Defunding the police is the public health solution we should be advocating for
As protests rage across the country demanding an end to police brutality, there are greater underlying factors that need to be reconsidered to ensure that the changes committed are meaningful and lasting. We talk about structural racism as a solvable policy change, however, I believe it requires more than that. As a public health professional, I’ve been working to achieve equity for all people. My goal is to walk you from a place that sees the police as the solution to many problems that should not be their responsibility. I fundamentally believe that the police as an institution in American culture not only needs simple structural and policy reform but a cultural one too that might result in a rigorous overhaul of the police resulting in it’s defunding.
I want to challenge you to rethink your perceptions of certain existing archetypes by thinking about the police through the lens we were all raised in. Most of us played some version of the game “cops and robbers” where the cops were the good guys, and the robbers were the bad guys. We believe that police were put in place to serve and protect all people, and robbers were selfishly there to steal the assets of others with wanton disregard. This perception however pervades into adulthood and across our society, and is not actually an accurate portrayal of the interaction between the police especially with regard our most vulnerable people, like those belonging to communities of color.
Public health has long talked about the need for improvements of the built environment to improve the health of individuals and populations. We call this the Social Determinants of Health — a nice sanitized way to imply that there are social factors that affect an individual’s ability to achieve health. It allows us the ability to talk about racism, without saying the word and making white policy makers uncomfortable. I recall running a well known public health program that aimed to improve obesity and other chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, hypertension and diabetes, diseases that disproportionately affect Blacks and low income individuals. We aimed to tackle the built environment, by removing food deserts or by making sure that individuals have well functioning and clean parks, playgrounds, roads or walking paths.
It is harder to talk about security in the communities that have the greatest prevalence of chronic disease. If you were one of these individuals, your choices to improve your physical activity are to try and sign up for a gym you can’t afford or go to a park in your neighborhood. For low-income black communities, this might represent a significant challenge. Parks are hotbeds of criminal activity, as could the neighborhood they live in. But what if the fear and security concerns of being outside also come from being an innocent but presumed guilt black man in a park? A park where a misguided passerby would feel threatened by this black man’s presence and calls the police, and then the police would then try to remove that black man who has every legal right to be there. And if he resists he gets arrested, shot or killed. What if this was true in your own neighborhood, too? Suddenly, living with a debilitating but slow chronic condition starts to sound a little more preferable.
But what about drugs and crime — how will those be stopped? As the former director of an addiction center, my goal was to build a system that rehabilitated individuals who engage in substance misuse and help them achieve their goals. Ideally, we were even part of the prevention aspect of it — ensuring that no new drug misuse was engaged in. Oftentimes, we were met with very real antagonism that we were helping “addicts” who made a decision, which became a conversation around morality bankruptcy. To them, people in recovery didn’t deserve any more of our time, attention or resources. The prevailing political response, from both the right and left, has been to stamp out drugs. Just say no! However, whether by design or remnant of mismatched policy directives, these efforts are a distinct failure.
Moreover, I contend that they are supposed to be: these policy and programmatic directives have no intention of comprehensively solving the problem. The antagonism I met when running my addiction center came primarily from the law enforcement and criminal justice system. The maintenance of low level drug charges that result in felonies disproportionately affects black and low income populations, and allows the police the justification increase their force there. It allows them to patrol neighborhoods where this drug use is more prevalent and act without impunity to ensure that they hit the requirements they need to in order to document that they have “ensured safety.”
However, what becomes suddenly very clear is that if drugs are endemic in a community, then people have not made a bad choice, they made the easy choice. Perhaps the only choice. If you grew up in a household of narcotic drug users, had a friend group made up of drug users, the social and often physical environment in which you live normalizes drug use. Increasing police won’t solve that problem: they solve the problem of it affecting other people who see them as a nuisance.
You might say that’s cynical, revisionist and reductionist, but conceptually, you can likely understand this from your own experience. Have you ever been pulled over for a ticket for something relatively minor, and you thought to yourself that officer could have totally let you off? But you wrote it off as the reason because he was probably trying to reach a quota and you were just the unlucky one in the speed trap. That ticket justified the need to keep cops patrolling your street and to justify them hiding to catch you. What if your whole existence was reduced to being a speed trap? It begins to illuminate a picture and narrative that rings all too true: the police will say they do what they have to do because they were doing what they could to prevent or respond to crime.
