Police Brutality

For anyone that seen my Instagram live or IGTV post I touched on police brutality and a suggestion for something that can be done in order to combat the issues that we see each day in the media. Talking is not my strong suit so it may seem like I was rambling in the video so for any of the people that watched it, I apologize if it was hard to discern what I was trying to say. I’m going to use this week’s post to hopefully clear it up a bit and also try to elaborate more on what I was trying to get at.

So first off I’ll give a little work background. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this in an earlier post but in the event I have new readers this week (I hope) I’ll reiterate. I currently work as a case manager for a supportive housing program. Basically, my clients are able to live alone with little assistance. They all suffer from a mental disorder and are considered low income but they need little help to deal with the struggles of everyday life. So as per the agency that I work with I am provided with monthly trainings. Aside from that various agencies throughout the city provide our agency with information on trainings that they are having that are open for the people that work at my agency. Due to the pandemic this hasn’t been going on but prior to this I was going to 3-4 different trainings a month. These trainings would be focused on different techniques with dealing with clients with different levels of mental illness. I don’t know what type of training that the police have or their ongoing requirements for trainings however I believe that they would benefit from the trainings that are provided for people in the social services and mental health field. From the various videos of police responding horribly towards black individuals and other minorities I believe some type of interpersonal training are needed. I also believe that this training would be needed on an ongoing basis. It seems like when police officers respond to a call about black people they are automatically afraid that things may go left when it is usually them that escalate rather than de-escalate the situation. I’ve been put in situations where it would seem on the outside that my life would be in danger when I’ve been with clients however I have been able to talk them down from hurting myself and another individual. So I’m pretty sure police officers would be able to benefit greatly from these types of trainings.

Another thing that I wanted to touch on is funding. We know that police officers across the nation receive an exorbitant amount of funding. In NY alone the NYPD’s budget is close to $6 billion dollars. I’ll admit that I haven’t gone through the entire budget plan however this number seems ridiculous. It’s easy to say what you’re going to do but in practice it is never this simple. I would propose a true audit of the NYPD and all police agencies nationwide to find out where all this money is truly going and if the high numbers are actually benefiting the public or just the pockets of the officers and their higher ups. From that audit we could possibly see what can be cut out from it and redistributed throughout other more deserving agencies in that particular state. In my video I stated that I wanted to do policy work so I’ve been trying to think about ways to change things for the better. However I’m only one person. I honestly want feedback on this. Please reach out to the number by text on the contact page or even by email. And please if you can, subscribe to see more posts.