Conversation Starters

Policy Overview Policing in the United States has a long, often troubling, history (Anderson, 2016).  With law enforcement being tasked with the bulk of what is broadly defined as “public safety,” officers are said to “protect and serve” the public-at-large.  The harsh reality, though, is that Black and Brown people are targeted more often by the police, resulting in generations of community trauma and escalating violence between the two “sides” (Sakala and La Vigne, 2019). What’s true, too, is that these public safety trustees are called to serve functions that go outside of typical police officer training or common expectation of their duties (Vermeer et al, 2020).  This combination of implicit (or explicit) racial biases/tensions and the undue stress of calling the police for matters that they are not equipped or needed to handle has resulted in unnecessary violence and death, both of residents and sworn officers (Kahn, 2018).  In 2020, the murder-by-police of Geo...

An Introduction of the Policy Issue The dialogue on how best to approach policing and public safety has ramped up significantly since the murder-by-police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others over the course of 2020.  While egregious and often racially disparate police violence is far from a new phenomenon in the United States, the amplification of Mr. Floyd’s murder, especially, by the Black Lives Matter social justice movement catapulted the issue of law enforcement violence against Black and Brown people straight into the public eye.  Not only was murder-by-police a commonplace occurence, it came with with little-to-no consequences for the involved officers, their supervisors, or on up the chain of the command (Sakala and La Vigne, 2019).  Indeed, this sort of violence appeared to be publicly sanctioned by the powers-that-be as the results of these instances of assault and murder continued without any move to change the systems that enabled such behavior (Ande...

A Brief Re-Thinking of Public Safety Policy Problem Definition, Assessment, and Description The debate over how best to approach and carry out equitable public safety has endured since before the founding of the United States of America.  While safety is a fundamental human need, a simple scan of the social horizon reveals that safety is not an automatic guarantee for all people, especially for those whose racial identity isn’t white (Kahn, 2020).  The history of inequities related to non-white residents stretches back for centuries but became especially illuminated over the course of 2020 as Black Lives Matter protests against the murder-by-police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others drew continuous media and social attention that has yet to abate.  More than ever, dialogue and debate has overwhelmed the airwaves as options ranging from a complete abolishment of the police to doubling down on the amount of money municipalities should invest in so-called “Blue Live...