Moreover, they can be as brutal or terroristic as necessary because that is what they are incentivized to do. The officer in this clip retorts about how difficult his job is, and no doubt, it is. But what if he was set up to fail because the goal of his program is not to get to the root of criminality, but continue it perpetually? He talks about homicide and abuse as being Black crime. To me, that sounds like he’s justifying the death of George Floyd. Because of the perception that these crimes are a black problem, he and his colleagues need to be able to act with wanton disregard to get the job done. It sounds like a justification for profiling individuals based on our biases, which is the underlying problem with police brutality.
Moreover, these protests are helping publicly characterize how police are the aggressors in far too many situations. It seems then that the police’s duty in its current form is not to serve and protect all of the people in its community. If profiling built on biases is the root cause of this problem, fundamentally, this makes black and low income populations who are subject to historical and structural racism less likely to be the people who are protected by them. Conversely, we can then presume that the police are primarily used to be a show of force to look after wealth in the form of wealthy white people and their assets.
Whether you are saying All Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter — is this what we want our police to be? At this critical moment, we need to look at what actually works at reducing these problems comprehensively. The prevailing norm is that increasing a police force reduces crime, however this is anecdotal, at best. Does setting up more speed traps stop speeding? Could the police simply place a squad car on the side of the road and wouldn’t most people slow down at the sight of it? Is speeding the real problem that needs police intervention, or is it reckless driving? At what point does a ticket have to be given out?
Experts on law enforcement note that it’s “not what you have, it’s what you’re doing with them.” Basically, adding more police, ramping up their power and scale doesn’t actually improve safety. For our more direct health problems, the police don’t offer a close to prove solution. Solving addiction and drugs in a community doesn’t happen just by having an overwhelming police force. Improving chronic disease outcomes come from scaling up education, building communities, and focusing on public health, not having more police in neighborhoods to make white people feel safer.
A popular campaign called 8 Can’t Wait is circulating social media right now. To me, this represents an important first step, but a hollow long term solution. It’s absolutely important to retrain police to consider alternatives to force and learn de-escalation. However, a more comprehensive overhaul such as defunding the police can be the next step to challenging this further. Reallocating parts of massive police budgets to health, education, housing and communities could be a massive game changer. Ensuring that not just new police, but those who are patrolling the streets today, are provided thorough training about resiliency and trauma the as well as cultural competencies in the history of violence and brutality would be additional keys to success. But all of these changes must also come with a re-conceptualization of how we view the police and crime in our community.
What do we consider crime? Is being black in a park, a crime? Obviously not, we all know better (despite the Amy Cooper event less than 10 days ago). But is using drugs because that is the norm in your community a crime? I’ll push the envelope even further. Is sex work, which might have been the only option for some to make money to survive, a crime? These are problems — sure. Crimes? Not in these contexts. We think ill of these things because we are trained to follow the line of thought that leads to “moral bankruptcy.” But empathy for situations outside of our own mean that we cannot criminalize the lives of people who have found solutions to their problems. And thus, the solution shouldn’t be to solve non-crimes with criminal justice.
Do the police need guns to respond to these problems, especially considering their biases resulting in far too many unnecessary deaths? As many people know, in the UK, the Metropolitan Police of London were founded on the principle of “policing by consent” rather than by force. Gun-toting police officers are deployed for specific cases. It was noted that in the year up to March 2016, the police in England and Wales only fired six bullets. Is the way to stop gang violence by arming up and turning neighborhoods into a war-zone? Or, can we improve these neighborhoods and stop making joining a gang the easiest solution for some people. Tied with strong and reasonable gun control in our country, and utilizing law enforcement to stop the flow of illegal weapons into communities — I would argue that our police could be implemented in a similar fashion as the UK.
The People’s City Council of Los Angeles introduced a budget actualizes these ideas. It looks to reallocate funding into appropriate areas that might actually get to solving the root of these problems. I challenge all who read this to think push beyond a simple reform that maintains your conception of normalcy, tension and peace and advocate for the comprehensive reforms needed. My colleagues and I in public health must also start to be more bold about how we talked about these problems, and not hide behind terms and solutions that shield us from the root problems. Now is the time to overhaul the police, criminal justice, health and the way we even think about their role in our society.
