So I have a police scanner that I listen to for background noise and musical entertainment. It is interesting having a window on the world of law enforcement that is unedited, humorous, sad, exasperating and surprisingly human. Listening has given me insights into the people that do jobs that I wouldn’t want to do. You know, man with a gun at 2 AM or Rottweiler attacking people in an alley or a deceased person who hadn’t been seen in several days. I wouldn’t want to be involved in foot pursuits through yards or writing parking tickets because the local alderman has her knickers in a twist. I wouldn’t want to direct traffic at 7AM on a frosty January morning nor would I want to take a violent 14 year old who is off his meds to the hospital. It seems that we expect much from the police. Somehow they should be the human refuse department, picking up the debris of lives shattered by any number of pathologies. Drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, unemployment, domestic violence all seem to show up on the ‘routine’ calls that go out everyday. In our collective fatigue around what plagues us as a society we have abdicated our responsibility to oversee and hold accountable public officials. We allow our politicians to tell us anything year after year. We allow our law enforcers to behave without any shred of oversight until the most egregious are finally arrested and incarcerated for the same crimes they were meant to prevent. We won’t admit that policing will not solve our drug problem, our gun problem, our domestic violence problem or any of our problems any more than the fire department can prevent fires. What will it take for us to shed this delusion that more policing, more aggression, more oppression will solve centuries old problems in this society? Will it be the complete collapse of law and order that is necessary to see that policing isn’t the answer? With 7 million of our citizens incarcerated, on probation or parole, more policing does not seem to have worked. Can we admit we have been wrong and move on to a different solution?
Daniel Quinn wrote a book entitled The End of Civilization in which he stated, “ Old Minds Think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do more of it this year. New Minds Think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do something ELSE this year.” Is that such a hard concept to understand or are we just not smart enough to figure it out. Or are we just insane, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Sure the police have a tough job. We are the one who make it tough. We can’t communicate with each other and we can’t work out our own conflicts and we certainly can’t level the playing field that leads to economic crime like drug selling, burglary, and armed robbery. And neither can the police. So we will continue and watch more people get incarcerated and more lives damaged and expect the police to fix our problems.
Daniel Quinn wrote a book entitled The End of Civilization in which he stated, “ Old Minds Think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do more of it this year. New Minds Think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do something ELSE this year.” Is that such a hard concept to understand or are we just not smart enough to figure it out. Or are we just insane, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Sure the police have a tough job. We are the one who make it tough. We can’t communicate with each other and we can’t work out our own conflicts and we certainly can’t level the playing field that leads to economic crime like drug selling, burglary, and armed robbery. And neither can the police. So we will continue and watch more people get incarcerated and more lives damaged and expect the police to fix our problems.
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