Like with many professions it is hard to be critical about the police if you have friends and family who are still or once were in law enforcement. Like any profession there is loyalty to your fellows, and a defensiveness when people from the outside speak as if their experiences were universal and all informative.

As a teacher I would cringe any time a teacher was arrested for some heinous child endangering act because it meant for a time we all bore that stain. One child molesting teacher made us all suspect, and people were only too eager to demand steps be taken that needed to be applied to all teachers. For a time the public believed that the one rotten apple had already spoiled the whole barrel.

Teaching, like police work, is very public, subjected to the go to phrase “I pay your salary” when someone wants to criticize with no substance, and being referred to as a “public servant” as if you are supplied room, board, and necessities, only in exchange for which you must serve no matter how degrading the whim.

So, although I do not approve of the extreme forms of police on citizen abuse, I have to remain mindful that the majority of police are not those people, but the better ones.

I have a problem with the keyboard warriors whose opinions outnumber any actual involvement that means inconvenience and persistence as oppose immediate gratification in making change especially when they think that they can really impress people if their opinions and suggestions are so extreme as to be impractical, but strong enough to create a cute phrase.

They love the controversy and compete in an attempt to establish who is stronger on the issues by their own metric and they quite often abandon reasonable reform for a total abolition of  something  without having realistically giving time or attention to think it through.

It might be a lack of a single concept, perhaps a name that encapsulates the majority’s desire for reform and gives form to theory.

Lately a phrase has become part of the discussion, and it is as simple as sticking to the fact that  taking a knee was about racial disparity, especially in regard to police actions, than to how viewed the American flag.

People are throwing around “Defund the Police” applying it as it fits their argument, and it fits everyone’s opinion because it is left undefined.

The desire to defund the local police may be better accepted if it was more clearly seen as properly funding the police.

As in any large profession that has a hierarchy and moving up in the system depends on how closely you are aligned with the thinking of the top, there is a chance that practices, procedures, training, and finances can be subject to bad influence, and this calls for assessment and restructuring. In the present time, what the police do and how they should do it, needs some evaluatio0n from without and within, and that could mean ending certain programs and introducing new ones that would put local law enforcement squarely on the same side as the people they serve and protect. They exist, after all, to protect the community from harm, not surveil the members of the community to watch for their inevitable law breaking, and seeing nothing else.

Rather than needing “defunding”, what is needed is redirection and carefully budgeted programs.

As a community sharing program, one police officer I know had his department buy an old travel trailer which was then moved to locations with large senior citizen living centers, so residents could ask the police questions, or contribute their ideas.

Police meant more than just busting people.

Other place may see a need for social interaction with the community on officer patrols.

Increased investment in community reduces the need to call police in instances when police officers’ specific skill set isn’t required. Police have enough on their plate without adding a need for them to be mental health or drug addiction counselors, so maybe funds could go to other entities that are better equipped to help and could eliminate a police presence.

As a teacher I am familiar with both the conscious and unconscious assignment of new responsibilities to teachers and police to take on roles for which they are not trained because those who see a need for certain services don’t really think who should administer them and let them become the job of the teachers or the police because they have more contact with community members than do other people.

The way it is now, if there isn’t enough mental health funding, let the cops do that, or maybe be a parent to someone else’s kid so you teach them how to follow rules rather than have parents do it, or have to lecture some kid at a store because mommy doesn’t know how to be more than the child’s best fun friend.

Police should be patroling to keep communities safe, not dealing with finding the homeless shelter, go to a school because some parent did a poor job of raising their kid, dealing with mental health issues, or going to someone’s house because the neighbor’s dog parks.

Four Minneapolis police officers responded to a 911 call for a minor, nonviolent crime. Why four? He had supposedly tried to The chemical promotes smooth blood circualtion to the male sex viagra genérico 25mg organ. So patients cialis without prescriptions should make sure that medication interaction is not a problem before taking any oral medicine for men only. Person taking this medicine should inform doctor if overnight cialis delivery he is taking it along with other drugs such as heroin, cocaine, etc. are found at more risk to get sexual impediments. They cheapest viagra from india additionally hold crospovidone, magnesium stearate, hypromellose, titanium dioxide (E171), lactose, triacetin, indigo carmine aluminium lake (E132). pass a counterfeit $20 bill. He hadn’t been violent, nor was he acting in a threatening way.

That should have involved one police car with, perhaps, two cops in it.

If money was invested in violence prevention programs, training in minority relations, youth homelessness programs, opioid taskforces, and mental health response teams, uniformed police could be protecting communities from actual crime not societal problem.

Perhaps money for these programs could come from the money budgeted for military style gear, mobile command centers, and not having local  law enforcement “drafted” into helping ICE perform its job at the local community’s expense.

Because of the past two weeks of demonstrations, there seems to be a social media contest to wear the crown as the Most Outraged. This takes the form of demanding the tearing down of the whole system so there is nothing, instead of a carefully thought our program of reform.

These people, these keyboard warriors, like to tell people that you cannot really be dedicated to social justice if you do not think the exact way they do, and let you know they have gone to an event or two, but they are not there for the actual long haul it takes to affect real change.

They do not want to improve policing and establish better policies and practice; they want to do away with the whole idea of a police department without actually knowing what that entails.

They have a repeatable phrase and repetition will make it useful.

“Defund Police!”

Abolish the Police!”

But as was said in the play A Man For All Seasons,

“What would you do, cut a great road through all the laws to get to the devil?

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

But the benefit of the law should be applied with reason.

And for those who see a world with no police and rampant end-times crime, no one is actually suggesting the ending of the police. The phrase “defund the police” is one of those scary generic terms which sound frightening if left undefined, which it is why those who use it leave it undefined.

Gay people recruit, but religions convert; a Black football player takes a knee it becomes “un-American”, whatever that means in the moment; people walking from Central America for the promise of this country are a caravan, an invasion; when they get here they are “Criminal illegal aliens” without having done anything but get here; The Affordable Care Act became Obamacare to emphasize that as good as it was for most, it was the program of a liberal Black man.

So what is actually meant by “Defund the police”?

Police Departments will continue to be funded, but not overfunded. More care will be required as to where the money goes and if what is proposed is actually necessary.

Money that went to local law enforcement to be able to perform those jobs that aren’t actually theirs, things like mental illness, homelessness, school policing, medical care, and youth issues would be redirected toward those agencies trained to deal with these issues so that the police can keep their communities safe for those in them.

It is not as negative as abolishing something, but to get it back to what it is supposed to be before those who recognized a societal problem needed to be addressed, decided it would be, but then never took the necessary step sof designing a system to do that, and, so, let it fall on the police.

Redirecting money would include assessing community needs to see where the money would best be spent for the greatest results as opposed to buying the latest artillery so the cops on the beat take on the look of an invading army.

It means things like hospital, schools, social services, and infrastructure will get the money tom do the job they should be doing.

“Defunding” is a scarier term than the truthful one. Reforming police financing would be more correct as it, unlike defunding, is reasonable and not a term chosen to appeal to emotions rather than reason.