Number Games And No Police Reform

 Police work should be a straightforward profession. Serve and protect through patrol. In many urban areas, especially high crime areas, there must be patrol on foot. Vehicular patrol is insufficient in many places. It must be supplemented by officers walking neighborhood beats. True community policing, not the convoluted nonsense sold as community policing, means cops walking beats and becoming integral parts of the neighborhoods they serve. 

Police reform and discussions about policing too often center on the sensational, and on self serving agendas. Also follow the money trail, and who profits from what is proposed, whether it is training as the answer, or something else.

There can never be police reform until numbers game policing ceases to exist. Police departments and politicians, from mayors on down, misuse what policing should be when police and deputies are pushed to generate meaningless statistics, whether for arrests, traffic stops, traffic tickets, warnings, or something else. Generating numbers is not the same as serving and and protecting through patrol. In fact, it detracts from effective patrol. Good policing is not compatible with cops and deputies as mindless cogs generating meaningless statistics.

Serve and protect through patrol must be the bread and butter of any police department. Generating meaningless statistics must stop. It encourages the worst in police conduct. 

Good cops know how to de escalate situations, how to escalate situations that require escalation, and when to know the difference. They want to serve the public and the communities in which they work. Good cops are not on power trips. They are not interested in petty nonsense and making someone's life miserable because the cop or deputy has a fragile ego that is easily bruised. 

Police reform means ridding police departments of clout, cronyism, political favoritism, layers of bureaucracy and unnecessary supervisory and other positions. Cops on all levels belong on the streets as much as possible, not hiding in offices and buildings.

Police reform should be discussed in great length. Instead, the narrative continues to focus on the sensational and on self serving interests. Numbers game policing should have ended long ago.