The Police Aren’t Doing What We Train Them To Do
By: Davin Hall
Tags: Police, Defundthepolice, Policing

The Police Aren’t Doing What We Train Them To Do

Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash

A lot of the criticism around the slogan “Defund the police” is based on two assumptions. First, that it means taking away all police. Or, second, that it means taking away some money from the police and not doing anything else.

Doing either of those things would be a mistake.

I wrote in my last article that crime is a relatively rare occurrence, and it is. But that still means that there are murders and shootings and robberies and burglaries and acts of cannibalism, and that these happen too often. We still need to respond to these events as they happen.

And sometimes we need an armed government response to situations. We have a heavily armed populace in the United States (we literally have more guns than brains), and that results in active shooters, violent domestic abusers, barricaded subjects, and mentally unstable individuals who pose immediate danger to innocent people.

A function of the government is to keep people safe, and sometimes that involves the use of force. We need highly trained individuals to be able to wield that force in the safest possible way.

The problem that we have right now is that we have taken those highly-trained individuals and tasked them to do a huge amount of other jobs in addition to responding with deadly force in the rare times that it is called for.

This is another idea that is not remotely controversial. You cannot find me a police officer who thinks that cops aren’t asked to do too much. We have put a ridiculous burden onto police departments that they cannot possibly meet. The police aren’t blameless in this — they’ve been more than willing to take on this responsibility, even while complaining about it — but it is the collective fault of the electorate that we haven’t corrected this.

A murder, a drug house, a convenience store that gets robbed every other week, a schizophrenic man, a battered woman, a lost senior citizen, an overturned car, an angry kid. We ask the police to deal with all of these things. We ask police officers to be detectives, soldiers, social workers, lawyers, secretaries, and resource managers, and we haven’t given them the tools they need to do these jobs properly.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report in 2013 that focused on training that officers receive in their police academies. On average, officers receive 168 hours of training on weapons/defensive tactics/use of force, and 9 hours on mediation/conflict management.

We are training government agents to be warriors and putting them into situations where we need guardians, teachers, healthcare workers, or just someone to listen. This is not fair to the public or the police.

The good news is that we don’t need to be flooding the streets with government agents with huge amounts of combat training. (The bad news is that that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.)

In a study in the NY Times, the authors found that about 1% of 911 calls were related to violent crime, and accounted for about 4% of the time that officers spent on their shifts. (The larger amount of time is due to the fact that violent crimes take longer to process.)

For starters, this is a ridiculously low number. But it’s even misleadingly high. The vast majority of the time that is being spent on violent crime calls is not time where an armed government is needed. It’s time that is spent collecting evidence, talking to witnesses and victims, or just standing around and making sure no one steps on something important.

In other words, even in violent crime calls, we over-use police officers.

Interestingly enough, we have an example of government employees doing work that used to be done by police officers (when it was done at all). Crime scene investigators are trained specifically on the requirements for their job — collecting and processing evidence of crimes. They are not armed. They cannot arrest you. They are not police officers.

We need more of this. We need more government employees who are doing work that had traditionally been done by the police. We need more government employees who are specifically trained on de-escalation, mediation, mental health care, traffic safety, juvenile care, and problem-solving, and we need to make sure it’s not all the same people who are getting all of that training.

This will all cost money, but if we are taking tasks away from the police, then it makes sense that we can divert money from police departments as well. (Or, to put it another way, to defund the police.) This isn’t about blind cuts to the police. It’s about purposefully and thoughtfully spending that money on other avenues.

We have examples of rapid response from government employees who aren’t the police (EMS and fire). We have examples of government employees taking over tasks that had been done by the police (CSI). We have vast amounts of data on what the police are doing right now, and which tasks we can divert to other specialists.

We need to start telling our elected representatives that this is the direction that we want policing to take. And we need to help make sure that going in that direction isn’t political suicide for those elected representatives.