How defunding the Durham Police could lead to safer neighborhoods

Videos of black men being murdered by officers has even cops kneeling in the streets. Policing has to change in America.

So, yes, we should defund the Durham’s Police Department. More than that, we should also defund the Durham Countys sheriff’sf patrol. Then the city and county should take an even more radical step: create a Unified Safety Department to serve everyone. Real safety for all. With lower taxes for struggling citizens.

I believe both the county’s sheriff and the city’s chief of police are doing great jobs under the circumstances. This proposal is not a criticism of their work. Better than most of us, they understand the challenges of keeping officers and citizens safe in a country with too many guns and too few mental health services. But if you want big improvements you have to make big changes.

One of the biggest challenges we face is changing the culture of American policing. Because culture in the cop shop drives behavior in the street. Tweaking procedures isn’t enough. Building a new department from the ground up would allow Durham to redefine the culture of officers charged with keeping us all safe and recognizing that Black lives matter.

Hiring officers for a new department at higher pay would give a chief a chance to create an organization that better reflects Durham’s culture and demographics, especially regarding gender. It also would give the chief a chance to exclude applicants with files full of citizen complaints. And improvements like expanding the job probationary period for new offices from a few months to three years, allows enough time for tough situations to reveal a cop’s true character; problematic officers can be fired rather than merely being suspended. Citizens would benefit from a more respected and collaborative safety department.

Having a Unified Safety Department would not change the status of the jail or the courts as state law requires an elected sheriff to run those two operations. Also, their funding is equitable compared to that of the sheriff’s patrol.

If you live in the city you get one police patrol, but elected officials allow you to pay for two. How’s that work? In addition to paying city taxes for city police, your county taxes pay for four squads of sheriff’s patrol officers. They’re funded county-wide, but they only work outside the city limits where the median income is higher than inside the city. How is that fair? Why should that continue? Do we want city residents to have a get-one-but-pay-for-two deal on schools and other services? Of course not.

Fairness aside, combining the police department and the sheriff’s patrol would eliminate job duplication and the inefficiency of patrols contorted by city boundaries. That saves tax money that can be applied to higher salaries or to hire more social service professionals. Those are enough reasons right there to defund and unify those two departments.

But it’s even better than that. None of the large national and international corporations in the Treyburn industrial area and in Research Triangle Park pay city taxes. But they benefit from the city police: whose employees do you think are living in those six-story apartments downtown near the freeway? The state won’t let the city tax the corporations that are near but still outside of Durham’s city limits. They’re free riders. But by unifying our safety departments, corporations outside the city limits would pick up their fair share of costs and reduce the tax burden on struggling city residents.

And there’s another bonus. Letting corporations pay their fair share for safety would free up city leaders to invest more in housing and transit.

Net result? City residents will have more money in their pockets as well as more progressive and professional officers. And their work will be supplemented by more social services from county government and more urban services from city government. All because the taxation will be much more equitable than it is now.

Who would choose the chief of this unified department? Just as with our long-unified planning department, both the city manager and the county manager would have to agree on an appointment. In other words, through their managers, both the city council and the county commission would have control over that position.

Now’s a great time to do this because both boards are majority people of color. And there’s no guarantee that it will stay that way forever.

This story was originally published August 17, 2020 at 12:00 AM.