In Policing, Prevention is the Best Medicine
How about we keep murderous cops off the force to begin with?
a Philadelphia Citizen feature
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The protest phase of the George Floyd tragedy has slowed down to a temporary simmer—until the next tragedy. In the meantime, the public conversation is now stuck and meandering, trapped between a rage moment and a need to implement. Something. And soon.
On one side are well-meaning, but somewhat powerless House Democrats who were the first to hit the scene with a package of reforms. But, they won’t be able to get it through the other side of hard headed policymakers, especially Republicans in charge of the White House, U.S. Senate and a majority of state legislatures who don’t want any of this. Screaming to the left, and taking up a bit of oxygen, are those with the questionable messaging choice of “Defund the Police.”
Less police funding wouldn’t have spared George Floyd’s life or upended systemic racism. But real reform of police unions might
There are too many skeptics on both sides of that message because it sounds so absolutist and final. If you mean “defund” then you mean defund or no money or funding being channeled into police. Next natural question: Then how does a police department exist if it has no money to operate?
Is the absence of police a chance you want to take—especially in a city like Philadelphia? Homicides are, last check, 24-percent more than where they were last year. Violence overall increased by an astounding 41 percent—just in the past 28 days. So, if there’s no operational police force, what do we propose we do about problems like that?
But, because we’re trapped in a hamster-wheel cycle of polemic acrobatics—pro-police law-and-order folks on one side butting heads with anti-racist police-stop-killing-us folks on the other—we have yet to shift into a deeper conversation about how policing in America could be better.
We could start by “putting everything on the table,” as retiring police Captain Sonia Pruitt, chairwoman of the National Black Police Association, put it during a segment on WURD’s Reality Check. “It’s time we think outside the box about what policing is, even if that means disbanding a police department. We have an opportunity here to reimagine what our police departments should look like.”
The New Orleans Police Department has been remade thanks to an innovative peer intervention program. Can the Philly PD undergo a similar culture change?
In the last couple weeks, policymakers of all stripes have been rolling out all sorts of “police reform” proposals—from the Minneapolis City Council “dismantling police” to Congressional Democrats and Senate Republicans in Washington now sparring with competing plans.
In Philly, Mayor Jim Kenney wants to look transformative on policing while he continues to get the soft no-oversight treatment after unprecedented mass tear-gassing, highway herding and rubber-bulleting of protesters in Center City. (Would Philly’s last three Black mayors — including the one who dropped a bomb on a Black neighborhood 35 years ago — have ever slithered their way out of that?)
Meanwhile, the question remains as to whether any of these proposals are truly groundbreaking or just performative. Many seem more tactical and operational, subtle and not-so-subtle tweaks at police training, hiring and conduct protocols, not a fundamental or philosophical rewiring of policing, particularly at the frontend.
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