Abolish and defund this

Imagine if you will a scenario. 

You are hanging in your living room with a buddy. The two of you are having a back-slapping evening, a couple drinks, some football on the tube. Suddenly, and terrifyingly, your friend goes into what seems like cardiac arrest or some sort of heart event. 

You gather yourself, head into the kitchen and grab a knife of what seems like appropriate size and serration. 

You head back into the living room. Your friend is gasping, not unconscious. He looks at you, desperate, soliciting in you a sense of camaraderie and you tell yourself, “I must fix this!”

A splash of alcohol on the knife, and you’re ready. Well, ready as you’re going to be. 

First, an incision down the left side of his chest and then a horizontal cut below the ribcage. You stick your hand in and start massaging the heart. Because you have no idea what else to do and swear you’ve seen it done on ER or Grey’s Anatomy. 

You can probably guess how this turns out, but we’re not shooting for morbid, so we won’t go there. 

911 you ask?

Oh, yea, in the old days, probably. But not now. 

See, there was a doctor in town who botched a couple surgeries and, tragically, one of those patients died. 

Then there was another shoveling opioids into the mouths of unsuspecting and vulnerable citizens.

There were uproars, commentaries in the media, inquiries. And then protests. 

And finally, the medical establishment in your town – hospital, doctors, everything – was abolished. Shut down. For good. 

Ridiculous right? Or the appropriate response? Ask the guy with the bloody knife in his hand. 

In the wake of the George Floyd murder – and not for the first time – there were calls, consternation filling the air, to defund the police. Or, why stop there – just abolish them. They’re poison. They hate the people they serve. They’re racist. They are weapon-wielding terrorists, as dangerous to the populace – especially those that aren’t white – as the folks they are supposed to be protecting us from. 

So, let’s abolish them. 

That’s how life works, right? An auto repairman screws up your car, and next thing you know, they’re gone. All of them. The third baseman on your baseball team makes an error and lets in the winning run. Presto, the team’s been shut down. 

Things aren’t working, clean house.  

Well, no. It can’t and shouldn’t work that way with the police any more than it should with your doctors, your auto repair shops or your sports teams. Because there are better solutions. You remove bad apples, not the entire barrel. The third baseman? Release him. Trade him. Next man up, as they say. 

In my hometown of Philadelphia, this past week, our mayor released his budget proposal for the next fiscal. It includes a raise of about $24 million for the police. It’s a modest 3% increase and mostly earmarked for new officers. See, Philadelphia – racked by a gun violence epidemic that saw the murder rate soar in 2021 to its highest level in about six decades – has a shortage of officers. That’s another story for another time. 

But after the Floyd murder – and the protests, abundant here in the City of Brotherly Love – City Council rejected an increase in the police budget, according to news reports. Many thought they didn’t deserve it. 

That was then, this is now. During a hearing this past week, some in City Council were saying that the modest increase is too modest. And while some on Council believe that an increase will help abet the surge in murders, others feel it only, as one councilperson put it, provides the “illusion of security.” 

To be clear, most of the increase in no way provides funding to tackle systemic issues that beset this and many other cities. According to the reports, 90% is for salaries – higher thanks to a new union contract – and other personnel costs. There is money proposed to upgrade police cell phones and laptops with applications, the story notes, that will aid investigations and other measures to help the police solve more crimes. 

But dug deep in the recent Philadelphia Inquirer story about the proposed budget were items that may, in the long run, get at the root of the problems in the city that go a lot further than simply hiring more police officers. 

Last year, Philadelphia spent $155 million on anti-violence strategies, almost half of that funding for jobs programs, after-school activities, and grants to community-based programs. 

None of these, of course, are new innovations. Giving kids alternatives to a life of crime has been around almost as long as crime itself. 

Also included, however, are programs that partner police officers with unarmed violence “interrupters” who target citizens most likely to commit or be victimized by crime. There would also be $2 million allotted to a pilot program modeled on Chicago’s READI program which offers mental health services and job opportunities to men at risk for experience or committing violence. 

There would also be $7.3 million to continue a program testing Mobile Crisis Units, staffed not by police but medical health practitioners who respond to people in crisis. 

This is not a new idea. It is in place in many cities. We recently spoke to the interim police chief in Santa Rosa, CA where the idea is to not only build trust between the police and the community it serves, but to also reduce the amount of time its officers spend responding to situations for which the police are far from the most qualified first responders. 

Santa Rosa police chief Rainer Navarro is retiring after 30 years with the department in early May. John Cregan currently holds the title of Interim Chief and is a candidate to replace Navarro. He has been with the force since 1999 and lives in Santa Rosa with his wife, a former teacher, and their two high school-aged daughters. 

At the risk of profiling, Interim Chief Cregan looks like a cop. Shaved head. Steely eyes. A serious, focused demeanor. He looks like someone I would not want following me in a car, blue and red lights flashing in that hypnotic, disorienting pattern that foretells trouble. For a forthcoming podcast with True Thirty founder Joey Dumont, he wore his police threads. For my Zoom interview, he wore a suit which simply made him look like a cop with higher rank. 

