To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.
I envision communities in which the first responders to mental health crises are trained mental health specialists and not the police.
We can point to several inflection points in the history of policing in the US that caused it to diverge from the path of other non-military police in other nations.
The end of slavery and the advent of Jim Crow led southern lawmakers to mobilize the police to arrest black men (mostly) on a variety of non-violent charges and send them to jail and prison as labor. These police also used violent means to control black populations, first in the South and then elsewhere.
Labor actions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw industrialists mobilizing the police to crush strikes and keep factories open.
The war on drugs not only expanded the carceral state (as I wrote about here), but it also flooded local police departments with cash and materiel in quantity and lethality to wage an actual local war. SWAT teams arose in that era and the militarization of the police was nearly complete.
But a less considered historical point has bolstered that militarization all along: the many wars of choice that the US has fought since the end of the Korean War. With an annual budget now approaching a trillion dollars each year, it is safe to say that the US has made war making its chief end.
And the detritus of these wars (big and small) flows back into all of our communities in the forms of surplus military weaponry and war veterans who help populate local police departments (perhaps, especially their tactical units).
Because we have invested so heavily for so long in the police—especially to control certain bodies in certain communities—the police have become a “solution” to many community challenges.
And we have ALL been complicit. I can think of no other domain in which so-called liberals have more readily joined conservative forces to build an institution—this time in the name of “community safety.”
We give to that institution a monopoly on the use of force in local jurisdictions. We give it scant oversight. Our elected officials take its unions’ money. The police consume an ever-larger portion of local budgets. And once you have a hammer… well you know what every local problem looks like.
I have seen this in my nearby.
My vision is that we begin to chip away at the monopoly we have given our police over every aspect of civic safety—indeed over several critical public health challenges—by replacing them with trained mental health workers who will respond to mental health crises in our communities.
This is starting to happen around the country and has succeeded so far largely because the police themselves are ready and willing to cede this ground. They know that they are ill-eqipped to deal with these emergencies and bad things can happen when an armed person meets one in full crisis. We have seen it.
There are many domains that the police will not willingly give up. Power is not dispersed without a fight, and our generations-long empowerment of law enforcement has left them powerful indeed.
So, let’s take this one. Let’s stop the charade that the police are a militarized social service provider—uniquely equipped to deal with “dangerous” situations. And let’s use the knowledge and tools we have to open the door to change.
Yes, this will require shifting resources away from police departments to social services units. And, yes, the police will begin to raise the alarm about increased crime, threats to public safety, and the specter of anarchy that such shifts will entail. They have mobilized that kind of fear before and will do it again.
But our public health requires this shift. The shift from seeing force or the threat of force as the way to bring about public safety—the shift to redefining public safety first and foremost as a public health endeavor.
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 