives that may be replicable or adapted to other communities’ needs.

In Tennessee, one sheriff used money allocated for a new jail to build a behavioral facility for individuals arrested who need for mental health assistance:

Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall built the Behavioral Care Center, which opens this fall, with funding that was initially budgeted for the new Downtown Detention Center. And the therapeutic space stands in stark contrast with the white walls and orange jumpsuits that fill the county’s jails.

At the Behavioral Care Center, Hall says, patients won’t wear orange. Staff will wear scrubs, not correctional officer uniforms. And the rooms are designed to put patients at ease. In one common room, the wall is painted with a vista of a peaceful lake, and sea foam green rocking chairs sit beneath a flat screen TV.

Hall says all those details were intentional, to remind both patients and staff that the facility is for treatment, not punishment. And the goal is to help people as soon as they arrive at central booking.Hall says the center won’t be equipped to treat the sickest patients. Instead, he says it will care for those who are between a one and an eight on a one-to-ten scale.

[…]

“People who belong in here are the ones who really wouldn’t have committed their crime had they been stabilized on their medication,” the sheriff says. “If not medication, their treatment. Because we incarcerate people for being ill. We’re the only modern country in the world that does that.”

While this change still relies on the intervention of law enforcement, it nevertheless recognizes the cruelty of punishing the mentally ill rather than taking steps to help them.

Other communities like Eugene, Oregon have long taken steps to find alternatives to mental health crisis response:

For more than 30 years, Eugene has been home to Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets, or CAHOOTS, an initiative designed to help the city’s most vulnerable citizens in ways the police cannot. In Eugene, if you dial 911 because your brother or son is having a mental-health or drug-related episode, the call is likely to get a response from CAHOOTS, whose staff of unarmed outreach workers and medics is trained in crisis intervention and de-escalation. Operated by a community health clinic and funded through the police department, CAHOOTS accounts for just 2 percent of the department’s $66 million annual budget.

Of course, there is more to policing than just responding to overdose and mental health calls, but these two jurisdictions are models for other governments to find non-punitive ways to deal with local issues. They use money that would otherwise be allocated to traditional law enforcement in ways to address the persistent needs of community members in urgent need of care. The programs cooperate with or are under the direction of existing local police agencies, undermining the false ‘us versus them’ dichotomy that dominates criminal justice politics. Neither program is a panacea, but each shows that the distance between police and community interests is not nearly as far apart as the dominant conversations indicate.

Better government is possible

What I saw outside of my window was a group of police officers doing the best they could to address an emergent community problem. Nobody was hurt or arrested, the immediate situation was resolved without incident, and these are undoubtedly good outcomes. But they didn’t help that man in any appreciable way: they just didn’t harm him.

Strongly held ideological disagreements should not obscure the obvious problems with our current policing reality. Community leaders can and should debate which solutions are right for their specific communities. But every stakeholder should agree that what American society is currently doing for our most in-need communities is insufficient.

America’s reliance on police and the criminal justice apparatus to address what are essentially personal health problems is a prime example of bad government, yet calls for fixing bad policy are met with loud condemnations of “socialism!” We’re already spending public money to address these issues, but we’re often doing so in ways that — in the best cases — only patch-over incidents without ameliorating the underlying social conditions. The debate, then, isn’t between socialism and freedom, but between bad government and better government. We have examples that show that better government is possible.

I’m not a socialist, nor am I a police abolitionist. But I’ll happily work with socialists and abolitionists if it means finding smarter and better ways to fix the problems we all see in our communities. Our neighbors and our cops deserve nothing less.

This article was adapted from a Twitter thread you can read here.