Safety or punishment?

“Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” ~Vice President Biden

If budgets reveal priorities, America’s reveal deeply broken commitments to each other. Absolutely, we should reallocate our budgets (and not just away from militarized police forces), but we also need to recognize how the prioritization of force has deprioritized the things that actually make our communities healthy and safe. We can’t just reallocate: we have to redeem our entire idea of community health and safety.

Policing should not be about punishment and should almost never be about the application of force. We imbue judges with the power to punish. Policing is supposed to be about safety for everyone. Community health. Public safety. Protecting us from criminals. The idea of police brutality as some portion of police too far down some spectrum of acceptable force and just in need of some correction is an utter fallacy. We have so effectively criminalized poverty and blackness and so narrowly defined “us” to mean privileged, wealthy, and most often white then reinforced the bastardization of the function of policing by calling them “law enforcement” and combined that with a terrifying mythology of fear about crime. The language of war gets us in further trouble with a “war on crime,” a “war on drugs,” a “war on poverty” — wars have enemies and…