Is there common ground between community organizers and police?
By Omari Salisbury
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Earlier this week there was a budget hearing at City Hall. A big issue was defunding the police and that’s been a primary demand everybody’s been talking about for quite some time now.
Yesterday I spoke with Nikkita Oliver, co-executive director of Creative Justice and community organizer with Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now. She said:
Community is already effectively handling some aspects of community-based mental health responses, but has been doing so over capacity and underfunded. In this time of transition, community-based organizations will need both considerable funding and some time to scale up services to meet the larger communities’ needs.
Our societal dependency on police as the response to social issues, such as mental health crises, has meant that many community-based organizations that do this work more effectively than police have been working over capacity while also underfunded.
This shift to defund police and invest in community-based public health and public safety infrastructure is a societal adjustment towards community-based public health and public safety services that are more effective.
It is also overall a better fiscal investment of the communities’ resources (tax dollars) as stewarded by the municipality.
In other words, given the 17,000 police response 911 calls made last year in Seattle for mental health issues, there are better organizations suited to deal with public health and safety — currently those organizations are just underfunded.
SPD Chief Carmen Best made a statement a few weeks ago on June 22:
SPD has voiced, for years, concerns that police officers are asked to play too many roles. Officers have become the safety net for a series of failures by other social systems — many of which are the result of sustained under-investment, as well as systemic racism. SPD is conducting a critical review of the work officers are called to engage in — by the community and by other government agencies. SPD needs to work with community to determine which of these responsibilities can acceptably be passed to other agencies, or completely turned over to the community.
Assess non-criminal 911 calls, current outcomes, and alternate responses
Determine an appropriate response to misdemeanor violations
Reconsider the role of specialty units and proactive enforcement
To me, at least around this particular issue, Chief Best and Nikita Oliver are saying the same thing. Chief Best is saying some of the work SPD does would be better dealt with by the community but the community is underfunded to be able to deal with it. That’s exactly what Nikkita Oliver just said to me yesterday.
I’m always trying to build bridges when possible and it seems to me, at least on this topic of police responding to mental health issues, we find that the defund SPD movement and Chief Best might very well be on the same page or close to it.
What happened years ago is that the public decided not to fund all of these types of public health services and they dropped them into the lap of law enforcement. It’s not just an issue here in Seattle. It’s an issue across America, and I think many police chiefs and sheriffs around the country probably have a similar sentiment to Chief Best’s.
In my conversation with Nikkita Oliver, she said that these types of real structural change don’t happen over night — it’s a process.
All I can say is this: it seems like there's a space for the Seattle Police Department and the organizers of the defund SPD movement to at least have a conversation. Sometimes stakes are too high and egos are too big at the City Hall level, but I think we’re at a place where some real progress can be made.
Cameras don’t always have to be there, it’s cool, just start the dialogue.