Defund The Police and Its Conversation Non-Starter Problem

I have seen enough of Facebook from my friends and family, people I care about and respect, to know that the term, “defund the police” is a really poor term for the actual argument being made. It allows a knee jerk dismissive reaction from a lot of people. It allows the counter-argument to found itself on, "You hate all police officers and want lawlessness and anarchy." It invites reaction to the argument without understanding the argument and it ends the conversation.

This is the crux of the problem with much of our conversation when we disagree anyway: we can’t agree what we’re arguing about. If arguments are going to be deliberately misconstrued for the purposes of winning them, rather than solving the problem or understanding better, I’m no longer willing to engage in them. I never want to fight. But if we’re going to fight, I want a fair fight.

Shouldn’t we all?

Why don’t we all? Isn’t that kind of the problem?

My favorite response to this tactic, this what-aboutism, this running to the ends of the extreme of position, this self-serving outage was honed on a particularly narcissistic road block in my life.

“I don’t think that is an appropriate response to what I just said.”

It works a surprising amount of the time. I will not let you redefine the terms of the argument, but I’m going to try and be polite about it. I am hesitant to engage in much of this conversation because I am exhausted by yelling at each other about our differing values or opinions.

I want to like each other when our conversation is over.

But if I wait for us to get our collective poop in a group and establish common values, so that we can talk to each other respectfully, I’m going to miss the moment.

As a school psychologist, this opinion is rooted in my professional experience as an educator and mental health professional of 12 years. (They do not represent the agency that employs me.)

The term “defund the police” is meant to point out that all state and federal budgetary expenditures are subject to change and review. Why are police department budgets frequently unscrutinized? Funds are allocated by lawmakers. Government-run agencies are routinely given more or less depending on who runs the block in congress. In education, we know this.

We are routinely defunded. We are forced to take our budgets back the drawing board every year because there’s less than there was before and we have to figure out how to “do more with less”. Funds are withheld for lack of compliance with this regulation or metric or that. We are subject to a ridiculous amount of oversight and the stakes are very real. It is my understanding that there is nothing near analogous local law enforcement.

Cutting educational funding, by the way, is a really, really bad investment of the public’s money. Research time and time again shows that robust education funding decreases I almost every societal problem that the vast majority of Americans can all agree we would like to reduce. That can’t possibly be brand new information, but budget cuts happen routinely and are generally received by shrugs.

The pointed use of funding in the headline for the argument is that police officers are sometimes an inefficient use of funds. If we need someone to be physically subdued in order to enforce compliance, we need a police officer. We can all agree that we will always need police officers and we are grateful to them because there is and will always be a need to punish maliciousness. But should that be our goal in every instance where we send a police officer, and if not, why are we sending one?

What if our goal was to connect people in crisis to the help they needed? Would that be a better use of community resources? It is a worthwhile question to ask ourselves what qualities our communities would like our servants to attend to when they serve us.

This is not an inherently anti-police sentiment. Personally, I know and love many officers. As a mental health professional, I serve a lot of the same population and I know something about the chaos you are frequently invited into. The burden of a community helper job is this: When you are on the clock, you are required to filter your response through the needs of those you are helping rather than your own. Professionalism is programming the self to attend to the needs of the task rather than the self. Law enforcement is a job that requires the sacrifice of self in many small and many life defining moments. It requires many considerations before taking the self into account. You don’t really get to ask yourself what’s good for you before you have to ask yourself what’s expected of you. It’s exhausting. It is traumatizing. I hear you and I see you and I know. What is being placed on you and the care that is being taken of your heart and your soul is not fair. I know it hurts. I know that repeatedly ignoring your own needs can create a rub that can turn into a wound if left untended. I know that some things we ask of our officers blasts a wide wound in an instant. I know we take poor care of people with wounds we can’t see and we generally aren’t encouraged to examine our own. I know that unacknowledged wounds create poor checks on impulsive behavior. It is not blasphemy to say so. I care about those wounds a great deal and I would love to see greater attention placed here too.

Here’s the dirty, shameful, beautiful and simple secret: most of the time, people need help.

I have spent my entire career supporting students who require specialized programming due to special education needs. Most of my students have significant behavioral needs and range from preschool to age 26. I love my students. Every day I love them. But some days are hard. Some days students are really upset about things that cannot be controlled or fixed.

We train for those days. We are certified in nonviolent crisis handling. There is paperwork involved when things go slightly sideways. There is hell to pay if it goes really wrong. The cultures I have worked in do not tolerate physical force unless absolutely necessary.

No one is kneeling on anyone’s neck and getting away with it.

There have been a few times where it was absolutely right to invite a police officer to help with a situation at school. We need to be able to call police officers when significant force is needed.

But a lot of the time, it’s not.

We also work on using new skills out in the community during the school day, so my students occasionally have meltdowns out in public. Imagine taking a high school student with significant autism to McDonald’s to get the chocolate shake he earned by meeting his behavior checklist all week only to find out the machine is down. Only McDonald’s will do. Sometimes the aftermath looks a bit like Wrestlemania in the parking lot. Because this might attract attention, police often respond without being contacted by our staff. When this happens, we pray for the benefit of the doubt for both ourselves and our students. We usually get it, but the few occasions on which we did not, the story is scary but thankfully nowhere near tragic.

Where I work, some behaviors happen that are unsafe and require a hierarchy of physical management of students. Please don’t think that I am discounting the reality that these interactions are dangerous. It can be ugly. No one is having fun and occasionally people get hurt. It pumps adrenaline, which is why we train for it, which is why we take turns through it.

Which is why I do not want the human making decisions about what is going to happen to my student to have a gun.

When the storm is over at school, the repair is to the relationship, to the stuff that got thrown, and not much larger. We do the fixing and processing together and through the repetition of this process, we help the student grow. We respond in the way that is best for the student, not us personally.

Society demands it of educators.

We worry about students out in the community without us. I can think of several encounters over the years where students really did end up arrested and in serious legal trouble because they became upset in public or responded inappropriately to a social situation because of their disability. We have the extreme luxury of a stellar police department in our community, but systems do what systems do.

The argument related to police funding is exactly that. Systems do what systems do. So let’s use the same funds and divide them differently. Let social workers and other community helpers do wellness checks, respond to mental health calls, and provide services that connect people with resources. Most people with high needs are well known to one community agency or another. Empower these professionals to intercede on behalf of their community members when they interface with the law. For example, send a social worker, not a police officer, to check on the guy pacing on Main Street. They probably already know each other. Social service agencies are already in dicey situations unarmed in your town, I promise you. Proposing an increase in their resourcing will not shift them into harm’s way suddenly.

I avidly follow news from local departments nationwide that tout the success of programs that increase the use of community helpers instead of/in conjunction with law enforcement. Outcomes in one Kentucky town, for example, include budget savings because these responders are less expensive, reduction in repeat 911 calls, and a drop in overall arrests. It works.

It is a universal human truth: we respond differently to those who are bringing force than they do to people who are bringing help. Sometimes you need a hammer, but it’s not the only tool you need. We live in an age where we have an unprecedented ability to match a tool to a job in a million other instances. This is not an unsolvable problem. But until we are willing to agree that people who want to use a screwdriver sometimes are not anti-hammer, we will not be responding appropriately to what has been said.