Opinion |

Let’s reimagine policing in the post-Floyd era

Nearly two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin. The pain of that day revealed a need to rethink policing and how to deliver what the public wants: a feeling of safety.

In the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder and following Chauvin’s conviction and sentencing, there were loud calls to reform or defund the police. Some progress has been made, with state legislatures passing laws that create baseline standards for police accountability and behavior. These laws take a number of important steps — addressing police use of excessive force, for example — and require officers to intervene when their colleagues cross the line.

And several cities across the country have shifted funding from their police departments to public health and social service agencies that are more capable of addressing the underlying issues that lead to the presence of police — like poverty, homelessness and a lack of access to mental health care.

Just last week, San Diego County Board of Supervisors Chair Nathan Fletcher announced that all 11 law enforcement agencies in our region will now be able to refer mental health crisis calls to a county-sponsored, 24/7 mobile crisis response team. For years, law enforcement officers have responded to these calls — difficult work that they’re not trained to do.

But the drumbeat to defund the police has been drowned out by the reality of rising crime rates in cities around the country. In New York City, for example, there were 1,531 shootings in 2020, more than twice the number in 2019. In 2021, 1,562 shootings were recorded, the highest number since 2003.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria recently announced a $14 million increase in the fiscal year 2023 police budget, to $584 million — reflective, he said, of San Diegans’ desire to keep safe and improve police response times.

The budget covers costs for police personnel, equipment and facilities. Part of it will go toward pay raises to improve the recruitment and retention of officers. Their last pay hike was in 2017. With retirements and departures outpacing new hires, the San Diego Police Department is nearly 200 officers short of its staffing goal.

Retired Vacaville Police Chief Bob Harrison is an adjunct researcher with RAND Corp. and course manager for Command College, a 15-month graduate program for aspiring police executives.

Last year, he wrote a commentary for RAND saying that the public’s dissatisfaction with our current models of policing has created a “generational opportunity” to improve public safety.

Nationwide data show that police make contact with about 60 million people age 18 and older each year, with only a fraction of those contacts resulting in violence or injury. Still, Harrison wrote, we have a crisis of confidence. According to a 2021 Quinnipiac poll, one-third of Americans say they disapprove of the way police are doing their job. Two-thirds of Black Americans agree. Support of police at the local level is stronger than it is for law enforcement in general.

The findings shouldn’t be surprising, given the problem of systemic racism in policing. A report released last month by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights concluded that the Minneapolis Police Department allowed a culture of racist policing to flourish for more than a decade. Officers stopped, arrested and used force more often on people of color than on White people.

And The New York Times just reported that a state audit of five California law enforcement agencies found troubling bias among officers, including social media posts and conversations among officers mocking transgender people, women, Latinos, Black people and immigrants. The auditors recommended that the agencies diversify their hiring practices and screen applicants’ social media accounts for bias, among other changes.

Harrison thinks that most chiefs would support ways to screen out candidates with known biases and troubling affiliations. But Harrison’s reimagination of policing goes further. “We need to attract more outliers to the profession,” he told me. “We can teach them the police work.”

When Harrison describes the perfect cop, that person sounds a lot like one of our mediators at the National Conflict Resolution Center — which makes perfect sense. He believes that a transformation of policing is possible if people would “search for ways to resolve conflicts, empathize with one another, and focus on the humanity of every person served.”

This is a two-sided proposition. Harrison knows that most of us don’t want to be policed. But we need to become informed consumers — and to keep in mind that most police officers want to do good, because they do.

Let’s honor the memory of George Floyd and continue taking steps to build a system of public safety that truly protects all people.

Dinkin is president of the National Conflict Resolution Center, a San Diego-based group working to create solutions to challenging issues, including intolerance and incivility. To learn about NCRC’s programming, visit ncrconline.com