Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.
“Defund the police” may have gotten traction in some quarters, but the thinking behind it – to completely do away with cops — is not serious policy.
What is worth serious discussion is whether state and local governments have put too many responsibilities on law enforcement’s plate, effectively making police into armed social workers rather than law enforcement.
Could some responsibilities currently assigned to police be more effective, and safely, handled elsewhere?
The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner thinks so. In a piece on the demands California places on its officers, Tanner wrote:
…dispatching records show police being assigned tasks they are not equipped for – wellness checks, mental illness, drug overdoses, dealing with the homeless – on top of traffic accidents and citations. The Los Angeles Police Department’s dispatches throughout 2018 show that only 12% of dispatches were for violent crimes, compared to almost 40% for nonviolent complaints and 38% for property crimes.
Tanner says many of these issues should be handled in different ways – through “[m]ental health professionals and social service personnel.”
Law enforcement could then employ its personnel toward the more serious crimes for which they are both trained and equipped.
Such a move may also maintain progress on what “remains..a decades-long downward trend” in violent crime.
Image Credit: By Jamelle Bouie [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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If people did not act with no respect if they did they would not be treated poorly. I always told my kids at school if you show respect I would t4eat them the same way. It wo4ked.
when i was a kid in the late 50’s and early 60’s we never had this kind of crime.today it’s an angry society!lots of kids today have no respect for their parents,their teachers,and certainly not for police!but they weren’t my kids so i mostly blame the parents!
Cops should refuse to patrol black areas. Let them see what it’s like with no white man to protect them. The blacks all say they hate white men yet they need white man’s food that he grows and produces, they need white man’s cars that he invented and manufactures, they need white man’s medicine, gas, cell phones, houses, roads, freedoms, education, technology, all given to them by white men. The black population wouldn’t last two weeks on their own before they would look like every other black nation on earth. Crime ridden, starvation, disease, poverty, and dictatorial government that allows the society to decay. That is just a fact. Someone has told them that they can run a super power better than white men when they can’t even run a third world country.