The Police Aren’t Doing What We Train Them To Do
It’s not their fault; it’s just not what people call the police for.
A lot of the criticism around the slogan “Defund the police” is based on two assumptions. First, that it means taking away all police. Or, second, that it means taking away some money from the police and not doing anything else.
Doing either of those things would be a mistake.
I wrote in my last article that crime is a relatively rare occurrence, and it is. But that still means that there are murders and shootings and robberies and burglaries and acts of cannibalism, and that these happen too often. We still need to respond to these events as they happen.
And sometimes we need an armed government response to situations. We have a heavily armed populace in the United States (we literally have more guns than brains), and that results in active shooters, violent domestic abusers, barricaded subjects, and mentally unstable individuals who pose immediate danger to innocent people.
A function of the government is to keep people safe, and sometimes that involves the use of force. We need highly trained individuals to be able to wield that force in the safest possible way.
