The idea of community policing is to get police out of their squad cars and into the community. The police department in Redlands, California, had embraced this model for years. Coffee with a Cop, a program that does just what the title says, started in Hawthorne, Calif., and has spread to all 50 states. In some places, such as Boston, police are driving ice cream trucks. Some departments encourage officers to not only work in the community, but to live in it. Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, West Valley City, Utah, Chattanooga, Tenn., and other cities have taken to offering incentives, be it home prices, discounted rents, cash bonuses or tax credits, to officers who choose to live in the community they police.
Many police shootings have started with stops over the smallest of infractions. Instead of having police pull over cars for a broken taillight, and approach the driver's window, initiating the kind of exchange that can go so wrong, as it did with Philando Castile in Minnesota and Walter Scott in South Carolina, just photograph the license plate, then dash off a ticket to the registered owner.
Alton Sterling was hawking CDs in Baton Rouge, Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island. Both died at the hands of police. Aggressive enforcement against street vendors over very minor things criminalizes poverty.
Use a special council/prosecutor to handle cases of police misconduct. When police and prosecutors work together in the same jurisdiction, questions surface about whether prosecutors can be impartial. A special prosecutor creates distance and helps with public perception.
Make police departments more diverse, which, for many police departments, has been a struggle. Race, religion, ethnicity"
Demilitarize the police. Already a point of contention, the issue of police dressed in military gear and wielding military armament is in many cases, overkill.
It was not just a knee pinned to George Floyd's neck that killed him. Or gunshots that killed Breonna Taylor. Or a chokehold that killed Eric Garner. It was also centuries of racism that have festered in U.S. society, including our overly punitive, adversarial policing. And videos of the police-involved killings do not show the broader toll that their actions have taken on Black and other minority communities. Nationwide and fundamental police reform is overdue.
Major police reform will take patience and money (some of the financing can come from reducing police budgets). These approaches are a starting point as we confront the dangerous biases, especially racism, that have become embedded in police and other institutions. We must work to root them all out.
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