On 5/2/2021 2:11 PM, Walt In Seattle wrote:
> As the new Police Chief has explained, a rapidly shrinking police force
>
> Only in the minds of those who are nearly brain-dead or who choose to ignore the obvious can it be suggested that punishing law enforcement or dramatically scaling back its role in addressing its core mission will solve a problem existing not JUST in law enforcement but in the full spectrum of society. It isn't JUST Police who harshly judge or misjudge people based on an engrained prejedice that has been with us for centuries. Minnesota's Attorney General expressed some empathy for Derek Chauvin. He did so, not because Chauvin was wrongly prosecuted, but because Chauvin did what he did in the perception he was doing nothing wrong while (impliedly) that perception originates from the culture which shaped him long before he became a Police officer. This was a wise and insightful observation that I wish the Seattle City Council had properly realized on its own then considered last year and could have in the absence of Keith Ellison's statement of empathy for Chauvin.
>
> Defunding will ***NOT*** solve the problem. A wide-ranging cultural realization followed by a societywide approach to solving the problem is our best hope for solving it. To take from SPD, in some measure, its ability to protect and serve by diminishing its ranks will ***NOT*** solve the problem! It ***WILL*** contribute to a rising crime rate for which only the Seattle City Council who decided to implement defunding shall be to blame. Mark my words: Seattle will know and experience more crime and be less prepared in the future to deal with large-scale emergencies -- natural or caused by human beings.
>
> The substitution of direct social services for SPD programs designed to help people may be laudable and I would not excoriate the council's intent to help or the concept of same. I DO excoriate the notion, where or if it exists, that people in one context have to suffer to help people in ANOTHER context. Doing the right thing in one place and doing wrong in another, regardless of intent, is **NOT**, in the greater scheme of tings, doing what is right and best, especially for a city council ostensibly responsible for seeing the BIGGER PICTURE then planning for the future implied by that bigger picture. The Seattle City Council simply did ***NOT*** reach that goal in THIS instance >
I first met Sue Rahr when we were both Lieutenants at
our respective departments. She went on to become
King County Sheriff, work for the feds, and become
director for the main Washington State Training center
for police officers.

She expresses some important points here:

from

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/do-we-care-enough-to-do-police-reform-right/

Do we care enough to do police reform right?
June 12, 2020 at 3:41 pm

Protesters wait outside City Hall as Mayor Jenny Durkan and activist
Nikkita Oliver meet during “Defund Seattle Police March and Rally for
Black Lives” event on June 3, 2020. (Amanda Snyder / The Seattle Times)
Protesters wait outside City Hall as Mayor Jenny Durkan and activist
Nikkita Oliver meet during “Defund Seattle Police March and Rally for
Black Lives” event on June 3, 2020. (Amanda Snyder / The Seattle Times)
By Sue Rahr
Special to The Times

I hope the senseless and callous murder of George Floyd will be the
watershed moment that leads to true police reform. There are no excuses
to be made for this disgusting display of cruelty and indifference. No
arguments about “split-second decision-making under rapidly evolving
circumstances.”

The officer didn’t lose his temper, he didn’t overreact, he didn’t fear
for his life. The most disturbing thing the officer didn’t do was care.
He casually suffocated a human being to death, without even taking his
hand out of his pocket. That’s what makes his actions so chilling and
forces us to reflect on our system of justice.

In our nation, we have created a system too often marked by a profound
lack of caring for the harm we inflict in pursuit of being tough on
crime. Since this powerful and popular political agenda began in the
1970s, politicians across the nation have learned that it plays well to
voters. When we layer this political reality on top of a justice system
with roots going back to slave patrols, segregation and the enforcement
of Jim Crow laws, law enforcement’s role in the enormous racial
disparity in America becomes impossible to ignore.

I don’t have the column space or expertise to engage in a credible
discussion of the long and complex history of race that precedes the
current state of our criminal justice system that prevents the most
vulnerable in our society from receiving true justice. But I do have
more than 33 years of police experience, nine years operating our
state’s criminal justice training academy, and over 15 years working
with and learning from our nation’s leading policing experts, including
as a member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
From that perspective, I offer my insights into the current situation
with the intention of providing a backdrop for a discussion about
meaningful police reform — which cannot happen in a vacuum.

We must also discuss our mental-health system that is broken; our
health-care system that is deeply inequitable and doesn’t address the
disease of addiction; and a lack of fair and affordable housing and
educational opportunities.

I do not bring the failures of these other systems into the discussion
to deflect blame from problematic policing. Rather, I raise them because
the root causes of crime and disorder that police are expected to
resolve are directly related to the failures of those other systems.
Calls to “defund the police” have become common. If that means we should
divert the resources to these other services, that is a logical response
to the currently untenable situation in which we put officers.

We expect a front-line police officer, equipped with five months of
police academy training, to handle and resolve problems that require
interventions by highly trained experts in the fields of medicine,
mental health and education.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described this reality in his profound
Atlantic essay, “The Myth of Police Reform.” His concluding remarks: “A
reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all.
It’s avoidance. It’s the continuation of the American preference for
considering the bad actions of individuals, as opposed to the function
and intention of systems.”

Our society has created a system with the intention of moving the
visible, ugly evidence of all these systemic failures into jail and out
of our view. Did anyone really care about homelessness until dirty,
rat-infested encampments started showing up on our city streets and in
neighborhoods throughout our communities? Did we care about the
suffering from the disease of addiction before people desperate to
finance their use broke into our homes and cars, and strong-armed
robberies were committed on our streets?

If we’re honest, most people don’t care about the underlying problems or
suffering. (It’s easier to attribute them to the moral failure of
individuals.) But we do care about the symptoms that impact us directly
and are only willing to invest our tax dollars in the issues right in
front of us.

Consider this medical analogy to the persistence of crime in our
communities: I’ll pay for aspirin to bring down a fever. But I’m not
willing to invest in the prevention of the underlying illness. And I’m
not willing to pay for expensive treatment to cure it. Then I blame the
aspirin for not curing the illness. Or, I use too much aspirin in my
zeal to bring down the fever and inflict lasting damage to the patient,
exacerbating the underlying illness.

This is not a perfect analogy for our policing problems. Tablets of
aspirin don’t have the latitude to make moral choice. But it illustrates
how we put front-line police officers in a position where they can treat
only the symptoms — then we blame them for failing to cure the illness.
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So how does this relate to police misconduct?

Working in an environment of perpetual frustration and failure can breed
resentment and callousness. This does not excuse misconduct but merely
helps us understand what might contribute to bad decisions.

It illuminates the need for a reform agenda that is more strategic and
robust than simply identifying and punishing individual officers.

I keep hearing people lament, “Why does this keep happening?”

Consider the frequently used metaphor of bad apples. It keeps happening
because we only focus on removing the “bad apples,” which is relatively
fast and satisfying (compared to the hard work of broad, systemic
change). But that ignores the underlying problem. Most of the apples we
put in the barrel were good. Something goes awry in the barrel to make
them go bad. Until we are willing to invest in creating a healthier
barrel, which only partly includes removing apples when they go bad,
these tragedies will keep happening.

When we are ready to truly invest in a transformation that builds public
trust, we must have robust discussions and take bold steps to advance
policing. These steps include: