Is It Time to Hit the Reset Button on Policing?

Four years ago I wrote a column calling on local leaders to fundamentally change the way streets are designed. In “Engineers Should Not Design Streets,” I explained why the narrow and technical charge of the engineer didn’t fit the complexity of street design. We get poor outcomes, not because engineers are bad people, but because they are poorly suited for the things that need to happen when designing a street.

The reaction to this suggestion from the engineering community was outrage. How is it possible to design a street without an engineer? The criticism was harsh with the kindest of my professional colleagues wishing me luck with having a bunch of uninformed idiots designing my streets. Few even bothered to try and understand what I was suggesting.

Of course, I wasn’t saying there was no role for engineers in the design process. We can’t design a street without an engineer, but we should never start with the engineering. More importantly, the values of the engineering profession shouldn’t dominate our approach. Here’s what I wrote back in 2016:

Building a productive street is a collective endeavor that involves the people who live on it, those who own property on it, those who traverse it as well as the myriad of professionals who have expertise they can lend to the discussion.

Put your least technical person on staff in charge of your next street. Empower them to meet with people, observe how people use the street and then experiment, in a low cost way, with different alternatives. Keep experimenting until you start to see your indicator species show up (outside of their cars, of course). Now you have a design you can hand over to your engineer to specify the technical stuff—pavement thickness, paint specs, etc...—and get the project built.

Minneapolis, the largest and most important city here in my home state of Minnesota, is having a conversation about disbanding their police department. As someone who lives over two hours north of this conversation, it’s been interesting to listen to the reaction of my local friends and neighbors, many of whom believe that disbanding the police department will mean a complete lack of law enforcement presence. It doesn’t mean that at all.

I’m reminded of a CityLab article from over two years ago on the police department in Camden, New Jersey. One of the deadliest cities in America, Camden disbanded their police department. From CityLab:

In 2013, the Camden Police Department was disbanded, reimagined, and born again as the Camden County Police Department, with more officers at lower pay—and a strategic shift toward “community policing.” That meant focusing on rebuilding trust between the community and their officers.

From later in the article:

Thomson characterizes the 2013 overhaul as “hitting the reset button.” To hear him describe it, the turn towards community-cop symbiosis was like flicking a switch. “We were able to do in three days what it took three years to do before,” he said.

Camden is now something of a showroom for community policing techniques. Officers are trained to use handguns and handcuffs only as tools of last resort. To increase accountability, members of the department are equipped with GPS tracking devices, and many wear body cameras that were designed in 2016 with community input. The impact of body cameras on police officers is disputed and inconclusive, but the hope is that they encourage officers not to use force unnecessarily.

“It’s more of a protect-and-serve approach to dealing with the residents, rather than kicking down doors and locking our way out of the problem,” said Moran.

Last week I wrote an article about the struggles of small towns in America, using my city’s budget to demonstrate how we are a ward of the state. What I didn’t focus on is that 53% of our budget is public safety. With our fire department gutted in the last recession, most of that money is spent on police. It’s an enormous sum spent annually that has, for my entire professional life, been off limits to any reform or restructuring.

I was visiting my friend Joe Minicozzi in Asheville last year. We were walking out of his office and there were—to my recollection—four fire trucks and numerous ancillary police vehicles at the building next door. We weren’t in a hurry so we stood at a safe distance waiting to see the flames. Instead, we learned that someone in the building called 911 because they thought they were having a heart attack. No flames, but lots of response. In cities across North America, this is not an uncommon occurrence.

I’m familiar with how these systems run because I’ve been around them for decades. Even if there were the absence of police brutality, it is obvious that dismantling and retooling public safety departments today presents an opportunity to embrace nuance and complexity and provide a community huge benefits. Now, in the wake of repeated demonstrations of the excessive use of force that is synonymous with most American police departments, there are no credible reasons to forgo this kind of reform process. 

As a final note, I wrote the following at the end of a piece about Ferguson, Missouri, back in August of 2014:

I joined the Army on my 17th birthday and spent the summer between my junior and senior year of high school at basic training. Despite the total exhaustion, there were two nights I just couldn’t sleep: the night after bayonet training and the night after our first day shooting the M-16 at pop up targets (silhouettes of people). Just contemplating, even at a very detached level, the notion that I might be asked to take a human life was a very sobering notion for a 17 year old. Simulating the act was eye-opening. Fortunately I was never faced with the moment where I had to do the real thing. I don’t know how I would have reacted.

It is with that background that I find myself beyond horrified at police officers—not even soldiers but public safety officers—in full camouflage gear pointing their weapons at American citizens. I even saw photos of a sniper. A sniper! Snipers are used to take down targets with stealth—terrifying—and we’re deploying them during social unrest. My mind is just blown. I don’t think we—as sober citizens—can overreact to this reckless display of force. You never point a weapon at a person unless you are prepared to kill them. Is that what we’ve come to?

When I see militarized police, I see another example of how cities have allowed themselves to be positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy of governments, to orient vertically in response to state and federal priorities and incentives. Instead, cities need to assert their own leadership and reorient themselves horizontally to focus on the urgent needs of their residents. That’s how we build strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

There is no credible argument against dismantling the Minneapolis police department. Nor the police department in Ferguson. Nor the dozens, potentially hundreds, of police departments across the country that—due to whatever cause —do not represent the values of the communities they serve.

Top image from Wikimedia.

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