SCAPEGOAT

Published in

Homeland Security

4 min readFeb 7, 2016

Jeff Davis

It’s safe to say that over the past two years the law enforcement community has come under close scrutiny. Scrutiny from the media, scrutiny from the communities they police and even scrutiny from the White House. Think I’m being overly sensitive? In May 2015 the White House released a report documenting the findings of a Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The mission of the task force was basically to find out why there seems to be a disconnect between the public and state and local law enforcement. The 116 page report culminates with a convenient format of issues and recommendations that eerily mimics Michael Josephson’s Six Pillars of Character taught in many school districts.

All of the findings tie into a common theme of community engagement in the sense that US law enforcement should evolve with society. That’s a tough pill to swallow for those who have been in the business of protecting and serving for over thirty years. After all, law enforcement seems to have been working ok for at least the past three decades. Or has it? Is there room for improvement? And by that I mean drastic change improvement. Has US law enforcement fallen so far behind the times that police in this country are out of touch with reality? Or has society reached a point that they need to be pulled back and put in check?

Recent studies indicate that enforcement and incarceration — tough on crime — has not really worked out so well. California has taken drastic measures to recognize that locking offenders up does nothing to break the cycle of repeat offending. The rate of recidivism-repeat offenders- among those who are released after serving some of their time is still very high. Studies in California corrections conclude that lack of education and opportunity lead to high rates of recidivism among those prisoners who are released.

In California, the courts orders Governor Brown to reduce the population of those locked up because the prison system was over crowded and therefore inhumane. This forced the hand of the State Corrections Bureau to unload thousands of prisoners to local correctional jurisdictions and therefore absolving the State of their responsibility to rehabilitate and release violators. Funds were provided to those regional jurisdictions to come up with and implement plans to deal with this issue.

About the same time, California passed Proposition 47 which reduced the criteria for many felony crimes, essentially reducing those to misdemeanors in an effort to reduce the number of local jail populations.

All this appears to be setting the stage for a perfect storm and an increase in crime. Guess who will bear the brunt of increased crime? If you guessed state and local law enforcement you just correctly answered the final Jeopardy question. So at a time that the call to change law enforcement is at an all time high, I wonder if that will really solve the real issues of crime in this country, or are we looking for a convenient scapegoat? Time will tell.

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SCAPEGOAT

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