To reimagine policing, we must break out of the box

Sixty years ago, the noted American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote, "For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end. Such men as these are crackpot realists: In the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."

Today, there are many such “men in authority ” who say that civilization is in grave danger because of terrorists, criminal conspiracies, rogue states and now fantasies of vast conspiracies of socialist, anarchist, leftwing provocateurs who are prosecuting "a war on cops." That is their paranoid reality.

Their hysterical agenda constantly frustrates society's urgent desire to explore new ways of providing for our great public protection enterprise that are not founded on assertion of dominating police power.

Albany has experienced an alarming number of shootings. Of course people are upset. Of course the public is heaping recrimination on the mayor, the chief of police and other public officials. People want more cops on the street. The problem that all this emotion creates is that it deals a major setback for those who have been advocating progressive reform to our larger

For those of us who have given long and patient consideration to alternative ways of providing for the common defense, perhaps instead of "defunding," we should adopt Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction: breaking an idea down into its component parts and seeing whether there isn't a more effective way of putting them back together to better solve the overriding problem.

public safety enterprise. This neverending sense of crisis frustrates all progress. And it frustrates our effort to root out the systemic racism that is the fundamental flaw in our public protection enterprise.

"Defund the police" is an unfortunate slogan. Opponents of reform, committed to the status quo, use it to vilify those of us who have given long and thoughtful consideration to how to improve things without just doing more of what we have always done. I'm talking about ivory-tower academics or government agencies like the Division of Criminal Justice Services where innovation is never accomplished. We have the media with their "If it bleeds it leads" sensationalism. There are police unions, arguably the biggest impediment to reform and progress. There are characters like the mendacious Dermot Shea, the influential New York City police commissioner who was declaring the recently enacted bail reform laws the direct cause of a rise in violent crime before the ink of the governor's signature had even dried on the bill. There are religious leaders who organize and speak at public gatherings to air concerns about violence who offer nothing but platitudes.

Whenever we reach a crisis point, the same old cast of characters are convened to come up with the same old agenda of futility. And so, Gov. Andrew Cuomo gives us his Policing Reform and Reinvention Collaborative.

For those of us who have given long and patient consideration to alternative ways of providing for the common defense, perhaps instead of "defunding," we should adopt Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction: breaking an idea down into its component parts and seeing whether there isn't a more effective way of putting them back together to better solve the overriding problem.

We really need someone somewhere in the mix to steer a true course toward genuine reform and progress. That is not happening. The way Cuomo has set up the statewide enterprise of "reinventing" or "reimagining" policing assumes that there will be no original thinking injected into the process.