Last week, as demonstrations and outrage continued across America, I received an invitation that made me very nervous: I was invited to join a  live BBC World Service program to discuss the view from California. I felt ill-equipped to contribute. What could I say that would be valuable to the dialogue? This is a challenging time to opine on the tinder box that is America, particularly if you’re a white immigrant. But I did my homework, listened to a lot of diverse commentary and read widely.   

[Photo credit: Alisdare Hickson]

I can’t claim to have all the answers (who does?) but in preparing for the program, I did some personal growth. I changed from from feeling tongue-tied and unworthy, to fired up about speaking out. How? My research taught me three important things (see below).

But first, here’s what we discussed on the BBC:

Listen to the BBC podcast, starting @4:00.

Or listen to the Fresh Dialogues podcast below which features highlights of our discussion and more about what I discovered.

https://www.freshdialogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Police-racism-FD-podcast.mp3

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We began by discussing Trump’s executive order introducing police reforms, and then listened to the insightful perspective of Philip McHarris. A researcher at Yale University, McHarris is a vocal member of the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability. He makes some excellent points about the need to prioritize education and economic opportunity for the black community, and has written a provocative New York Times Opinion piece  that concludes: “We need to reimagine public safety in ways that shrink and eventually abolish police and prisons.”

I agree with his call to reimagine public safety, but it’s hard to imagine that abolishing police and prisons will ever be a wise idea. What do you think?

BBC transcript (edited for length and clarity).

Philip McHarris: Police are largely arresting people, and putting people in jail and ruining lives and communities, when people need resources and opportunities, and not a prison cell and policing.

Defunding police means shifting resources away from policing and getting at the underlying causes like not having quality schools, employment options, housing healthcare. The communities that are the safest don’t have the most police but they have the most resources. Because of specific decisions and political inaction, housing policies have created legacies of racial and economic inequality. People often are forced into survival economies which are then criminalized. 

So the first step is funding community resources and institutions. The other side is developing alternative emergency response systems where police –– who have guns and a license to kill with immunity –– are not showing up when people need a wellness check, a mental health intervention or domestic violence support. 

Jamie Robertson: Alison, this idea of defunding the police…is it getting traction? The idea of withdrawing the police and replacing areas of police enforcement with social workers? 

Alison van Diggelen: There is support for defunding police and looking at the root causes (of police brutality). The fact is: We all have bias. It’s what we do with it and how we manage our first impulses (that matters most).

The police force needs to build new protocols and new partnerships, as Philip said, with social workers and psychologists. It needs to invest more in anger management and de-escalating violence, rather than inciting violence. And perhaps making Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers mandatory for police officers?

This pandemic has exacerbated the tinder box of despair and rage in America. Perhaps America also needs to face its horrific history of slavery. That legacy continues today. We need to borrow practices from South Africa and Rwanda and hold Truth and Reconciliation hearings.

And criminalize, not tolerate any white supremacy [...]