By Alex S. Vitale, The Appeal, July 20, 2020
Policing in America has gone too far. It has now become the one-stop response to our communities’ public health and public aid problems. Police officers must enforce traffic laws and respond to domestic disputes. They must manage mental health crises and drug overdoses. They must deal with homelessness and school discipline. Police officers, of course, are neither trained nor equipped to be part of our social support systems, and so it’s unsurprising that they often make them worse.
Even when it comes to crimes of violence, it turns out that law enforcement often fails to protect people. Less than 4 percent of an officer’s time is spent investigating so-called violent crimes, and police don’t even do a particularly good job at that. In Chicago, for example, police typically solve only 4 out of 10 murders, and only 2 out of 10 when the victim is Black. Yet police are expensive, eating large amounts of municipal budgets. The City of Chicago spends approximately $4 million dollars per day on the Chicago Police Department, an amount equivalent to 5 months of mental health services, 18 months of substance abuse treatment, or 32 months of violence prevention programs.
As former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said, “We are asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it… Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops… that’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all these problems.”
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