[ad_1]
Demonstrators hold a sign reading ‘Defund Police’ during a protest over the death of Daniel Prude in Rochester, N.Y., Sept. 6, 2020.
Photo:
brendan mcdermid/Reuters
From “Defund Social Workers” by
Emily Cooke
in the New Republic, Sept. 23:
Since mid-2020, as outrage over police violence reached an apex and calls to defund police departments gained momentum, it has seemed obvious to many on the left that social work is the solution. If nearly a quarter of the people shot by officers are in a mental health crisis, the argument goes, social workers should respond to certain emergencies rather than cops: Fund social services, not police. . . .
Most criticism has, predictably, come from conservatives. “An offender’s mental illness does not mean that a social worker should, or can, respond to his violence,” insisted
Charles Fain Lehman
of the right-wing Manhattan Institute in a recent letter to The Wall Street Journal. (Nobody, it should be pointed out, is suggesting that “crisis intervention counselors” . . . should intervene with, say, an active shooter.) But critiques have also come from the left, including from social workers themselves, who suspect that any substitution of their colleagues for police would amount to dressing wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The danger of trading out law enforcement for social workers, or trying to rein in police squads by adding soft-eyed chaperones, isn’t that the unarmed helpers would be ineffective or that crises sometimes require blunt force. The concern is that if you measure in terms of the power to coerce, surveil, and inflict lasting harm, social workers are, thanks to very nature of the job, cops by another name—“key participants,” said
Dorothy Roberts,
a sociologist and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “in a system that is designed to control and punish marginalized communities.”
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the September 24, 2022, print edition.
[ad_2]
Source link
(This article is generated through the syndicated feeds, Financetin doesn’t own any part of this article)
