In this episode Trent reflects on the growing discourse surrounding “police abolition” and looks at what reason and scripture tell us about the need for law enforcement.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
It is the return of Tuesday news day. Well, at least for today it is. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and we’ve been busy. I just had my debate with Sam Rocha on, can a Catholic be a socialist? You can check that out on YouTube at Catholic Answers Live or right here on the podcast, listen to the audio version. I want to do more debates coming up. At the end of July, I want to do a debate on atheism. Hopefully a debate on the deuterocanonical books of scripture at the end of August. Oh, and also we’ll be doing a debrief of my debate on socialism with Matt Fradd of Pints With Aquinas on Thursday, so you’re not going to want to miss that.
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Now onto the topic of today’s episode. This is a real ripped from the headlines episode, police abolishment. Should we be getting rid of police officers? There are a lot of people, including some very vocal proponents on social media, on Twitter, but even people who belong to city councils who are saying yes, the problem … they talk about the problems of police brutality, and from their perspective police brutality, police abuse, or police misconduct is something, it’s a problem you can’t solve, and so their solution is just to get rid of the police entirely and replace it with … you’re never really quite sure what they’re proposing. They say that the problem of police violence is not just the problem of a few bad apples, but it’s representative of police being bad as a whole, so their solution is to just get rid of the police, and they want politicians and others to back them in this.
Here’s a video taken a week ago of Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis. Remember, Minneapolis is where this all started. That’s where George Floyd was killed. That’s where the Minneapolis police precinct was burned down in a protest afterwards. Jacob Frey, who is young, I think he’s just a few years older than I am, and he’s here at this protest. There must be hundreds if not 1,000 people on the street corner in downtown Minneapolis. There’s a woman with a microphone, and Mayor Jacob Frey goes up and she asks him, “Do you support defunding the police?” By defunding the police, they mean getting rid of the police entirely, just scrapping, getting rid of the police, replacing them with someone else. Mayor Jacob Frey walks up there and he meekly says into the microphone, “I do not support defunding the police at this time.” The crowd is not happy about it. She says, “Get the F out of here,” and everyone starts shouting, “Boo! Go home, Jacob.” I’ll play it for you now to see how it all went.
Speaker 3:
[inaudible 00:03:30] Boo! Go home, Jacob, go home. Go home, Jacob, go home. Go home, Jacob, go home. Go home, Jacob, go home.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so that crowd represents the 15% of Americans who think that the police ought to be abolished or done away with. So 85% of people want the police to be there, that they pick up the phone and call 9-1-1, a member of law enforcement will be sent to help them. But I still think 15% is a huge number of people, a huge group of people who say, “Nah, we don’t want the police at all.” There are a lot of members in politics, especially at the local level, who also support this, including in Minneapolis where they voted nine out of 13 to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Here is a local Minneapolis/Saint Paul news coverage of that that happened one day after Mayor Jacob Frey was booed out of that protest for saying he believed the city should have police officers.
Speaker 4:
Of police forces-
Speaker 5:
Nine members of the city council say they support dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department and replacing it with a community based public safety model. While they don’t know what that will look like, they say over the next year they’ll ask the community to help them rebuild what they call a broken system from the ground up.
Lisa Bender:
We’re looking back 150 years. Hopefully it will not take us 150 years to rebuild that new system, but we know it won’t happen overnight.
Speaker 7:
I’m seeing a lot of reporters ask questions about, well, you know, if there’s a fatal drive by shooting, what are you going to do? Or if this other thing happened, who would respond? The answer is we’re going to come up with that solution together.
Trent Horn:
I almost admire the ability of those who defend police abolition to be able to sidestep legitimate questions of their position. Like, okay, if we don’t have police officers, who’s going to respond to calls for violent crime? Who’s going to investigate violent crimes? Who’s going to protect us from murderers, rapists, people who are breaking into our homes to kill us? What are we going to do in those situations? I almost admire the ability of these people to completely sidestep the question and turn it back on those who are asking it.
You heard in that previous news clip Lisa Bender, who’s a member of the Minneapolis City Council. She was on CNN, and to CNN’s credit, they at least asked this question, which any journalist worth their salt should ask, which is, okay, are you going to do about violent crime? Who are you going to call in those situations? Here’s Bender’s response to that.
Speaker 8:
Do you understand that the word dismantle or police free also makes some people nervous? For instance, what if in the middle of the night my home is broken into? Who do I call?
Lisa Bender:
Yes. I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and I know … and myself too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.
Trent Horn:
I’m not going to give a reply to legitimate question. I’m just going to say, you need to check your privilege. These calls for police abolition have been growing recently after a few days ago due to a shooting in Atlanta of a gentlemen named Rayshard Brooks.
Here’s an article on CBS News. It says, “Police said Brooks fell asleep in the Wendy’s drive through on Friday night and had failed a sobriety test. When police tried to take him into custody, Brooks resisted and stole a taser from an officer, they said. Brooks ran from the officers and at one point aimed the taser at police before the officer fired his weapon, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said, citing surveillance video that was released to the public.”
But here’s the thing. When officers go to arrest someone and that person resists arrest and flees the scene, the officers need to go and apprehend that suspect, especially when that person has stolen one of the police officer’s weapons. Brooks took a taser off one of the officers, was running away with it. Yeah, he wasn’t running towards the officers, but they’re pursuing him, and he looked behind him and aimed the taser at them to fire the taser. If that had struck the officer, it’s possible he could have died. If you abusively use a taser, you’re sending 50,000 volts into someone. You can kill them. Or the taser doesn’t have to kill you to be a threat. If Brooks had incapacitated the officer with the taser, then he could have gone and taken the officer’s firearm and killed the officer or done something else with it.
