Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, April 19, 2021

Dah Poleez

What do they actually do? Here is an informative article from the New Haven Independent. They got a record of all the dispatch reports in New Haven for a two year period. These include dispatches in response to 9-1-1 calls, non-emergency calls from citizens, and police-initiated actions such as traffic stops. Only 4.4% involved any form of violence. 

 

The most frequent reason was for burglary alarm activation. Unfortunately the data doesn't specify how many of these were false, but I'm guessing it's a lot. Anyway that was less than 8% of calls. It seems that is within the common perception of what ought to be a police responsibility and it seems to me a reasonable claim that an armed officer should respond to these because you never know if there's a perpetrator there who might be dangerous. However, for the majority of dispatches, it's a very legitimate question whether the police -- given the nature of their training and skills, the powers they have, and their martial culture -- are the right kind of people to respond. 


The second most common dispatch, actually, is motor vehicle accident, no injury. Others high on the list, in order (some of which would seem to overlap and perhaps be somewhat arbitrarily classified) are breach of the peace/disorderly conduct; domestic dispute; theft; trespass/"unwanted person"; parking violation; noise complaint; public hazard; welfare check; evading/no injury (I'm guessing this means leaving the scene of a motor vehicle accident); and finally the only violent situation on the list, "assault/fight". Then there's "person down"; behavioral/psych/suicide; criminal mischief; motor vehicle stop; harassment; tenant/neighbor issues. (I've skipped "miscellaneous" and 9-1-1 hangup calls.) Emotionally disturbed/intoxicated; drug offenses; and prostitution are father down the list.


It certainly seems to me -- and this is more than just common sense because I have interviewed police officers about these issues for reports I did for community groups, and yeah, even some of the wiser police leaders know this -- that the most appropriate responders to most of these problems are not heavily armed people whose training has been mostly about effecting forceful apprehension and shooting or otherwise disabling uncontrollably violent people. These situations call for medical and psychiatric personnel, social workers and other people trained in dispute resolution and counseling. If they find that they need police backup, they can call for it, and maybe in some cases the judgment would be to have backup nearby, but to keep out of the way until called. 

 

It seems to me this even applies in the case of say, a store clerk believing that a customer may have passed a counterfeit bill. The sort of person who responds to that can be more like a parking enforcement officer. They can collect contact information for the parties, and take the bill for examination. If they determine that it was fake, or apparently fake, they can write a ticket. There is no good reason to detain the person, any more than there is to detain people for running a red light. 


The Independent interviewed criminal justice professor and former police officer Kalfani Ture:

 

He said he consistently hears complaints from past colleagues as well as from officers he talks to today about police officers “having to do work that is beyond the scope of policing.” This current nationwide rethinking of policing underscores the necessity of training social workers, counselors, and crisis intervention specialists to respond to incidents that society currently leans on “warrior-minded” police officers to handle instead, he said. . . . 

“When warrior-oriented policing became the dominant paradigm after 9/11, we were taught about how it takes just a fraction of a second for someone to take your life. Therefore you should be proficient in being a killing machine, if circumstances call for it,” Ture said.

He said he and his colleagues in Atlanta would spend a significant amount of time learning defensive tactics, firearms training, and how to forecfully gain compliance from a suspect, and relatively little time on deescalation. He said deescalation was largely treated by police officers with a “hug a thug” mentality: that is, that a suspect inherently presents a violent threat to the officers and their surroundings.

He said many officers — in Connecticut as well as all over the country — spend much of their spare time training in mixed martial arts, which only reinforces that warrior mentality.

This militant stance runs in direct contradiction to the types of calls that police officers increasingly respond to, as borne out by the NHPD dispatch data. Those calls are for drug-dependent issues and mental health crises and traffic stops, he said, and only a very small portion require a forceful response. . . .

He said the warrior mentality . . . encourages officers to look for violent crime where it may not necessarily exist. “If you are searching for crime where it may not even exist, you may end up in a situation where you’re not policing, you’re harassing.”

 

The calls to "defund the police" were an unfortunate choice of language. Almost no-one I know of is advocating completely abolishing the police as we know them. There are situations that require a forceful response. However, they are far more rare than the general impression. What people are calling for is redirecting resources to more appropriate resources for the bulk of what police are now doing. And the remaining police force needs a radically different kind of training, and needs to recruit based on different criteria. 

 

 

15 comments:

Don Quixote said...

Sounds like police need to apply deescalation to themselves. They’re bringing way too much testosterone and paranoia to the gig.

Chucky Peirce said...

Odd that the emphasis is largely on coralling the criminal after the crime occurs and the damage is done.

I'd rather live where the crimes are less likely to happen in the first place. A case worker with a load of 40 cases has an hour a week for each one; about enough time to fill out paperwork. I believe its been shown that drastically reducing the number of cases each worker has to handle actually reduces overall costs due to better outcomes.

