One of the most common suggestions from police reform advocates is to stop using armed police officers for a wide range of tasks that might be better handled by trained dispute moderators and social workers. In Los Angeles, the police union said today it was willing to negotiate this:
As part of its upcoming contract talks, the Los Angeles Police Protective League intends to tell city negotiators that it is willing to let other city departments or nonprofit agencies respond to calls about panhandling, illegal sidewalk vending, urinating in public, mental health episodes in which there is no threat of violence or criminal activity, and dangerous dog complaints in which “no attack is in progress.”
....Council members have been looking in recent months at putting $1 million into an Office of Unarmed Response and Safety. Bass, for her part, promised during her campaign that she would create a public safety office that would not involve the LAPD.
The union is willing to stop having LAPD officers head out to homeless encampment cleanups, unless a deployment request is made by a city agency. Officers would stop making most “welfare checks” requested by the public. And they would no longer tackle certain quality-of-life calls, such as illegal dumping, illegal fireworks, noisy parties and drinking in public.
The union's statement was apparently received positively, but I remain cynical. These things are all basically scutwork that police officers have never wanted to do in the first place, and I am completely unsurprised they are "willing" to give them up. The question is, are they also willing to give up a big chunk of their budget in order to fund all the new unarmed responders? $1 million sure isn't going to do the job, after all.
My guess is that they want to shed this stuff but keep all the money they have now, which will make the whole proposal a nonstarter. I will apologize profusely if I turn out to be wrong.
Is this really a plausible approach?
"mental health episodes in which there is no threat of violence or criminal activity"
How is such a determination made? What, exactly, constitutes a mental health incident in which we can safely determine no threats of violence?
Speaking for myself, I am regularly surrounded by tragically disturbed individuals on public transit. And, sure, 99% of the time there doesn't seem to be any serious threat. But, one year ago, one of them suddenly pulled out a knife and held it to my chest while splashing water in my face. There were no clear signs I can recall indicating that the knife incident was going to turn out so differently from all the other interactions with disturbed types. So, call me crazy, but isn't it a bit idealistic to send social workers into certain situations that can turn violent from one moment to the next?
That IS not an uncommon concern with social workers. Even my wife has been in that situation and has gotten training in the past in the requirements and dangers of being a counselor. (And there are a lot more people that wind up in that role than you might realize.)
Of course, police, especially those who have taken on "warrior police" training and the attitude that goes with it, are the last people who should be sent into ANY potentially tense situation, given experience of the last couple of decades.
Thanks for your genuine concern. As DButch points out, real life social workers deal with this all the time, in this country and in others. (Mental health episodes that occasionally turn into violence as you’ve described don’t just happen in the US. Other countries send unarmed people all the time to deal with them.)
Totally agree. They tried to do the same thing in St Petersburg a year or two ago. It didn’t last too long. The social workers were frequently calling h for police backup, I think a few were injured, some were refusing to go in the calls. It was only a trial period but the city pulled the plug on the program pretty quickly.
Yeah, I’ll believe they’re serious when they give up the budget and extra positions these kind of calls add.
One million dollars (presumably per year) for the City of Los Angeles is not much. How many man-hours a day does that buy? Back of the envelope calculation says 60 man-hours or 10 people working 6 hours/day. ($40/hr). That's thin coverage and would help but not if it's to take on all tasks the LAPD is shedding.
As someone who has formed a union, it would be awesome to say, "we agree not to do something, and consider that a give in negotiations".
Instead of taking it out of the police department, what if they added it to the police department? Just about every police department has a SWAT team, officers who receive specialized trading for things like barricaded armed criminals, drug raids, etc. What if they had an elite team of officers with specialized unarmed intervention training for the types of crimes being discussed here?
Just a thought.
Those boys on that special unarmed team wouldn’t be as respected by the other boys in blue around them, just like how police across the country don’t respect their alleged brethren who defended the Capitol on Jan 6th 2021. Eventually that team would experience attrition as enlistees leave for more manly jobs in the LAPD, ones where they’ll know the rest of the department has their back when shit goes wrong.
Money is a great motivator. And if some are trained in unarmed intervention and leave that unit they will retain the skills they have learned.
Also, a lot would depend on leadership and the quality of the training. If respected leaders aren’t on board and the training was poor it wouldn’t work for the reasons you stated.
