Imagine a husband who beats his wife. He physically assaults her, manipulates her, isolates her from friends and family, controls her. She tells herself that it’s okay, because he puts food on the table. She tells herself that maybe she deserves it when he hits her, and that she just needs to be a little better.
Now imagine that this abused woman is given help from someone else. Someone tells her that she can get away from this man. This person gives her money to start a new life. But instead of doing any of that, the woman gives the money to her husband. She tells him that he needs to go to counseling. So the husband uses the money to design a counseling program for himself. He writes up a curriculum, teaches himself in class, and gives himself a test. Lo and behold, he passes. He’s changed. He’s reformed.
Do you think this woman’s life would be any better after that?
This ridiculous scenario is what we are doing every day with police departments. There is overwhelming evidence of the problems that police departments have, of the abuse that they administer, and yet our solution is to give them more resources. Our solution is to trust them to fix a problem that not only did they create, but that they also do not recognize.
A new Ipsos/USA TODAY poll was released recently that found that only 18% of those polled supported defunding the police. It also found that 43% of those polled supported taking money from the police and redirecting it toward social services.
There are two takeaways here already. First, a lot of people fundamentally don’t understand what defunding the police means. According to this poll, 43% of people supported defunding the police, but only 18% recognized that. Second, even after everything we’ve seen, after all the evidence we have, still a majority of people do not favor taking anything away from police departments.
Not too surprisingly, the numbers were heavily split along race and political ideology. Even then, 33% of Democrats and 37% of Black respondents thought that police budgets should remain the same.
On top of that, 77% of White respondents and 42% of Black respondents said they trusted local police to promote justice and equal treatment for people of all races.
People want reform, but they want the police to administer their own reform. They want more money to go to the heart of the problem. They want to strengthen the institution that is causing this damage.
It is difficult for me to see this as anything less than an acceptance of the racial injustices and illegal violence perpetrated by police departments. The only other way it really makes sense for me is to think of it as a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
It’s hard to get out of an abusive relationship. There’s so much self-doubt and feelings of powerlessness. There are good times that make you think that maybe the problems are in the past now. There’s crippling anxiety that makes you scared to take a single step away from the relationship.
This is where we are right now with the police. It does not have to be this way. We can have a healthy relationship. We deserve to have a healthy relationship. We can have a public safety system that is effective, efficient, and equitable. But we will never have that if we continue to enable the abuser in the partnership.
As a final note, I want to also add that many police officers are also in the role of the abused spouse here. They are being mistreated, inefficiently trained, stressed, harassed, and endangered. Again, it doesn’t have to be this way. A better public safety system will benefit every single person in the country, regardless of whether they’re wearing a badge or not.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Samantha Sophia on Unsplash