Defunding the Police

Once upon a time, there was a very good idea concerning police reform that centered around the utilization of unarmed professionals to diffuse situations involving non-violent law-breakers.  Wherever it’s been implemented, it has shown remarkable results in terms of effective de-escalation and, of course, a 100% reduction in lethal force. Nobody has a gun, so nobody get’s killed.

The concept had unassailable logic behind it.  Does anyone, police included, want to handcuff a six-year-old who’s “acting out” in his first grade classroom and haul him into the station?  How about dealing with an unarmed naked guy calling out God’s name along the town’s main drag?

Then came a bad idea: the whole package became known as “Defund the Police.”  Had the verb been “focus,” or “assist,” it could have been quickly and naturally assimilated into our society.  But no, we had to make it sound like we’re making our police forces less capable of dealing with crime.

The name was immediately hijacked by the ultra right, and frequently taken out of context to embarrass anyone who stood for it.  (See poster above.)

President Biden, in his State of the Union address, dropped the whole thing altogether.  That potato was simply too hot to handle.  Who can blame him?

In any case, it’s possible that, somewhere down the road, this refocusing of the police away from clearly nonviolent situations and towards incidents where they are needed may make a recurrence. If that happens, it will require a return to civility in politics, where good ideas, whether they happened to have come from the left or the right, are agreed to and put into place for the good of all.