Ross: The end result of defunding the police department
Jun 9, 2020, 7:59 AM | Updated: Jun 10, 2020, 6:54 am
Seattle's East Precinct. (Getty Images)
(Getty Images)
What I’m learning is that defunding the police doesn’t really mean that 911 suddenly goes dark.
It seems to mean cutting money for exotic crowd control equipment, ending the war on drugs, and finding ways to reform lawbreakers without spending all that money on locking them up.
Instead of all that – you give everybody a secure place to live, enough to eat, access to mental health treatment – all those things that for a lot of voters sound like too much like socialism.
What I do know is that whatever improvements you adopt from this defunding, they had better work.
They have to take two things into account: Americans hate the idea that somebody might be getting something for nothing, and number two, we have that Wild West gene. We even settle lane changes violently.
I can certainly see where a system of on-call mediators or certified pacifists could be useful in many situations, but I think most voters will still want to know that they can pick up the phone at any time and call a guy with a gun.
And if that gets defunded, we’ll likely just arm ourselves even more that we already do, and you’ll still have the same savage acts of street justice – except by un-trained non-cops.
Which would not be an improvement, although it is much easier to send them to prison.
Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
-
Tune in to KIRO Newsradio weekdays at 5am for Dave Ross on Seattle's Morning News.