If we put our best resources into the schools with the most at risk kids, I'll bet we'd see similar results.

The cost of housing prison inmates in most areas is comparable to the cost of sending them to college. And I'd rather live in a community with a lot of teachers and social workers than one with a lot of police and prison guards.

There are exceptions of course, but most people would rather feel productive than be idle. I'd also like to have more tax payers in my town than convicts.

I don't hear of many people who complain about deadbeats who think enough of their own kids' superior virtues to send them to live in a violent ghetto, just to prove that they can transcend their environment.

Don Quixote said...

Couldn't agree more with you, Chucky. Funding public education in at-risk areas, as well as everywhere else, would be the best preventive medicine in the world for decreasing crime.

That's why Betsy DeVos and her ilk are such truly evil fuckers. That education is PRECISELY what they are trying to prevent, so the 1% can have everything. They don't realize that it's just as with global warming, pollution and vaccine hoarding: they're condemning themselves and everyone else to slow deaths.

Viz.: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/04/19/former-lobbyist-explains-how-privatization-movement-trying-end-public-education

Woody Peckerwood said...

Cervantes,

I believe Don and Chucky are discussing the symptoms and not the root problem.

https://justthenews.com/nation/experts-say-growing-number-single-parent-households-will-lead-more-crime-poverty-depression

Sociologists have long noted that children from single-parent homes are far more likely to exhibit high-risk behaviors and experience negative outcomes relative to their peers in two-parent households. The Census Bureau itself noted that "children's living arrangements can have implications for children's outcomes, such as academic achievements, internalizing problems (e.g., depression and anxiety), and externalizing problems (e.g., anger and aggression)."

W. Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the director of that school's National Marriage Project, echoed that assessment.

"The growth in single parenthood is bad news for our kids, communities, and country," he said. "More single parenthood equals more child poverty, school failure, crime, and depression. Kids growing up in communities with more single-parent families are more likely to stay poor and end up in jail. And all of this takes a toll on our country, fueling social and economic inequality and making the American Dream more unattainable for millions of kids across the nation."

Cervantes said...

Well I wouldn't say that's "the" root cause of crime. It is true that single parent households tend to be economically disadvantaged, and it's plausible that children who get less adult attention and nurturing are negatively affected in other ways. But there's bidirectional causation -- poverty strains marital relationships and is itself a cause of single parent households. Another reason is that one parent (usually the father) is abusive, and the children are better off without him than with him. Parents who are quarrelsome or otherwise dysfunctional are also likely worse than a single parent household. There is no public policy that can force people to live in marital relationships. But there are policies that can make sure children are adequately housed, fed and cared for even if there is only one parent present. And of course the answer to poverty, school failure and depression is obviously not the police.

Woody Peckerwood said...

There is no public policy that can force people to live in marital relationships.

Actually, there's a lot public policy can do to encourage people live in marital relationships.

For starters, stop punishing the poor for having a relationship. I've owned lots of rentals, some section 8 housing, and when inspection time comes, the father temporarily moves out with all of his clothes because mom and the kids won't qualify for this and other forms of public assistance with a man in the home.

Also, stop incentivizing young women with welfare payments to have more and more children. They can have 'em, but put a limit on payments for those who are thinking this is an income opportunity to have 5 or 6 kids at an early age like their mom did (hey, she did OK, didn't she?)

Secondly, give married couples a tax advantage. A larger standard deduction together than each on their own. Additional tax credits for keeping a two parent household with a qualifying child.

But the most powerful encouragement is to make a two parent household, especially in marriage, K00L again. Government could talk it up in public announcements. As much as you hate Christians, they champion marriage and two parent households. Ya' gotta give it to 'em for that.

Cervantes said...

Your first point is correct. However, the second one is not. Here is the true information about Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which is what you mean by welfare. No, it doesn't work the way you think it does. And married couples do in fact have a tax advantage, and dependents are deductible. Not sure what you're on about there.

As for Christians, while they may champion two parent households, I'm not aware of any data that shows they're more likely to be in one. Every few days it seems that one of those "champions" is caught snorting meth with a male hooker or similar.

Cervantes said...

I should be more specific. The so-called "marriage penalty" in the tax system applies only to high income, dual earner couples. People with lower incomes, or with only a single earner or highly disparate earnings between the two, get a tax benefit from marriage or it's neutral.

So no, it doesn't affect the kinds of households you're thinking of.

Cervantes said...

Here's the summary from Wikipedia:

The US tax code fixes different income levels for passing from one marginal tax rate to another, depending on whether the filing is done as a single person or as a married couple. For lower incomes, the transition points for married couples are twice those for single persons, which benefits a couple that gets married if their incomes are sufficiently different. This is equivalent to "income splitting", meaning that the tax due is the same as if the two persons use the schedule for single persons, but with each declaring half the total income. At higher incomes, this equivalence is lost but there is still an advantage if the two incomes are sufficiently different.