Cynical approach from a slightly different angle: when I saw that story I assumed the police union (of which I know nothing) was caving because they can see which way the wind was blowing on this issue, much like Eli Lilly "voluntarily" reducing the cost of insulin just after Biden calls them out on the high prices.
It didn't occur to me that the goal is to protect their massive budget, but that makes plenty of sense too.
Anyway, I assume this is the posture of "progressive" politicians going forward; "fund" the police, but also take away a bunch of their functions and give them to social workers. After a while it will be glaringly obvious the police are over-funded and then "reducing" police funding can be spun as fiscally conservative. Even Rick Caruso will be calling for it.
After a while it will be glaringly obvious the police are over-funded and then "reducing" police funding can be spun as fiscally conservative.
This will never happen. No politician anywhere will ever be able to cut police funding, even if the police are doing absolutely nothing to stop crime (as is increasingly happening in our nation’s cities) and even if the police are actively committing crimes of their own (like shooting unarmed people or people just possessing guns as is their 2nd Amendment right). “Defund the police” is too potent a weapon to be wielded against any politician running for office. And as the US military has shown over the last century, it’s impossible to cut funding for our warrior class regardless of actual threat levels.
Disagree. I think the world will notice at some point one of the central contentions of this blog -- that crime is way down from where it used to be. It could take a lot of people whose ideas were formed in the 80s and 90s dying off (and taking "NextDoor" with them), but it will happen, I think.
But I get your point.
No, people will not notice how crime is down from what it was 25 years ago. What they notice is how it is up from last year, even if it is only certain crimes.
If people do remember how things were decades ago, it is usually in the form of the "good old days" when many things were perceived to have been better, even if they actually weren't.
Or they'll notice it's up in some community miles away because the local news didn't have enough news that night. People believe there is more crime now than the early 90's for christsake.
Still disagree. As this blog noted a while ago the number of police officers per crime is now something like twice what it was 30 years ago. There’s a lot to be gained by a politician saying “I’ll cut your taxes and reduce government waste.” It will take a while but it will happen, I think.
I still get your point that “crime fighting” is a potent issue.
It will last until the first, well perhaps second, "no one could have foreseen" incident where one of these Unarmed Response and Safety officers is harmed or killed.
Police are unarmed in many countries on a routine basis, and manage to not die while dealing with mentally deranged individuals (of which do exist also outside the United States).
But in most other countries, especially the ones where the police are mostly unarmed, the civil populace is not armed to the teeth. 400 million guns for 330 million citizens is a lot. And they dramatically increase the chance of any emotionally-intense interaction becoming violent.
Countries where police don’t carry guns:
Botswana
Cook Islands
Fiji
Iceland
Ireland
Kiribati
Malawi
Marshall Islands
Nauru
Niue
Norway
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tonga
Tuvalu
United Kingdom
Vanuatu
Per: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-where-police-dont-carry-guns
That works out to be 17 out of something like 195 nations on the planet.
And some in the UK do. Just not all of them.
Cynicism is justified, but it’s really worth doing! I’d also end all traffic stops except for reckless driving like really excessive speeding, running stop signs / lights, etc.
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I think it would be worth the extra money if the public begins to see less of the police in action. If you are a local taxpayer and you call to have an issue dealt with, only to have another agency knocking on your door, you might begin to wonder why you are paying all this money in taxes to the police and be more amenable to budget decreases.
Not gonna happen. Most voters already don’t encounter crime on a daily, weekly or even yearly basis… and yet it only takes watching the news for an hour a day to scare them into thinking crime is rampant and an entire political party should be punished at the polls for a few people who aren’t even party officials saying “let’s defund the police.”
It’ll take generations before that mindset goes away, if ever. It’s far more likely the GOP will just abolish or render useless elections than it is that a critical mass of voters will voluntarily take away police funding.
You're probably right, Austin. I would have to agree with a reply to you from OwnedByTwoCats above with gun proliferation as the chief reason why you can't get a cut in police budgets. Here in Atlanta, guns have flooded the city (and the state of Georgia) and opening the news in the morning is, "let's see who's been shot now."
What's the clearance rate for the LAPD?
Unfortunately, I think Kevin is right here. No way any police force will give up a dime of their budgets to squishy causes.
Nail meet Hammer.
Police department: Sure give those responsibilities to another department.
Also Police department: Hey look at all this money for armored vehicles and drones!
Negotiate? WTF? They're willing to NEGOTIATE what police work means? How is that a subject for negotiation? It is a policy decision and none of their concern beyond that of any other voter. So is their level of funding.