I fully accept the need for significant reform in policing. We need to reverse the trend towards ever-increasing militarization of the police. We need to replace the qualified immunity doctrine that insulates cops from being held accountable when they break the law and violate civil rights with a system that does a better job of balancing the need for accountability with the need to prevent strike suits and legal abuse. We need a more diverse police force and a better trained force.
But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. In Time, Minneapolis City Councilman Steve Fletcher advocates replacing the police force with "a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity":
We had already pushed for pilot programs to dispatch county mental health professionals to mental health calls, and fire department EMTs to opioid overdose calls, without police officers. We have similarly experimented with unarmed, community-oriented street teams on weekend nights downtown to focus on de-escalation. We could similarly turn traffic enforcement over to cameras and, potentially, our parking enforcement staff, rather than our police department.
You can read the editorial as closely as you want and as many times as you want and you won't see a word about how to deal with violent crime. So I was left to wonder how "a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity" would deal with murder, rape, armed robbery, home invasion, and so on. In 2019, Minneapolis experienced 4,323 violent crimes, which was neither unusually high nor unusually low:
Here's what Fetcher said back in 2019 when asked about violent crime:
As for how the city could address violence downtown, he said that the city had learned that much of the violence wasn’t from people targeting strangers, but rather between groups or individuals who already knew each other and were in conflict. He said the city had invested in an Office of Violence Prevention to help “disrupt those cycles” of violence through outreach and social work.
Obviously, this is not my field. But I have a very hard time believing that a social work outreach program can replace cops when dealing with violent offenses. Very hard.
