A modest proposal re policing

I'm entirely sympathetic to the cause of defunding the police, although I think the language of defunding is probably incorrect. I think what's really being asked for is a reallocation of police budgets to prevent crime from occurring in the first place. Given that so much of what the police currently deal with is a result of poverty, drug addiction and mental health problems, it seems like a total no-brainer to go to the root-cause of those problems rather than expecting the police and the prison system deal with people who really shouldn't be there.

That said, I'm also sympathetic to the situation most police officers find themselves in - under-prepared for the situations they find themselves in, and often frightened for their own lives. I've known a fair few police officers and they've all been decent people, but that's not always enough.

But then I see stories like this, where a black family on a charity bike ride are pushed off their bikes by police and threatened with a taser for 'matching the description' given by a stabbing victim - a black male on a bike. That's disgraceful, tactless and inflammatory. This is in Tottenham, a couple of miles from where I live, and about 200m from where the police killed Mark Duggan. 

I think that the police will always exist in some form - people won't be willing to devolve stolen vehicle chases to social workers - but when I look at stories like those above, I think the big thing is how rare it is for the police to actually live in the communities they serve. Of the police officers I've known, they've all utilised their free travel and shift working patterns to live a long way from the areas they serve in largely white, rural neighbourhoods.

My modest proposal would be for a two tier police force as we see in the rest of europe, where there's a national police force for serious crimes, and then a local police force, staffed by people who live within that community, tasked with preventing petty crime. I would pay those local policemen and women the median salary for the borough, corrected annually, and I would only allow them to work on that force while they lived in the borough. I bet that issues like the racial profiling of young, innocent, black men would be quickly nipped in the bud if the officers responding to such crimes were local and known to the community.