BRATTLEBORO — Our nation's police departments' primary objectives have to be enforcement of existing law as enacted by the legislatures of the various states and the U.S.
The latitude exercised by each department is affected by a dizzying array of various police-departmental and community circumstances. There is no template except that which falls back upon established law.
In a real sense, the executive summary and, therefore, the full report, released in January, of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) to the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing is putting the cart before the horse.
The summit participants “outlined three conceptual elements of building community-police relationships. The report defines those elements [as] communication, partnerships, and trust.”
However, the lack of confidence in those three elements actually begins with the legislatures, the hurdle that is the most difficult to overcome.
There are three distinct elements of lawmaking that cannot be addressed by community policing: the victimless crime statute syndrome, faith-based moral lawmaking, and the judiciary's failure to remain independent of the legislature.
It isn't community-integration policing that the community needs. It is an independent judiciary that can identify and overturn laws that do more harm than good and are subject to undue political, corporate, and religious influence and interests, not common law.
Without the reform and possible overturn of current unjust victimless-crime laws, the intimate intent and goals of benign community policing violate the separation of our innate privacy and community life.
Once an enforcement integrative community is established, it will set a precedent not easily amended.
Police are not and should not be community social behavioral workers. Diverse enforcement is a very recognizably different official responsibility that carries an inherent and alienable danger in getting too close to the private lives of people in the conduct of their individual freedoms and interests.
When a community cannot secure for itself the rights and freedoms of self-determination to ensure their happiness and tranquility, a state of unsound union will always exist.