It depends on what you mean by police. Officers of the peace uses “police” as a noun. Police as a verb is action. To police the grounds means to pick up what does not belong and put it where is does belong, to collect waste and protect order. Policing also means to serve and protect, to serve as a warning and a promise of justice, to provide oversight and balance against incursions by individuals and organizations threatening peace.

police, verb

1:  to control, regulate, or keep in order by use of police
2:  to perform the functions of a police force in or over
3a:  to supervise the operation, execution, or administration of to prevent or detect and prosecute violations of rules and regulations
b:  to exercise such supervision over the policies and activities of
4:  to make clean and put in order
5:  archaic, GOVERN

According to “Defund the police? Here’s what that really means,” an Op-Ed  in The Washington Post this morning:

“To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.”

The author, Christy E. Lopez, is a professor at Georgetown Law School and a co-director of the school’s Innovative Policing Program. “For activists,” she writes, “this conversation is long overdue. But for casual observers, this new direction may seem a bit disorienting — or even alarming.” The goal is not to remove protections, but to shift strategies and redefine responsibilities for public safety.

I thought over my own interactions with police officers and others charged with protecting property  and people. There were great experiences and terrible ones.

There was the police officer who looked down my shirt and declared: “One more button and I could take you in for public indecency.” There was the line of armored National Guardsman several blocks from a peace march who shoved me off a sidewalk and into traffic, despite my noninvolvement. There was the time I waited for a bus in front of Andy Shiga’s import store in the University District and officers got out of their patrol car and accused me of prostitution. (Let it be noted that I was wearing sport shoes, jeans, and a blue workshirt from Penny’s during each of these incidents, and it was buttoned to the top after that first incident.)

But it was kind policemen who coaxed the young woman out of a shared bathroom in the apartment building Gary and I managed in the University District all those years ago. They were calming and gentle and took her to Harbor View where she was held and treated until her father arrived to take her home. The hospital diagnosed a complete psychotic break triggered by a drug overdose. Those officers came by to tell us what happened to her, and came by later to ask if we knew how she was doing. By then Debbie was in a California mental hospital. There have been a lot of times like that when I witnessed police officers taking care of the public.

When a series of local burglaries resulted in lost food and small items from several homes and a broken window, the community assumed it was the work of a local teenager. Nevertheless, neighbors held a meeting at “Sitty Hall” and invited the county sheriff to weigh in. “What should we do?” The sheriff suggested we all buy guns. “That’s a terrible idea,” I said. And seriously, that is a terrible suggestion. 

Everyone seems to know someone who knows someone else who had an uncle who protected their home against Violent Drug Addicts or Known Felons. That was not what we were looking at. We were looking at kids breaking into holiday homes and raiding the refrigerator. The truth is we needed to de-escalate, not turn petty crime into a gang war.

You start something, I get a gun to protect myself, you pull out a gun to protect yourself. Someone goes to the hospital for four ounces of cheese and a transistor radio that hasn’t worked for years.

I don’t think most officers enter policing so that they can bully or beat citizens.

But some are trained to do just that.

Police on television seem most often to be soldiers fighting a war against the public. Oh, yes, career criminals and gangs and so forth, but too often this orientation of police and policing as a sort of domestic warfare does our society more harm than good. Lopez goes on to explain: “Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.

from today’s The New York Times:

“An encounter in Buffalo last Thursday — in which two police officers shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground and left lying him there while blood poured out of his ear — was troubling partly because of the original police account.

“The account claimed that the man ‘was injured when he tripped and fell.’ If a video hadn’t existed, the truth might never have come out.

“That’s a widespread problem:

• • In Philadelphia last week, the police said that a man had pushed an officer off his bike; a video instead showed an officer striking the man with a baton.
  • In a suburb of Sacramento in April, a police officer punched a 14-year-old boy multiple times while arresting him; the officer’s report didn’t mention the punches.
  • The Minneapolis police’s account of George Floyd’s death initially left out the most important details, like the knee pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes.

“Philip Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, who has analyzed thousands of police reports, told CNN that lies like these were fairly common.

“Activists in the current protest movement have begun to focus on how they can turn the rallies of the past 10 days into lasting change, to reduce both racism and police brutality. And reducing the frequency of false reports by the police is likely to be a key issue.”

Forget the cop shows and consider personal experience. Our faith that problems are best solved with the threat of violence or incarceration instead of reason and safer options might be at the heart of the problems they are supposed to address. Sometimes we do not need the knight in shining armor when a little old lady speaking slow and calm might have served to resolve the problem. Most policing situations are better served by an officer trained in de-escalation of an emotional situation than by an officer trained to fight a war. It sounds tough and purposeful to say a “war on drugs” or a “war on poverty” but there is no glamour in winning those fights and too often we abandon them even when we are winning.

I understand the appeal of a fight in an arena or on media, all that violence raising our blood pressure and exciting our lives. Action movies. Video Game. Football and ice hockey. So thrilling! At a safe distance.

In real life, we just want to go about . . . living. We want to do our jobs, get to the store, talk to the people we love. We want a hug. We don’t want a fight. In real life, most of us do not want war.

Ask someone who has been in one. Let officers of the peace do that.