Cregan was beyond rhapsodic, a reporter’s dream: ask a question, have that question and two or three follow-ups answered. What he could not hide if he tried was his enthusiasm for what his force of 250 plus officers was doing and how he proudly feels his small Sonoma County town north of San Francisco was creating a model that could change not only Santa Rosa, but the state and country. 

And it was impossible to not feel and adapt his passion. While listening to the podcast and chatting with Cregan, I felt I was hearing and experiencing a speck of a game change, an actual solution – or at least partial solution – to something that has bedeviled my hometown and many others for a long time. 

What if the police and the communities they serve were actually on the same page, worked together, were not at odds with each other, shorn of suspicion and knee-jerk animus?

Cregan is clearly leery of a state of affairs where all police are lumped together, branded by the actions of the worst players. Many institutions are not only as strong as their weakest link, the popularity of that cliché notwithstanding. 

“I don’t want to be judged by the actions of a policeman in Mississippi,” he said. 

“We want to use this as a shining example of partnership between us and the community,” Cregan stated during our recent chat. “We want to be a beacon across California.” 

“This” is a program called inRESPONSE and it is the very lifeblood of how Santa Rosa wants to police and engage with its residents. 

And Cregan makes sure to explain the duality of InRESPONSE: that it refers not only to responding to crime but to the department’s commitment to dialogue with the community at large without which, he clarifies, nothing he is working on would work. 

“The activists in the community are excited,” he proudly adds. 

inRESPONSE, according to Cregan and the department’s website, uses a mental health first approach. The reason, Cregan explains, is that too often police are sent to temper situations that involve mental health issues not criminal activity. 

The team is comprised of a licensed mental health clinician, a paramedic and a homeless outreach specialist. The inRESPONSE team works primarily on de-escalation and social work interventions. They are unarmed and respond to situations where an individual – unarmed as well – is experiencing a mental health crisis. If there appears to be a threat of violence, a SRPD office will respond first, then turn the case over to the inRESPONSE team. 

“We want to get away from the one-size-fits-all approach where police respond to every situation,” said Cregan on the podcast. 

But it is not just that police officers are sent to situations where they are not the most qualified responders. Cregan referred during the podcast to the “repeat customers,” citizens on the “cycle of psychosis” who commit crimes or get in fights, are incarcerated, are released, go off their meds and repeat the same behavior. Cregan spoke with incredulity of the perpetrators with whom his force is on a first name basis. “Oh, it’s John again,” rinse and repeat. 

What if, Cregan mused, those citizens were aided by those trained to help, not only helping them, but freeing police officers to respond to actual crime? And with 471 shootings in Santa Rose in 2021, there’s plenty of that. 

One of the inspirations for inRESPONSE was the Cahoots program which started in Eugene, OR just over 30 years ago. The department works with the Whitebird Clinic to respond to non-criminal situations such as substance abuse, mental/emotional crisis, disorientation and dispute resolution. What police departments in Eugene, Santa Rosa and elsewhere know is that sending police to a crisis might exacerbate a problem, not fix it. 

“We’ve built a Cahoots plus program,” in Santa Rosa, Cregan proudly exclaimed. 

What is needed in Santa Rosa – and everywhere else of course – is not just support, but sustainable funding. Problems and crime cross boundaries, and what may be working in Santa Rosa might not have legs elsewhere in the county or state. 

Cregan noted that California has a budget surplus and that now is the time to create a financial model to sustain these type programs not just this year and next but permanently. “Now is the time to pounce” he added. 

But there are so many ways in which needs are being met in ways that involve discourse within the community. 

In Santa Rosa, for example, the department works with Catholic Charities which has a homeless outreach team that includes, go figure, people who have experienced homelessness. They assess vulnerabilities and match subjects with appropriate housing. Again, there is no one-size-fits-all. Charities bought a local hotel and now 40% of the 144 rooms are dedicated to homeless veterans. 

The department also works with local hospitals, leveraging financial support so that there won’t be uninsured citizens filling emergency rooms. 

The unit within inRESPONSE that Cregan touts highest are the System Navigators who follow cases after the first event. They will go to homes and follow up with the citizens, get them the help they need, even drive them to the pharmacy to get medications if necessary. 

The police officer uniforms are, Cregan noted, “intimidating” to these folks. When they are assisted by inRESPONSE staffers, “they get stabilization and think they’re okay.” 

In the infancy of inRESPONSE, the team was called to a middle school where a 10-year-old was making suicidal comments to a teacher. Back in the day, the child might have ended up in the back of a police car. The parents were saying they didn’t want to call 911 because that would traumatize the child further. Cregan feels that this type of response – sending in people trained to help – is transformative. And he feels that what his department is doing – and accomplishing – is happening at a critical time where Covid and the region’s wildfires have only added to the existing stress points. 

“It’s kind of an exciting time,” Cregan shared. “We’re going to look back 30 years from now and see how we fundamentally changed our policies.”