The Night Out Connundrum

 

I overslept this morning and my brain feels confused. Why is it already light outside? I hope you will forgive any lack of cohesiveness in what follows. 

It’s the first of August and, in a lot of places in the US, communities will be celebrating something called National Night Out. In Columbia/HoCo, there will be one event at Wilde Lake Middle School, and another in Clarksville. The one at WLMS is hosted by the Howard County Police Department. The other is hosted by Clarksville Commons. 

Last summer I wrote about how some communities are turning away from the usual National Night Out events to create something more organic and less police-centric.

What Makes Us Safer? Village Green/Town², August, 2022

National Night Out began with the idea that coming out of your home and knowing your neighbors makes you safer. It has evolved into a quasi-festival event that is usually police-centric. You might almost say it’s a police public relations event.

I have some personal misgivings about the police-hosted event taking place at a school. I don’t know the details here or whose idea it was. Putting police inside of schools continues to be a controversial issue here and elsewhere. I’ve written about that numerous times. Locally we appear to be at a stalemate.

An interesting article is making the rounds again on social media about police and the allocation of their hours on the job.

Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data, Hassan Kanu, Reuters, November, 2022

 A new report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives.

The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided under the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which took effect in 2019.

The law requires police to report demographic and other basic information about their work, including the duration of a stop and what actions were taken, like ordering someone out of a car.

Read the article if you can. It’s important to perceive the difference between what most people think that police are doing and what - - according to their own self-reported data - - they are actually doing. I wish it were possible to have open conversations about this locally without the exchange devolving into angry and emotional accusations.

The report validates what our Black friends, neighbors, and coworkers already know:

More notably, researchers analyzed the data to show how officers spend their time, and the patterns that emerge tell a striking story about how policing actually works. Those results, too, comport with existing research showing that U.S. police spend much of their time conducting racially biased stops and searches of minority drivers, often without reasonable suspicion, rather than “fighting crime.”

Getting out of your home and knowing your neighbors is a positive experience and can lead to communities becoming safer. Attending police-centric events may not be an outright negative experience but is no guarantee for safety or community-building, most especially if you are not white. No matter how pleasant the evening festival may be, the next day the police department will return to what they have been doing all the days before.

We want to believe that it isn’t like that here in Howard County. In particular, white people really, really want to believe that we live in a place where this kind of policing doesn’t happen. I wonder what would happen if we spent more time listening to those who have had different experiences with police than we have. I wonder what kind of an event we would need that would center that kind of complete and non-judgmental listening.

It seems to me that events like Columbia Community Care’s Essential Resources Day last weekend get more to the heart of what makes communities safer.

Chauncee Smith, of Catalyst California - - the group that led the study with ACLU of Southern California - - offered the following comment about the report’s conclusions.

“We hope the report helps reshape the narrative about the relationship between law enforcement and safety,” Smith told me. Californians “should understand that a reimagination of community safety is far overdue and that equitable and community-centered solutions” are more effective alternatives.

“A reimagination of community safety is far overdue and that equitable and community-centered solutions are far more effective alternatives.”

I’d like to have a night for that.