4 Jobs We Are Asking the Police to Do (But Really Shouldn’t)
This is the first part of a two-part series discussing areas where there are better alternatives to currently-prevalent police intervention, split for better readability.
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Concept Summary
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The police have been under intense scrutiny lately, and for good reason. What started as an argument against excessive use of force compounded by racial bias has evolved into a broader questioning of the police’s role stemming from the roots of policing itself, arguably infused with the interests of a certain class (hint: it’s not the poor).
This whole discourse reminded me of a 2017 book I read a couple months back, The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College. It laid out eight public issues currently addressed in one way or another by the police, and why those are not working. While the research was mostly U.S.-focused, I believe some of the logic still holds across geographies.
Here goes the first four…
1. Discipline schoolkids
The rationale
The U.S. Justice Department’s “Cops in Schools” program puts School Resource Officers (SROs), which are school-based police, to maintain a safe environment for students, and act as mentors and advisors. There were two rationales for this program: stemming the rise of ‘superpredators’ — young, hardened criminals produced by trends like rising crack trade, single-parent families, and declining moral values — and preventing school shootings.
While the ‘superpredator’ theory has largely been discredited (the author himself admitted as much), and school shootings, as you might notice, still happen (and the research on effectiveness is not encouraging), at least the sentiment at the time of wanting to keep kids safe with people who were sworn to “protect and serve” is definitely understandable.
The problem
Some U.S. states, like many other countries, adopt a high-stakes testing model of schooling — shifting teaching towards test prep and rote learning, otherwise known by any 12th-grader as “boring stuff.”
This model gives teachers very little latitude to work with kids and tailor learning models that grow creativity, because proper education takes time, but if test scores are bad, the money’s gone, which means the teachers are gone. Naturally, bored kids lead to discipline problems.
So how do you bring test scores up, when there are misbehaving kids with poor grades weighing you down? Simple: get the cops to arrest them! A study shows that schools with SROs have nearly 5 times the arrest rate of non-SRO schools. According to the book:
“Students are frequently arrested for minor acts of disobedience and disruption such as using cell phones, disrespecting teachers, and getting into loud arguments…it [is] easier just to have a police officer come in and remove and arrest a student than to put in the hard work of establishing a reasonable classroom environment.”
Oh, and if some good cops wanted to work with kids, have heart-to-heart conversations, and act as mentors? Yeah, some of the ‘problem kids’ typically have issues back home that might touch the criminal realm, and as officers, they will be obligated to investigate. The implication is well known in street parlance as “snitches get stitches.”
The alternatives
Start with perhaps replacing officers with trained counselors with access to services for the students, but also the families.
Explore restorative as opposed to punitive methods. These include peer juries, problem-solving circles, community service, and conflict mediation. The point is to establish order to enable effective learning without having to resort to the criminal justice system.
The root cause that is the high-stakes testing is more difficult to change, but some after-school programs like the American Federation of Teachers’ community schools might help. These schools coordinate services from community organizations and tailor them to the particular needs of a given community.
All of these require time, money, effort, and political will. There will be discouraging anecdotes at the early stages, such as this masterful depiction from the show The Wire:
But the option is really between putting in the work to help the kids, or make them problem members of society as adult criminals (which exert considerably more costs to the society).
2. Deal with mental health issues
The rationale
The police have always dealt with mentally ill individuals, as some would exhibit behaviors that intersect with police domain, such as public nuisance or even criminal activity. Given the low availability of mental health services (and this is a global trend), the police end up being the only resource left to deal with such issues.
The problem
A police officer’s primary tools to handle people with mental illness (PMI) cases are admittance to emergency room, arrest, or informal resolutions. While officers prefer the last option, when the PMI’s behavior is deemed serious, there is no recourse other than the two other tools — which sometimes necessitate the use of force. In cases where the PMI holds objects that might be perceived as a weapon (e.g. a screwdriver or a knife), that situation can easily escalate to lethal use of force. Some suicidal cases might even rely on this dynamic to commit “suicide by cop.”
The alternatives
No rocket science here…a more robust mental health care system would be the answer. As with anything in life, that needs money.
With limited public funding, however, this invariably gets de-prioritized as it’s not as sexy as a ‘tough on crime’ stance.
In these cases, it’s just worth mentioning that a Florida Mental Health Institute study tracked 97 chronically mentally ill people over 5 years, and recorded a whopping 2,200 arrests, 27,000 days in jail, and 13,000 days in crisis units, hospitals, and emergency rooms. The estimated costs to taxpayers were about $13 million.
But, you know, gotta be ‘tough on crime’ and all.
