Should funding for local police departments be redirected to social and community based programs?
Yes, replace police with unarmed community based responders for non-violent calls
There doesn’t need to be a cop in the hospital room after a someone is raped, it could be a community liaison. Instead of dispatching armed officers trained to neutralize threats to deal with people experiencing a mental health crisis, we could send trained mental health professionals. We dispatch police who have received an allegedly universal training in a number of nuanced situations. Time and time again we see this training fail. We send in police in situations where there may be no threat to anyone other than the individual they are supposed to go help.
Police are “law enforcement officers” but they end up going places where no crime is being committed (e.g. someone calling for help for their mentally unstable family member). Why do we need guns in that situation? Why is someone’s deep pain seen as a threat?
If we funnel funding into programs training more mental health professionals and community practitioners, we probably won’t see as many preventable deaths at the hands of the police.
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