In a 2016 speech honoring five slain police officers, then-President Barack Obama said that a large reason for tension between police and communities is…
In a 2016 speech honoring five slain police officers, then-President Barack Obama said that a large reason for tension between police and communities is that “we ask the police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves.” He went on:
« We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns… and then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker, you’re the parent, you’re the teacher, you’re the drug counselor.' »
If there is a problem with overpolicing — and there is — one aspect of it is that we’ve put the resolution of too many social problems in the hands of the police, so that when the police come in, they deal with those problems like police. Force becomes the go-to tool, not the last resort. With the possibility of force always present, complicated issues such as homelessness, drug use, mental health, domestic abuse, social unrest, can escalate too easily. The problems come to seem like nails, and police are the hammer.
In the light of the killing of George Floyd, there have been calls to “defund the police.” This slogan has an immediate, visceral appeal: The police are bad, the argument seems to be, so we need to get rid of them and starve them for resources. But the slogan doesn’t obviously point the way forward to how we replace the police, and it can also lead us to overlook those situations where police might be necessary.
