Rioting and looting. Driving through crowds and shooting. These criminal acts, the work of extremists, threaten to drown out legitimate demands for reform of a damaged system.

There have been enough cases of police who have used egregiously excessive force against Black people, enough history of systemic bias predicated on race and enough blatant acts of racism by individuals that we should be able to see clearly that theres a need for a national reckoning.

We cant pretend that all police are perfect and beyond questioning. Nor should we pretend that all cops are bastards. These two diametrically opposed generalizations are the positions of extremists and in case you havent noticed, the extremists are the ones doing the shooting and instigating chaos.

Their actions are tantamount to violent, ugly tantrums, and will not bring us closer to solving the crisis in our public safety system.

Were not talking about defunding the police, a proposal thats both poorly named and short-sighted. Its poorly named because most advocates actually want some funding redirected to social services, not abolition of police. Its short-sighted, because moving the money around doesnt magically create the mental health and social services resources needed to address the myriad social problems that can contribute to crime.

A society without some form of policing will devolve into anarchy, and will most hurt people in poor communities, who will be beset anew by crime.

But we need reforms, and support for that concept is coming from all directions. We lost momentum in recent years for the nascent reforms, baby steps really, that began in 2015-2016. Will the momentum shift back now?

On Monday, Alabama football coach Nick Saban led his team on a march in Tuscaloosa in support of social justice. According to alabama.com, Saban and student athletes spoke in front of the same schoolhouse door where, in 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace resisted federal efforts to desegregate schools.

The problems of grinding poverty, trauma, exposure to crime, lead and other environmental toxins, unaddressed mental illness or a parental personality disorder, cannot be addressed properly by a 911 call during crisis.

Police officers are neither trained nor equipped to act as social workers or mental health professionals, and yet they have been forced into that role for decades now as those services have been cut. Many of them have tried to shoulder that burden, taking extra training in crisis intervention, making contacts with service providers.

And some just react badly when faced with a person in crisis. This is how we get police shooting deaf people or people in psychosis who fail to comply. It's why police have developed crisis intervention training, to provide officers with a different set of tools to handle a different set of problems.

But thats one piece of a complex puzzle. Militarization is another, and one which requires cultural change so police are not set against the public they are sworn to serve. The answers will not be easy. We'll need to cooperate, and to listen to each other.

Let us not go backward.

Tribune News Service

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We need police reforms, but none of this is simple - Olean Times Herald