The Mayor of Ithaca, New York wants to abolish the police department there, and the police department found this out by reading it in an interview the Mayor did with GQ magazine. His plan is to replace the current police force with an agency made up of armed public safety workers and unarmed community solution workers, which dispatches certain calls to people trained in mental health. Newell invited former NOPD Chief Ronal Serpas onto the show Friday morning to discuss.
“I think there's a lot of focus around the country in determining what cities have determined are designated first responders,” Serpas began. “And when you narrow in on chronic homelessness, mental health and substance abuse, which has been a growing problem in the country since 1963 Kennedy signed the federal law that started to defund the state institutions of mental health in favor of community centers, police chiefs had been saying, and I'm sure sheriffs said, we are not the best people for this. We aren't trained. We aren't resourced. We aren't equipped. So what underlies much of these conversations around realigning policing on these issues is likely to be a very good thing, but what we also know, and, and I bet you're going to agree with me on this - a very effective project was just done. Looking at the calls for service distributions of policing in America, less than 5% have anything to do with major crimes, maybe 10%. What really needs to occur here is, what is the duty that police officers and deputies are best trained for, best supported for and best equipped for versus what we've been asking them to do? So in the Ithaca thing, I think even the mayor said in the story, he kind of wished he had socialized this better, what his police department, but final word is that polling data from several different polling firms of all different political stripes is really very strong - people in America, particularly minority communities don't want less police. They want better police. So that's what we gotta be thinking about. Are police the best for substance abuse, mental health and chronic illness, chronic homelessness? Probably not.”
“I think that a lot of the frustration for leaders in law enforcement is that a lot of folks are sitting there pointing fingers at these social issues that we've had to deal with in communities across this country,” Newell said. “And as you pointed out, you were the one that asked us to do this! You didn't give us any guidance. You didn't provide us a lot of support in social services. In fact, to the contrary, you didn't make that a priority because you thought that the police were going to be able to make this problem go away. You know, as well as I, we never thought we were to make it go away. And it's one of the things when we talk about the war on drugs and whether or not we're winning it, I never thought that this was a win and lose proposition. It was always simply, are we going to develop an environment of safe harbor where we can live our lives without having to worry about people shooting each other over drugs in the streets of our communities!”
“Oh, absolutely,” Serpas said. “I was a chief at this time too, and I used the phraseology of the day, the war on drugs, what I should have been saying. And I said towards the end of my career, and maybe others did too, is folks, if you look at the drug use forecasting, meaning the people who are showing up in the jail, who are voluntarily allowing themselves to be tested for drugs and alcohol and doing interviews, it was a war on crime because so much of the drug market, despite what might be fun to watch on television or read about. I know much of the drug market is a very dangerous deadly business, irrespective of whether or not we should leave this question here. The question is, where are people getting the money to buy illegal drugs?”
“If you're addicted to drugs and alcohol chances are you're not fully employed,” Serpas continued. “Chances are you're struggling in so many other ways. Where does this money come from? Oftentimes it comes from the petty crimes that impact the community. But at the end of it, if you're a police department and your community does not have sufficient mental health beds, or does not have sufficient, proactive connectivity of these people in need of help before you call the police, then when you call the police, you're already late, right? That was our mantra. If you call us, it's already too late. We want to be there before. And that's the same thing. That's got to happen with this population.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
