Don’t Be Afraid to Scrap Your Police Force
What an 82-year-old high school can teach about reforming law enforcement
Why would you want to disband your police department?
When discussing police reform, ideas frequently come up that can sound extreme, unrealistic, even scary. We hear words like "defund" or "disband" and it's easy to misunderstand the intentions behind them. When discussion turns to defunding or disbanding police forces, some unscrupulous types like to take advantage of that misunderstanding, and frame the debate as a choice between anarchy and the status quo.
Far from it. This is about fixing something that isn’t working the way it should. It might be difficult for some of us to face, but there are problems in law enforcement that go deeper than the actions or attitudes of individual cops. Problems involving not just the mistreatment of people of colour, but also of women, LGBTQ people, neurodivergent people, the poor, the mentally ill and others. This can vary from place to place, but some reform of law enforcement is needed just about everywhere. The problem is that where change is needed most, it might be impossible to achieve by making improvements to the existing system. You might need to rebuild the whole police department from the ground up. To explain why that is, I’m not going to talk about police at all.
You see, this is not about what needs to change so much as why change is hard. Instead of specific issues of law enforcement, I’m going to tell you about a high school. My high school.
It started simply enough
Up until the 1930s, there was no separate high school in my hometown. To meet the growing needs of the community, the high school opened in 1939. It was the classic design - a simple, symmetrical box with three floors and an entrance in the middle. I graduated 50 years later, in 1989. Let me describe the school as I remember it.
I'm not sure how many separate additions and renovations there were, but this building clearly went through the baby boom, a growing population, mergers of municipalities and school districts, changing priorities, changing needs, changing technology and changing trends in education. The original school is still there, buried in the middle, but it has grown to serve an enrollment of around 1,300.
It’s many times its original size, but it was never designed as a whole building. Every addition was built around what was already there, according to whatever made sense at the time. New spaces were designed to serve needs that might later change, while existing spaces were repurposed for needs that arose after they were built. A few classrooms were clearly built for a specific subject other than the one being taught. An old auditorium became a bigger library, an extra machine shop became a drama room, and an old electrical shop already had wiring to become a computer lab.
Older parts of the school have gone through renovations and upgrades and retrofits, but there is still a noticeable difference in methods and materials from one section to another. There’s even a half-flight of stairs where the multi-level building with a basement becomes a single ground-level floor.
It doesn't make sense, because it can't
As you might expect, the building layout is a little strange. That’s just the nature of repeatedly adding to an existing structure. As soon as they built the original school, they limited what they could do in the future, and they ended up doing a lot. The main building was originally widened in both directions, with additions to the back where possible. When the school ran out of space on the north side, the school board just kept extending it to the south. When it reached a street, it turned left, then kept going. It did that twice more, until it connected to its own original front door. With every expansion, fewer options were available and more compromises were required.
Nobody would ever design a school the way this one turned out. The front of the building is on the least visible, most crowded side. The front entrance, the main office and the parking lot are nowhere near each other. The office is in the middle, near the original entrance, which is tucked away behind the main gym. The main gym, meanwhile, is on the opposite side of the building from the athletic field. I could keep going.
These compromises are necessary, because putting everything where it makes the most sense is just not worth the cost and disruption. You'd need to demolish and rebuild existing structures, and that's not practical. It's easier to work with things as they are, but after 50 or 80 years of growth and change, all of those compromises add up.
Of course, none of it seemed strange to me when I was a student. The school was like that for as long as I could remember. It was what it was. I accepted it and learned my way around. That’s what every student did, starting before I arrived and continuing after I graduated. Even when the school changed, it was just one change to the great established whole.
Sooner or later, you have to make a choice
It’s all fine, as long as it works, but imagine you find serious problems. Can you fix them properly? Is it going to require major alterations to the building? Are you going to end up making more compromises to get around all of the obstacles? Are you going to fix one or two things that are particularly bad, and ignore all of the many smaller problems that can add up? Are you just going to give up and live with it?
Fortunately, my old high school still appears to be serving its purpose well enough, more than 30 years after I graduated. But some other school districts do find themselves in a situation where they have to make hard choices.
Where I live now, the old high school was a similar maze of expansions, but it became impractical to keep repairing and renovating, so they closed it. They built a new school, on a new site, designed from scratch to meet their needs now and in the foreseeable future. It really is an impressive school. A little smaller than the old one, but also more compact and more efficiently laid out. Probably much cheaper to heat. It incorporates up-to-date knowledge of construction and education throughout, and it’s equipped to teach kids what they need to know in today’s world. That’s my daughter’s high school.
It won't stay that way forever, of course. Nothing does. But any future needs will be easier to meet with a new building than with something that was already a collection of compromises.
What does this have to do with police?
A police department is similarly a collection of organizational structures (as opposed to physical ones), procedures, culture and traditions, established and adapted and built upon each other over many years. Cop after cop has accepted and adapted to it. That’s fine if it works, but any fundamental change is going to be difficult, and likely require compromises if it’s possible at all.
As with school buildings, a few improvements might be all right for some police departments. Others, however, need to be rebuilt from the ground up. That might sound daunting, but it can also be exciting and ultimately rewarding. It's an opportunity to decide what people need police to do, and how they can do it best. It means building a 21st Century police service that is efficiently structured and well integrated with other services, that has a clearly defined role in the community and the ability to fill that role effectively. If done right, it can be good for the police as well as the community.
So, by all means, defund, dismantle and disband your police department if necessary. Replace it with something that's better for everyone.
This story is a response to Prism & Pen’s writing prompt, Police States and Police Brutality.
