For Defunding The Police, Let’s Talk Merger
This here really should not be too long of a read. I am no specialist, nor am I heavily involved in any specific activism. I just had an idea, and I wanted to throw this out to the internet to see if this thought is in fact beneficial to the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as to those who still do not understand what defunding the police means, and are horrified by that idea.
I am not horrified by the thought of defunding the police, and that is because I have taken the time to learn about what this means. Defunding the police is a call to rethink the distribution of billions of dollars of municipal taxes, and instead of using the police as the only answer to many of our societal flaws, we should instead send some of these billions of dollars to programs that better enable communities to thrive, sort of from a preventative perspective.
This ideology really does set up a great opportunity to create actual new jobs — not the usual narrative of moving existing jobs from one town to another. This would actually create new, and more jobs. I am not horrified by the thought of defunding the police.
I am horrified by the way that Donald Trump is using the uninformed fear of this movement to fuel his reelection campaign. I am horrified by Donald Trump for many, many reasons, and I don’t want that man perverting this cause for his own fascist gain.
So let’s talk merger.
Instead of “defunding the police”, and using that phrase as our battle cry for reform, what if we envisioned the whole public domain a little differently, while still trying to achieve the same goal?
It does seem a little silly to me, that police departments sort of operate on their own; police report to a police chief, who reports to a mayor, and that is pretty much it. Why do all of the responses to social matters fall under law enforcement?
What if we envision this as a corporate bureaucracy, where the mayor is in charge, sure, but instead of an isolated, autonomous police department, we instead create actual departments of social response?
The Department of Social Response includes the Police Department and its chief, sort of as a Vice President of a company, but there would also be a Chief of Mental Health, a Chief of Community Development, so on and so forth. All of these chiefs would report to the Mayor, and they would be required to have meetings together in order to discuss trainings, issues, initiatives, and most importantly in my opinion, they’d be able to argue with each other in these meetings. They also should be put on equal grounds of authority in this framework. The Department of Social Response, which includes law enforcement, embodies these other departments to prevent the need for increased use of law enforcement. How does the saying go? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? And we might be able to channel an ounce of prevention by merging all of these services under one domain.
We should want mental health services to blossom so that cops are not called to be the sole handlers of an anxiety attack. We should want our school systems to be funded so that kids stay in school, with air conditioning, books, sports, and world-class teachers. We should want community development efforts to include the actual input of the community instead of predatory corporations, so that land use benefits people first.
Creating this Department of Social Response, as well as establishing the subdivisions of it for mental health, community development, etc, would need money. We get that money by using funds from the current allotment in police budgets, thus achieving the same goal, but by also providing a visual reporting-line framework for the public to envision. Hopefully, this also destroys the way that Donald Trump has vilified this work all together.
I figured it is worth throwing it out there, to see if it ends up sticking anywhere. Also, it is totally worth voting Donald Trump out of office. That should be a top priority for all involved in this work, especially while he sends his unmarked federal agents into American cities, disappearing citizens.
Let’s Talk Merger, and let’s vote Trumpism all the way out of The White House.
