Because there are so many bad-faith discussions, I have to start with a quick disclaimer. “Defund the police” means to shift resources from our inefficient policing structure to other services that help people (and also deter crime!). It means to fund public safety, which is not the goal of modern policing.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about how great of an idea it is!
Most of the conversations around policing focus on the communities that are being policed. There’s a good reason for that — these are the most important people in the discussion. When the public isn’t being served by their government, it’s a big problem. But in this article, I want to focus on a different group that still gets a lot of attention.
The police officers.
A big problem in policing is an “us vs. them” mentality among the police. This is dangerous because there is no us or them. The police need to recognize that they are part of the communities that they are policing. But this also goes the other direction. We need to be aware that the officers are human beings too. And they are being repeatedly traumatized by policing.
The trauma that officers face doesn’t get as much attention for a few reasons. (1) They are causing the trauma of others and themselves, and (2) they are being paid and can opt out at any time. This makes it a little difficult to be sympathetic to them. But they are humans too, and it is bad when humans experience trauma. That is something that we should work to avoid whenever we can.
So how does defunding the police help officers? Why would they be better off with fewer resources?
First of all, let’s take a look at the trauma they experience.
Since policing doesn’t concern itself with improving public safety, it creates harm for police officers (who are affected by public safety). Aggressive policing tactics create situations where civilians are legally permitted to use deadly force against officers to protect themselves. These situations are 100% avoidable and only exist because of the police.
Aggressive and inequitable policing tactics inspire police protests and create antagonistic relationships between the officers and protestors. It is traumatic to be in the middle of a riot.
Right now, officers in Minneapolis are filing hundreds of worker’s compensation claims because of the trauma that they experienced during riots throughout the city. Many people are rolling their eyes at this because the police created this situation themselves. And while it is pretty absurd, it’s also true that those officers experienced trauma as a direct result of city leadership.
It is the leadership of cities and police departments that lead to the harm that befalls police officers. Our leaders have utterly failed to provide public safety. It makes a twisted kind of sense that officers would file worker’s compensation claims because of it.
Policing is incredibly stressful for patrol officers because they are not prepared by their employers for the tasks that they are assigned. Police recruits are trained for a few months and then are asked to respond to a huge range of situations. Domestic disputes, mental health breakdowns, bank robberies, traffic accidents, suicides, homicides, active shooters, shopliftings, riots, car break-ins, cats in trees, children out of school, the list goes on and on.
They are not adequately trained for any of it. It’s impossible. It’s impossible to train a single person on this vast list of items and expect them to perform well. This leads to tremendous amounts of stress on officers, which causes them to have extremely high levels of stress-related disorders (suicide, depression, insomnia, high blood pressure, heart attacks, etc.).
And let’s not forget about the number one killer of police officers today: Covid-19.
How does defunding help? It creates greater specialization for all of these tasks. Instead of a patrol officer responding to a mental health situation, a social worker does. Instead of a patrol officer responding to a car break-in, a civilian investigator does. Instead of a patrol officer trying to manage a domestic dispute, a social worker does (with perhaps an officer in the background in case something goes wrong).
Instead of politely asking officers to get vaccinated, we make it a requirement.
We ask officers to do far too much, we can’t train them properly, we don’t protect them, and it is killing them, harming communities, and costing taxpayers huge amounts of money that could be spent making our lives better.
If you care about the lives of police officers, you will call for defunding the police.
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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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