You have to start demilitarizing the warrior cop mindset when they zip around in their cars, never know anything about the people in the neighborhoods they patrol and start trying to change the adversarial relationship between cops and communities of color. Until both sides meet each other halfway nothing will ever change.
Changing the "I am a hammer and everything is a nail" philosophy of the police would be very helpful.
This.
As long as cops are patrolling a neighbourhood in the isolation of their cars, they're not really going to get to know the people who live there. They need to get off their arses and start walking the beat. That would hopefully go some small way to closing the gap and building up some sort of relationship with the people they're supposed to be protecting.
I don't disagree with the idea of getting offices out of their cruisers, but it's not as simple as "They need to get off their arses and start walking the beat." It's going to change response times if you have officers away from their parked cars; they'll need time to get back to the car and respond if the call is more than a couple of blocks away. And if that's not going to be your policy, if you're going to have some officers on foot and some in cars, then you're actually going to end up with a higher police presence, since you'll need more bodies to cover on foot what you were covering in cars.
TL;DR: It's a good idea, but implementation won't be simple.
Nothing worth doing ever is.
Community policing isn't a new idea and has had both its unqualified successes and dismal failures, but an adversarial relationship between cops and the communities they patrol is poisonous. Nothing positive can come from cops calling civilians as
"fucking animals" while the civvies serenade the cops with a chorus of
"Fuck the Police."
The cops have the bullets and the weaponry to fight the community, but the community has bullets and weaponry too. Neither side can win so where does that get us to but M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction)?
It's in the best interest of both sides to avoid all-out war in the streets.
Define "local." In some departments, you can't get in unless you're local.
Much has been made of racial disparity between a police department and the town it works for. But what if no one really wants to become a cop? How do you convince a black kid that the people he's been scared of for years, who locked up his dad, his uncle, his cousins, and his sister (maybe shooting one or more in the process) is a place he'd want to work for? Never mind that Dad, Uncle Joe, and all the others were actually committing crimes at the time, by the way. Would Junior really want to go work for the cops, and be seen as a traitor, or Uncle Tom?
That is both a sweeping generalization and a bit of unnecessary race-baiting, cmhbob. There are White Dads, White Uncle Joes and others whom have committed crimes yet despite the criminality of family members still produce law enforcement officers.
Take your stereotyping back through history when other ethnic minorities attempted to become police officers and the exact same argument was used to keep them out if their last name ended in a vowel. Or don't you remember
"George Stone?"
Every Black cop isn't viewed as a traitor or an Uncle Tom. If that were the case, there would be no Black cops. Minorities groups will always be legitimately suspicious of cops who don't look like them, don't relate to them and don't understand them.
"If no one really wants to become a cop" that begs the question, why does
anyone become a cop?
I would imagine Black cops become cops for the same reason White cops do and I doubt it's for the great pay, the round of applause and the free donuts. I figure they see a job that needs doing and they to do it.
Wonderful. That doesn't hold true for lots of places. There are lots of places where POC don't want to be a cop, or can't be a cop because of a criminal record, or because they can't pass the tests for one reason or another. So what's the solution?
I'm not saying it can't be fixed or that it doesn't need to be fixed. I'm pointing out that it's not as simple as "hire more POC."
Okay. Then from the perspective of a former law enforcement officer who says it
can be fixed and
needs to be fixed, how does it
get fixed, cmhbob?
