By Jacqueline B. Helfgott Special to The Seattle Times
Jacqueline B. Helfgott is professor and director of the Seattle University Department of Criminal Justice Crime and Justice Research Center. She serves on the Seattle Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Committee.
In the days following the brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the subsequent protests across the country, activists are calling for defunding the police as a solution to systematic institutionalized racism in America. Here is why we should not defund the police.
Major reforms are underway. In Seattle and Washington state, we already are doing what defunding proponents and police abolitionists are calling for within the existing system: restorative justice, alternatives to incarceration, demilitarizing the police, crisis intervention and de-escalation training, community engagement and holistic collaborative services. Reforms in Seattle and Washington state offer a model that law enforcement agencies in every city and state should implement.
Sue Rahr, executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, who was a member of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, has replaced warrior-oriented training with guardian-oriented training in the Basic Law Enforcement Academy training for all police and corrections officers to create an empathetic police academy. The Seattle Police Department has made changes over almost a decade in response to the 2012 Department of Justice consent decree, including creation of the Community Police Commission, Crisis Intervention Training, and the police department’s mental health Crisis Response Teams. Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program has become a model for the nation.
Police culture is changing. Yes, this change is painfully slow and incremental, and many argue we have no time to wait. However, starting over is not realistic or reasonable. Police reform in Seattle and Washington state has not been successful in changing police culture entirely or in other jurisdictions across the country and does not change the hard, heartbreaking fact that police killed Floyd. The Major Cities Chiefs Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police condemned Floyd’s death, noting that Floyd’s arrest was horrific and blatantly inconsistent with good police procedure on use of force. Police culture has been slowly changing for many years through the implementation of guardian-oriented policing, policy and oversight, crisis intervention training, community policing, and police-community engagement efforts, collaborative partnerships with mental-health and social-service agencies, and the increase in women and minorities in law enforcement.
You, Jim deMaine, advise the public on how to make decisions about our life’s end. Our End of Life decisions, you say, we should make for ourselves. You advise us not to leave these choices to a habit-bound and self-perpetuating traditional medical profession.
When have you blogged your advice on being Black and having police decide for you how to end your life? Were you speaking solely to the White, privileged few of the world? And what of the rest of humanity? “Others” can settle for what the protectors of privilege decide to attack them with?
Today’s blog written by a police apologist appears to be your first entry on the topics of either Race or Social Justice since November, 2019. If protecting the police is your first concern, given all that has taken place in the past three weeks, I think you owe it to your readers to share this New York Times illustration of police funding:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/business/police-tactical-gear-cost.html
Thanks,
Sylvia