Trump is right about police. We ask officers to take on too many duties.
By narrowing the role of policing, both police critics and supporters can achieve their aims.
President Donald Trump’s executive order on policing has been pilloried by the “defund the police” crowd who want substantial police reforms. But Trump’s approach represents the best hope yet for improving policing.
In fact, Trump’s proposal embraces defunding advocates' criticisms that law enforcement has become a catch-all for society’s ills and resorts to force too often. By narrowing the role of policing, both police critics and supporters can achieve their aims.
The true aims of advocates for defunding are as slippery as a wet bar of soap. Contorted definitions of defunding abound. Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law, argues, “For most proponents, 'defunding the police' does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever.”
This kind of double-talk (defund doesn’t mean defund, abolish doesn’t mean abolish) reveals that many critics are trying to co-opt the phrase and sideline anti-police extremists.
Setting aside police abolitionists, mainstream defunding advocates are right that effective police reform does require scaling back the duties and expectations that local governments and communities have for police. When all other government or community services have failed or are unavailable, the police are the agency of last resort.
Let police focus on public safety
In curtailing these demands, overburdened departments and officers can focus on their primary and essential duty: public safety, and carry it out with professionalism and skill.
Meanwhile, resources can be more effectively targeted at community needs that do not always require a police response. Notably, the homeless, substance abusers and those with mental illnesses (often overlapping categories) need social services, including counseling, medical attention and housing instead of time in jail.
Similarly, some domestic incidents do require police, but in a support role with counselors on hand to resolve conflict.
This is precisely the kind of response protocol called for in the president’s plan. Having federal support for additional training in deescalation of force and responding to mental health crisis is a key step in building the professional capacity of our police. At the same time, expanding the use of mental health professionals as first responders in a crisis is critical.
The good news is a number of police departments already are doing this. Dozens of major departments have hybrid teams that include social workers, counselors, medical personnel and police.
These teams take different forms across the country but prioritize helping those in need more than enforcing the law. Before the progressive mantra became “defund,” prominent left-leaning justice reform group praised the approach as a model for more effective policing outcomes.
But this approach is not really defunding as much as diverting resources and refocusing police roles. If properly executed, police may return to protecting the innocent full-time instead of a patrol officer wearing the hat of a social worker, grief counselor, dispute mediator as well as law enforcer.
Although many police departments have tried to meet expanded duties by investing in more training, a fully professionalized law enforcement system requires high-level, exhaustive but narrow training. Only then can we set clear metrics for success and hold everyone accountable for their performance. By asking too much, we cannot expect undertrained and under-resourced officers to deliver results that meet our expectations.
Bolstering non-police support systems will take resources and time. Effective and efficient service delivery to the most vulnerable cannot be achieved overnight or by simply repurposing police budgets.
New dollars allocated to a city department do not produce the same level of results as existing dollars because of start-up costs and inefficiencies that take time to curtail. And substantively improving or “reforming” police performance, even with narrower police roles, requires an investment, not a divestment.
Thus, cutting money from police budgets and simply diverting them to social programs, as the mayors of New York City and Los Angeles plan to do, will solve nothing, and the problems may get worse.
Crime rates drop from past decades
Part of the problem is that many “defund” or abolish the police advocates have never experienced the bad times. Crime has fallen dramatically and almost continuously for nearly three decades.
New York City logged 2,250 homicides 30 years ago. Last year, 300 people were murdered in the Big Apple, even though it has grown by a million people. Nationwide, property and violent crime rates are less than half what they were.
America is the safest it's been for more than 40 years — a privilege brought to you by the police.
To maintain public safety, we cannot “defund the police,” but diverting some police funding may well make our police better and streets safer if it is done right. And that is the intent of the president's Safe Policing for Safe Communities order.
Jason C. Johnson is president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. He served as deputy commissioner of Baltimore's police department from 2016 to 2018. Follow him on Twitter: @LELDF_President
