When Will Anyone Get Serious About Police Reform?

 The effort to delegitimize and stigmatize all policing should raise red flags about the motives of those that do this. Instead, it earns them places on public radio and elsewhere in the media.

In cohesive, small communities, police may not be needed. For the tiny minority of people living a tribal existence apart from the modern world, police are not needed. For the rest of the world, if police were not needed, they would have disappeared long ago.. The fact that there has been bad policing, bad cops, and that bad policing still exists, does not negate the fact that other than in a minority of areas, police are needed for public safety. 

Delegitimizing police in order to prove a narrative about racism or something else will not lead to better outcomes. Police reform and creating better policing does not come from biased narratives or from those with self serving agendas. Thanks to much of the media, experts at pandering, sensationalizing, and providing untruthfulness, there no longer is critical thought when it comes to policing or pretty much anything else. Thanks also to the pampered ivory tower world of academia, full of arrogance, laziness, self importance, dogma and political agendas wrapped up as scholarship,  cluelessness about police reform continues. No less important than reforming policing is the need to reform academia, yet they are ones often entrusted the responsibility for leading police reform.

Professionalizing police work, freeing it of cronyism, clout, political favoritism, number games and other shoddy police practices is not even in the discussion. The agenda when it comes to police is unfortunately not about really making policing better. Thus, when the dust clears months, maybe years from now, policing will be unreformed, unimproved, and worse. Unengaged, uninvolved, do as little as possible police work is the trajectory. It benefits police that are lazy and the legions of police and bosses in do nothing jobs, but not the public. Violent crimes and other crimes are not prevented from disengaged, inactive policing. 

Calls for police reform must move beyond grandstanding. They must move beyond self serving narratives. They must move beyond simplistic narratives that accomplish nothing. They must move beyond race baiting and narratives meant to divide and line the pockets of the race baiters. 

Policing should be a straightforward profession in which the basic mission is serve and protect through patrol. Cronyism, clout, political favoritism, number games and other shoddy police practices must be eliminated. Layers of bureaucrats, police officials in do nothing jobs and much more of the waste and fat must be cut from police departments. This requires a much lengthier discussion than the simplistic narratives now presented that want to reduce all of policing into one ugly pigeon holed box. Community policing must stop being manipulated and twisted into the convoluted nonsense it has now become. Cops in urban areas and especially in high crime urban areas, need to be on walking beats where they become integral parts of the neighborhoods they serve. This is true community policing. It is a very different job than what cops driving around in squad cars do. One is not meant to replace the other. It is meant to enhance the effectiveness of policing. The role of police is to serve and protect, accomplished by patrol, which is best achieved by having this patrol be by vehicle, by foot, and at times by bicycle.

What policing should be is a different issue than what cops should be. Better policing brings out the best in cops. Shoddy policing, including number games, rewards laziness, bad behavior, and more.

As for individual cops, short tempered cops, cops on power trips, violent cops, ill tempered cops, lazy cops, petty cops, thin skinned cops, ingratiating cops, cowardly cops, selfish cops are not needed. 

Policing needs to be reformed. This is not even being discussed in the charged grandstanding environment in which nothing good will result. Better policing is needed. Better policing will attract better people to the profession. This is not to say good cops do not already exist. They do. But too often, good cops are operating in departments engaged in bad policing that have no understanding of the core mission of policing.

Serious discussions about police reform, not loud grandstanding, is long past due. Otherwise, more decades will pass and nothing will change. Or even worse, policing will be a lazy person's profession where the goal is to do as little as possible so as to not rock boats and never make waves while employed by stagnant police departments.