TL;DR: Police forces should be reorganized to be in support of, and subordinate to, more effective social services agencies, like Public Health and Family Services.
There are growing calls to defund, disband, dismantle, or abolish police departments across the country. These have grown out of the understanding that individual reforms, imposed on police departments from outside, have been largely ineffective at curbing abuses or eliminating institutional racism. On the other hand, the prospect of abolishing police departments raises the question of who will be responsible for ensuring public safety in their absence.
Communities looking to make significant, structural reforms to policing are now struggling with this question. The announcement Sunday by a majority of the Minneapolis City Council that the Minneapolis Police Department would be dismantled lacks any implementation detail. Even the group MPD150, which has been pushing for the abolition of the MPD for several years, acknowledges that this is an issue:
Sure, in this long transition process, we may need a small specialized class of public servants whose job it is to respond to violent crimes.
But they provide no detail as to how this “specialized class” would operate.
There’s an important distinction to be drawn here between abolishing the police force itself and dismantling the police bureaucracy. While police are nominally accountable to outside institutions, such as the city government or an independent commission, the monolithic bureaucracy of a police department, bolstered by a too-powerful union, makes it difficult to effect meaningful change. So while a police force in some form must remain, the bureaucracy that tends to preserve an endemic culture of brutality and racism can be done away with. What replaces it is a structure that puts other social services front and center.
The model for how a reimagined police force would be structures lies in a key observation that has wide agreement, all across the range of thought on police reform: That an enormous amount of the problems police are currently called upon to address are better handled by other social services. The Rachel Maddow interview with Criminal Justice Professor Phillip Atiba Goff from Tuesday has a great discussion of this:
Imagine what would happen if, when someone was overdosing, or when a couple was having a disagreement that they didn’t know how to resolve, or when a kid wasn’t feeling safe, if you could call mental health resources, child protective resources, substance abuse resources. If the resources that folks needed so they didn’t need to rely on law enforcement were there, if 9-1-1 had more options, communities would feel safer and you wouldn’t be introducing a badge and gun to situations that law enforcement can never be trained to manage in the first place, and they have been trying to get out of the business of for years.
MPD150 lists alternative resources to a number of situations where police often intervene. At the other end of the spectrum, former police chiefs agree:
There are greater public safety returns on investment with programs other than putting money towards enforcement…Look, I would have traded 10 cops for another Boys & Girls Club, but the system needs to change as far as having police respond to incidents such as mental illness. Police are not equipped. They're not trained. They're not specialized in that. But yet it continues to get delegated to them.
Now consider that the unique capabilities of police are really quite limited: They are agents of local government authorized to use force in a community to protect public safety. But the use of force is only needed in a fraction of incidents, and even then is only a small part of the overall social service intervention. Consider the cases of domestic violence or drug abuse that Prof. Goff mentioned: The police might be needed immediately to subdue a violent person, but once that danger has passed, the cases are much better handled by social workers or health care professionals.
This points the way to a restructuring of the police force: Reorganize the police force to be in support of, and subordinate to, the more effective social service agencies. Individual officers would be assigned to a social service agency, such as family services or public health. Instead of being part of a separate police hierarchy, they would report directly to the agency to which they’re assigned. The social service official, not the police officer, would write incident reports, and the agency management would decide on raises and promotions for the police officers assigned to them.
Here are a few examples of how this would work, for cases where police are currently the primary responders:
- Domestic violence calls: The response would be led by a social worker from the local Family Services department. The social worker would decide whether they need to be accompanied by police, and in that case, the social worker, not the police, would be in charge of the interaction. After the incident, the social worker would be the one to write the incident report. Just as importantly, those police officers would be assigned long-term to the family services department, so they’d be trained and gain experience in de-escalation and the other skills needed in family services calls. It wouldn’t be domestic violence in the morning and drug arrests in the afternoon like it is now. And their performance evaluations would be made by family services managers, who would determine the police officers’ raises and promotions. The social workers, in turn, would be rewarded based on the health, safety, and well-being of the community they serve, not arrest or conviction numbers, and so would have to arrange their police officers’ training and assignments with those goals in mind.
- Traffic stops: Put the traffic engineers in charge. Traffic enforcement would be just one aspect of road safety, along with setting speed limits, traffic light timing, bike lane placement, and even fixing potholes. The traffic department’s mandate is to keep traffic flowing safely through the city, and they would assign police officers to traffic patrols only in furtherance of that goal. In many cases, traffic stops wouldn’t even be necessary. Burnt out taillight? Get a picture and send the vehicle’s owner a notice in the mail. In cases where road patrols are needed, the security officers would be tasked only with road safety, and not be empowered to look for other crimes. So no more pretextual “driving while black” traffic stops.
- Property crimes: Say someone breaks into your home or business when no one is around, damages the building, and steals some property. In the existing system, you call the police. But their activities in response to investigate—taking fingerprints, reviewing camera footage, and talking to witnesses, for instance—don’t require any use of force. After all, the burglar has long since made off with the loot. So criminal investigations could be separated from the police force, perhaps moving under the purview of the prosecutor’s office. Police officers would only need to be involved when investigators anticipate a confrontation with a suspect or an arrest. And then, the response should be with restorative justice rather than incarceration—of course, criminal justice reform is its own enormous issue.
- Violent crimes: What about truly violent criminals—murderers, rapists, and domestic abusers so violent they pose an ongoing threat to others, for instance—who must be incarcerated to maintain public safety? The criminal justice system would still exist, including prisons. But like with property crimes, only a small part of the process involves use of force in the community. The process of investigation, prosecution, and incarceration would be handled by a separate agency, such as the DA’s office, and police would be assigned to that agency for potentially dangerous interactions or arrests.
Of course, any officer could make an arrest if they see a crime in progress. But for most of them, it wouldn’t be their primary purpose. And they’d ultimately be rewarded for supporting the broader social service mission, not just based on numbers of arrests or convictions.
Reorganizing the police force so that individual officers are accountable to other social service agencies would bring the major changes to policing culture and practice that are needed while maintaining public safety. It would align officers’ incentives with those in local government who are working to address long-term problems. It would limit the scope of the police’s responsibilities, so they’re not called on to deal with problems they’re not equipped to handle, and that would greatly reduce the possibility of excessive force. And it eliminates the bureaucracy that protects a culture of violence and racism