- Folks sleeping on park benches
- Someone behaving erratically and in harm’s way
- Someone selling drugs to youth who are overdosing
- Someone in your home is perpetrating violence on others in your home
- Someone is talking to themselves on the bus
- Someone is experiencing a mental health crisis and is afraid
- Someone is seen snooping in car windows on your block
- Your friends are intoxicated and starting a fight
- Your brake lights aren’t working
- You’re sick and unable to mow your lawn
- You hit a rough patch and can’t repair your roof
Imagine having access to training, so you can know how to
respond to these situations yourself as part of a neighborhood team of good
citizens, instead of calling in the distant, cold government.
Imagine if everybody were included in a small neighborhood community
that knows them, meets them regularly, and cares for them; and isolated people can
get plugged into a supportive small community that really cares about them for
the long term.
Imagine if there were a database where small communities
share their information and coordinate care so no one community gets
overwhelmed.
Imagine all the people.
We expect police to be capable of responding to ALL of these
types of situations, and have to trust that they're doing it right all the
time. That's not happening because it can’t happen. Yet, the current model of a
police force as a social Swiss Army Knife persists.
Trusting that "a small task force of good citizens" will always be
capable of responding to problems in the right way on short notice is not a
reasonable expectation. The community pooled its resources to make those people
available on call is the entire purpose of government in the first place. But
we have shirked our responsibility and put it all on the police. We’ve blamed them
for not doing our job. And the laws are written to keep us from doing our part.
I propose that people in the neighborhood start talking to
each other and taking care of neighbors and “loose cannons” in their niche of
the world; and stop waiting on government to fix our problems.