3. Fix homelessness
The rationale
Part of the police’s mandate to “maintain public order” sometimes get translated into handling a part of the population that needs help to not, you know, infringe on said public order — the homeless.
The problem
You might start to notice a pattern here: The tools at the disposal of an officer are not going to address the root causes of homelessness. The police can’t magically conjure shelter, food, and the economic means for the homeless to provide for themselves — i.e., things that made them homeless in the first place. After all, nobody becomes a homeless person by choice.
What they can do is break up encampments, order people away, and drive them to more remote and isolated locations. These might appease the residents who were concerned with their neighborhood’s quality of life, but leave the homeless more vulnerable to robberies, assaults and the elements. Oh, and as always, use of force is always a present possibility, since mental health and addiction issues are invariably linked to homeless cases.
Further, though homelessness in itself is not a crime, it’s very easy to fall into the system and turn into criminals. Tickets for minor infractions like littering and public urination can and will inevitably show up (not to mention totally-illegal anti-homeless laws like public encampment bans and vehicle sleeping bans). Since what little money the homeless have typically got spent on unnecessary things like, uh, food and clothing, they can totally pay for these tickets, right?
The alternatives
The housing-first approach shifts the traditional view of homelessness services from emergency, temporary sheltering to providing low cost permanent housing to this segment of population. This could take the form of heavily-subsidized, government-funded housing.
On a more immediate basis, income support coupled with increasing the availability of shelters, relaxing the restrictive terms that are typically required (e.g. clean, sober, of a certain sexual orientation especially for religious group-backed shelters), and connecting those shelters with opportunities in that neighborhood could increase the of escaping homelessness.
4. Eradicate sex work (or at least keep it hush-hush)
The rationale
Most arguments for police regulation of sex work have moral undertones. Concerns of exposing children to overt sex acts and the paraphernalia that comes with them (including condoms). Assertions that no one would choose prostitution of their own accord and as such equate sex work with coercion. Minimization of sex workers’ humanity for religious beliefs, or minimization of their agency as victims.
There are, however, concerns involving cold, hard issues, such as international trafficking (especially juveniles), sexually transmitted diseases, and the harassment of women mistaken for sex workers or propositioning of uninterested men (and vice versa). All of these are very real problems and as such, it was sensible to put the police to work and stop this potentially harmful trend for the public.
The problem
The evidence has shown that even the most intensive policing efforts fail to eradicate sex work. As the book puts it:
“Even when individual sex workers move out of the profession as a result of police action, others replace them, and there is never a shortage of clients. At best, police can claim that their efforts limit the extent and visibility of the sex industry.”
Despite the narrative of sex workers as victims, again the tools that police can employ are limited to undercover operations and raids, leading to arrests and prosecution — criminalization. Given the unstoppable supply and demand associated with sex work, all these methods do is drive sex work underground — strengthening the hands of pimps and organized criminals, which leads to exploitative and coercive practices, illegal trafficking, and no controls for sexual disease prevention.
After all, if what they’re doing is illegal, the sex workers can’t go to the police to report abuse from pimps or clients. Oh, and also, said pimps can just bribe the police.
Further, those who enter this work often come from disadvantaged circumstances with some mental health and substance abuse issues, and the marginalization that comes with criminalizing sex work doesn’t really help them to get out of those issues and circumstances. Even “rehabilitation” programs that come after police intervention in some countries are highly punitive in nature and do little to actually improve the lives of the workers.
The alternatives
To meaningfully address the problems associated with sex work, you have to buy into the premise that whether you personally find it distasteful or not, sex work will continue.
I personally believe that premise, as plenty of evidence have shown over the years. Porn is involved in about 10% of internet use. The majority of the top 10 countries searching for sex terms in Google are conservative societies (though they don’t top the charts in actual porn site visits — probably reflecting limits in internet access and government bans for erotic material). There’s no shortage of sex scandals involving conservative figures. And even in Aceh, arguably the most repressive, religious province in my country, sex work still finds a way.
If this premise is accepted, then the goal should be to take coercion out of the process and giving more power to the sex workers. Decriminalization followed with some regulation with low licensing cost and cooperative local governments can solve the issues of coercion, abuse, unsafe sex practices, involvement of minors, and illegal trafficking.
But don’t take it from me. Take it from New Zealand, who implemented all the above with their prostitution law reform in 2003, and found sex workers reporting feeling safer, better able to negotiate safe sex practices, and more willing to report abuses to the police, as well as no evidence of increases in the number of minors involved in the sex trade.
Now if only we can all get off our moral high horses.