If the incomes of the two persons are similar, then at the lower end of the tax schedule there is no difference between filing as singles and filing as a married couple (ignoring the question of deductions, see below). But at the higher end of the tax schedule, there is a penalty for a married couple whose incomes are similar, compared to what they would pay as singles.

Cervantes said...

As for your other comment, I published it because you were trying to make reasonable points, but I pointed out the factual errors that it contained. That is all. Nothing wrong with that.

Don Quixote said...

One good parent suffices. Two good parents is great. But you need one. Better off without the other parent if s/he is abusive.

I knew a wonderful woman whose mother died in childbirth. All the other kids were a lot older. Her mom was 45 and didn't survive my friend's birth.

Her dad treated her like a princess, loved her, and she turned into a great parent of six wonderful children.

My parents did not get divorced. Our home was incredibly stressful and we'd have been better off if they'd been separated.

One good parent is all you need. Two shitty ones sucks. One shitty one making life hellish for the other one and the kids sucks. That's my experience, what I've observed, and my truth. Optimal would be a communal lifestyle where there are always aunts, uncles and cousins to rock the baby and play with the kids. Kids would have older relatives to learn from and honor.

We need to be flexible, not pedantic, in our thinking.

mojrim said...

You're cherry picking from anecdotes, Don. 10 yards, 4th down.

One parent is almost never enough. Maybe with a $4000/mo stipend and a drop in counselor, but this is america... Hell, two parents is just sufficient when everything is going well. Throw in a job loss or what have you and it can break under the strain. The two parent (nuclear) family is simply an artifact of industrial capitalism, a just big enough to reproduce, detached, portable labor unit that can be moved to wherever the plant is being built. I remember how much we jeered HRC for the infamous "it takes a village to raise a child" bit, but she was fundamentally right. If you're serious about good outcomes we need to bring back the extended family; if not as a household then within a local area. The mexican immigrants I currently live among, coming from a rural pueblo society, have got that shit mastered. The chairs beside the front door are the clue.

Now, my dear Cervantes, I must defend Peckerwood on something. TANF may work as you say but for decades its predecessor (AFDC) did exactly as Peckerwood pointed out. Maintaining a family is actually hard work, a fragile skill set learned from your own parents. Decades of such abuse by the feds broke the chain of instruction, rendering millions of black families unskilled to this day. More importantly, he was speaking of Section 8 which, I can tell you from personal experience, does exactly what he described. Two people with individual Sec 8 vouchers cannot even share a house, meaning that poor women can't team up to share expenses and household responsibilities.

Moreover, he's talking about actively incentivizing couples, not just being neutral, and that is definitely good public policy. Will that fix everything? Obviously not, but it's unquestionably a step in the right direction.

Cervantes said...

You're certainly right about the "man in the house rule," and there are other disincentives in means tested programs for people to raise their earned income. But as for the question of what policy should be today -- given that we can't change the past -- AFDC ended almost 25 years ago. The question is what to do about childhood poverty today? Complaining about AFDC is irrelevant.

mojrim said...

Estemado Cervantes, you are missing the forest for the trees.

1. Staying married and maintaing a household are intergenerational pass-down skills which are very difficult to regain once the chain of instruction has been broken. Having subjected at least two generations of poor and minority families to this, repairing those skills in the present will require active measures rather than just passive non-interference.

2. You completely skipped the matter of Section 8, which still actively discourages having two adults in one household. I encourage you to look into the bizarre income/person thresholds and the bar on pooling of vouchers.

3. We still have to financially incentivize marriage, not just avoid penalizing it, through the tax code. M. Peckerwood brought that up but you dismissed his point with the argument that we're not penalizing them, so it's all good? I guess?

What's my answer? Massive income support for married couples with children, biological or otherwise, enough to make a second income optional for that household. Throw in an on-call family counselor and a childhood specialist who don't report to CPS and we can start making some headway. American liberals will, sadly, want to means test this but that must be avoided at all costs. This is america and means testing = welfare = chopping block at the first opportunity. That's the underlying mistake of almost all great society programs and their progeny, most visibly the ACA.

This, obviously, will be neither quick nor cheap, nor will it "solve" crime in toto, but it is a big step in the right direction. Most importantly, it generates momentum in the right direction, with a growing cadre of intact families raising good-outcome children and freeing up more resources from the carceral state. A virtuous cycle, if you will.

Don Quixote said...

Well, Mo, that is true, because my friend grew up in Stockton, CA in the 20s and 30s. Financially, times really have changed. I know, because I’m one of those Americans who has worked three or four jobs at a time. But in the 60s my mom was able to stay at home with her three children while my dad worked.