Don’t Defund the Police — Help Children and Families Instead

You may have heard that a nine-year old was pepper-sprayed by a police officer in Rochester, N.Y. But did you happen to watch the whole ten-minute video of what happened? You don’t have to defend the use of the irritant to see that there is so much more going on there than another police-brutality story. It’s a window into pain.

The police were called to a domestic disturbance. According to the mother, and what in the video seems clear to a layman, this is family crisis that involves mental illness. It’s a sometimes under-the-radar plague in our country — certainly for the individuals and families suffering from it. And children! A couple I know who have a superabundance of love have at various times had multiple children in psychiatric residency programs. And it gets even more complicated when a child with a background of severe trauma and mental illness turns 18 and starts making choices about whether or not to take their medication. It’s not clear what’s happening in the Rochester case. The mother is saying foul things to her daughter. The daughter is accusing the mother of stabbing her father. The girl is beside herself with fear, anger, confusion — it’s hard enough being 13 in any situation, but if there is abuse of one kind or another and sickness, too? Things are clearly not well.

The Pennsylvania Parent and Family Alliance shared one mother’s reaction to the incident on their Facebook page. She described some of her family’s experiences of having to make frantic calls to 911 in fear that her child would hurt herself or someone else, with police having to handcuff the child for the sake of everyone, including the child. I’ve heard the story before of patients spending time in hospital psychiatric wings and being told that nothing is wrong — a recipe for just more of the same. The mother’s 13-year-old is currently in residential treatment because, she says, “only a hospital setting” can keep her safe. “I have received death threats that ended with my child in police custody. I have been physically attacked with fists, with feet, and with broken glass. I have called 911 while my other children ran to a neighbor’s home for safety. I have cleaned and bandaged my child’s self-harm wounds. I have been to the ER and been to the ER and been to the ER.” She suggests that the media spend more time asking questions about family life and needs rather than simply writing another cop story.

Again, I don’t know all that was going on in the Rochester story, but it should not become mere fodder for a harmful slogan. There are children in America who never have a chance. They may be victims of cycles of misery. Some of them may be sick and may not have the help they need. Some are in homes that, because of illness and addiction and trauma, are incapable of giving them what a child needs. The other day, I saw a young woman walking into a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic while on her phone. It seemed clear that the person on the other end was trying to talk her out of an abortion. “It’s f***ing whacked you have another child on the way,” she said to a woman who was obviously pregnant. One wonders what the circumstances are to make choosing life for your child sound whacked and make this girl walking into the clinic presumably not even consider not having an abortion. We live in a time that seems to support abortion more than making motherhood possible. Life is hard for families, and our political culture doesn’t value them as the precious resource they are.

In a new book, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for The Body in Public Bioethics, O. Carter Snead from the University of Notre Dame argues that our public bioethics needs to be “grounded in the whole truth of who we are and how we stand in relation to one another as vulnerable, mutually dependent, finite, and embodied beings.” That would be a game-changer. Such news stories as the Rochester one would radicalize us to love. Snead argues that “we can only govern ourselves wisely, humanly, and justly if we become the kind of people who can make each other’s goods our own.” That means doing more than putting up a sign on the lawn or assenting to the current political mantras in vogue. It means actually loving one another and meeting needs.

Before he got to the moment in the video that obviously got the most play, the police officer asked the girl — “dear” — what she needed. We need to ask that question more, and to get creative about resources. We don’t need to defund the police. We need to get people the help they need. That’s a question for civil society to take the lead on and government to support.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.