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re: US COPS BRUTALITY: Bodycam Shows Man Drowns in Arizona as COPS Watch & LAUGH
Is The US-Especially Texas, FINALLY Retraining its' Police?
Reimagining Police – With Safety and Justice in Mind
Scott Pelley went to Austin, Texas, where the city is reforming its police department.
60 Minutes 24 NOV 2021.
Scott Pelley reports from Austin, Texas, one of several U.S. cities experimenting with a new way of policing in which trained
civilians, such as mental health clinicians, are responding to calls once answered by armed officers.
This past week, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was a sharp reminder of 2020's summer of protest against police violence. After a police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin last year, Rittenhouse, then 17, shot and killed two demonstrators and wounded another. Jacob Blake's shooting came not long after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Protests pitted supporters of "defund the police" against those who "backed the blue." And with a significant rise in violent crime, progress on reform stalled.
But Philip Atiba Goff sees a way forward. He's a Yale social scientist who's been advising police departments for 14 years. Goff's work has shown that justice and safety can be found in cities that are reimagining police.
Philip Atiba Goff:
We focus on making policing less deadly, less racist, and often, just less present. And we leverage data and behavioral science to do all of that. Because oftentimes a scientific process is one you can trust when you can't trust each other.
Philip Atiba Goff is a professor of African American studies with a Ph.D. In psychology. He's CEO of the Center for Policing Equity which analyzes police data, 911 calls, arrests and traffic stops, to help cities reduce racial disparity and the use of force. Las Vegas is one example.
Scott Pelley: Las Vegas Police Department came to you. What was their question?
Philip Atiba Goff: Las Vegas Metro, they said, "We think we might be using too much force." I said, "Why do you think that?" They said, "Cause our community tell us so." I said, "That's a good indication."
Goff discovered most use of force in Vegas came after foot chases.
Philip Atiba Goff: So literally, they started training their officers, you're high on adrenaline, you slow it down, you count to ten, don't touch the person till the backup shows up. They dropped their use of force by 23% the next month. And it stayed low and it became a national model for training in foot pursuits.
In Berkley, California, Goff found the largest racial bias was in low-level traffic stops, like broken tail lights. So, Berkeley stopped enforcing minor violations.
Philip Atiba Goff: The places where we work, we see about a 26% reduction in use of force after we were there. Don't know how much of that was us, but all the things they tried together, about a quarter, right, of the use of force goes away. But in this moment, what we're getting asked for is something different. Not how do we make policing better but how do we remove policing from the places where we have abandoned communities, and so we ask police to punish people who we've abandoned for generations. That's the thing that's coming next.
To see what's coming next, we went to the capital of Texas. Professor Goff is not advising Austin, but this liberal city of one million is far along in police reform — even against the reservations of the conservative state legislature.
When George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in 2020, Austin was already smoldering over two police killings of its own. Two cops are charged with murder in shootings, nine months apart, of a mental patient and an unarmed man who was Black and Latino. In a demonstration in July, an armed Black Lives Matter protester was shot and killed by a man who drove his car into the March.
The shooter is charged with murder. At the peak of the unrest, the city council voted unanimously to cut the police budget 25% — about $150 million. The idea was to prevent crime — give police less to do — by spending the money on addiction, mental illness and homelessness. Austin called it "reimagining public safety."
Philip Atiba Goff: Law enforcement is not gonna prevent the violence. They're gonna respond to it. And if what you want is less violence, you want prevention.
Scott Pelley: When people hear about reimagining the police, that seems to come under the slogan of defunding the police. I think many people look at that and think, "My community's gonna be less safe."
Philip Atiba Goff: I think there are communities where that's absolutely true. Of course, you would be.
But we've defunded the schools in those communities. We've defunded mental health. We've defunded the actual hospitals. We've defunded the jobs. We've defunded the housing system. We've defunded the grocery stores.
What if instead of talking about just defunding police, we talked about refunding to the communities those areas where we've taken all the resources and the public goods away? If we did that, how much safer do you think we would be? The reason why people are so allergic to the idea of less police is they can't imagine a world where we take better care of the people who are vulnerable.
But arguments like that didn't carry the Texas legislature.
Republicans passed a law preventing any cuts to police budgets in large cities.
END
NB:
It has been observed across the world for many years, the brutal aggressive way many American police officers deal with some situations, and the killing of INNOCENT people causes more problems, resulting in civil unrest.
Inadequate training and many officers being unfit and overweight adds to the problem
DOWNLOAD FULL STORY HERE:
60 Minutes S54E10 SD-720p-1080p
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