Chief Tusken offers an interview to the press to talk about how an audit shows they should hire an additional 8 officers to deal with increased workload. But there is no discussion from the police or the city about how to reduce the number of calls to police overall by decriminalizing certain behaviors or offering better proactive resources.
Impact: The city and department’s unwillingness to entertain the idea of real change about policing shows that they are not actually interested in listening to residents of the city. It doesn’t matter how, where, or how many of us show up; they are simply not open to the conversation. The idea that because the department is doing things that other police think of as “best practices” they should be exempt from examination and change is laughable. Protests and conversations about the country are clear: policing as an institution needs to change. Not just a couple of departments.