Every Sunday morning I watch the news magazine CBS Sunday Morning. It is part of my routine. I have been critical of the show for the last several years because they largely skip over National Police Week while seldom missing a chance to talk about police in a negative lite. Scratch all that criticism. Today the entire episode was spent on the topic of policing. While they took some easy outs and missed some big points they did a nice fair job of looking at policing.
Most importantly, they caught the nuance. The differences between large city policing and small town policing. They also caught that dehumanizing police officers cripples the discussion and doesn’t move anything forward.
The desire to look to other cultures for examples of policing is understandable. There are some countries that have great models. CBS looked to Japan and Great Britain. What they ignore though is that the countries that tend to have strong policing do so with a highly nationalized policing model. The local police are really nothing but a precinct in the national system. Our founders set up a weak federal system on purpose. This functional difference is critical in looking at the number of police officers per capita. There is also the issue of drug usage and personal rights. The Japan has a drug abuse rate that is nearly non existent. This is just one small societal difference that creates huge differences for our deployment of police and our crime rates. Add in the difference in societal attitudes toward choice and mental illness and you end up nearly incomparable society. That said, there are significant lessons to be learned and Japan is one of those places to look.
Seeing the national media dive this deep into policing gives me a little hope. I wish they would have looked at evidence based practices or some very progressive departments that are doing good work out there. But they did include commentary from a survivor. Someone whose father was taken from him by a criminal, who gave all for his community. A perspective we should never ignore, who helps us remember the human toll to families of officers.
Well done CBS. Well Done
The Embed Educator 