Now, I mean, I’m not an expert in police shootings, or criminal justice, or criminal law, but for me this is not a clear cut case of police misconduct or police brutality. There ought to be an investigation. I mean, whenever somebody dies at the hands of the police, there ought to be an investigation. But studies show that when people die at the hands of police, almost always nine out of 10 times they are armed with a weapon. That is why police fire. Police don’t want to go around killing people. I’m sorry. They’re not bloodthirsty monsters, and I’m really mad about the widespread slandering of police when there are so many good men and women in law enforcement who put their lives on the line every day to protect people so that now it’s even considered wrong to even talk about police in general in a positive light. I absolutely can’t believe it.
But another one by Amanda Hess called The Protests Come for Paw Patrol. It’s not just a news article. Hess joins in on it with editorializing saying that television and film and culture as a whole, like we have a social responsibility not to depict police officers in any positive light whatsoever. I mean, that’s absurd. Like when people want to pull cop shows off the air. Like now people … Cops was canceled, Live PD was canceled, and they want to get rid of things like Law and Order SVU, or Law and Order. But I mean, I’ve watched Law and Order SVU probably like thousands of times, and there’s always an episode that deals with a crooked cop, a crooked prison guard, crooked DA’s. They show these people on these shows, but the idea that you can have any positive depictions of police officers, like you shouldn’t do that at all, just treat them all as being worthy of condemnation, that is absurd to me.
Hess in her article, she says that police officers who will do things like the Macarena at protests or dance with protesters in order to deescalate things, she says that that’s actually a bad thing. She says, “Cops can dance. They can hug. They can kneel on the ground,” like to put one knee on the ground in solidarity with protesters, “But their individual acts of kindness can no longer obscure the violence of a system. The good cop act is wearing thin.” So much so that the genesis of the piece were that people on social media were saying that Paw Patrol, a show about animals, animated animals who rescue people, one of whom is Chase, who is a police officer and also a dog who can talk, we’ve got to get rid of that because it’s making kids think that cops are the good guys. Like we shouldn’t think of police officers as the good guys.
Because of that, police officers are retiring. I mean, if I was a cop, I wouldn’t want to be a cop if every day people said, “You can’t say that police officers are good guys. They’re part of the system that’s out killing innocent people.”
Here’s an article from the Associated Press with Minneapolis saying, “At least seven Minneapolis police officers have quit and another seven are in the process of resigning, citing a lack of support from department and city leaders as protests over George Floyd’s death escalated. Current and former officers told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that officers are upset with Mayor Jacob Frey’s decision to abandon the Third Precinct station during the protests. Demonstrators set the building on fire after numerous officers left. Numerous officers and protesters have been injured. Mylan Masson, a retired Minneapolis officer and use of force expert says officers don’t feel appreciated.”
A question popped in my mind when I was thinking about all this. Why is it that teachers and doctors who have similar rates of misconduct to police officers and priests, why are they, especially like teachers, considered heroes? Like you never hear people badmouthing teachers. If I were to say, “Teachers are a useless profession. They’re just a bunch of child molesters,” people would say that I’m a terrible person, even though you can go on your computer right now and Google teacher molests student, and you will have thousands, tens of thousands of hits of finding teachers who have been guilty of physical, sexual abuse, emotional abuse of students, of teachers colluding and hiding this from people. Why do people think that? Why do teachers, and doctors, and nurses, and other people who are involved in these public professions who engage in misconduct, why are these professions glossed over but police officers and priests, they’re given an unfair, prejudicial bad rap?
Obviously there are bad priests. Obviously there are bad cops, but there are bad teachers. There are bad doctors. We had a doctor here in San Diego who molested hundreds of patients. He would take illicit photographs of them. He molested them, and yet we don’t hear people talking about abolishing doctors or abolishing hospitals. Why do we treat the professions differently?
Here is my answer. Sin. Our sinful nature hates those individuals who would hold us accountable for our wrongdoing. We don’t have a natural revulsion towards teachers, or doctors, or nurses, or people like that, or librarians because we see these individuals as those who help us, who serve us, and don’t hold us to a kind of level of accountability. But punishment for wrongdoing, our sinful nature naturally rebels against that. We naturally rebel against God. That’s why we need God’s regenerative grace, so we don’t rebel against him but want to have eternal life with him. Because of that, our sinful nature that we’re always struggling with that Saint Paul talked about the war amongst his members that he said, “I know what I ought to do, but I don’t want to do it.” Jesus said that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Our sinful nature rebels against priests because they represent the eternal consequences of our wrongdoing, and it rebels against police officers because they represent the temporal or earthly consequences of our wrongdoing.
Now, like I said before, there are bad priests. They should be dealt with. There are bad police officers. I have had police officers that I have felt have treated me unfairly, but I’ve had far more encounters with police officers where I’ve been treated fairly, and we need to take that account.
Let’s look closer then at the issue of police abolishment. Sometimes what happens in these debates, people will say, “We need to defund the police.” Then we say, “Well, if you defund the police, what are we going to do without police officers?” and the other side will say, “Oh, we never said that. You’re straw-manning our position. I never said that. We’re just talking about replacing police with better police. We’re talking about reforming them.”
People will always talk about Camden, New Jersey, which fired all of its police officers because the whole police department had become corrupt and then rehired new officers to take their place. I think that’s great. If you have any institution, whether it’s a police department, a fire department, whether you have certain priests. For example, I remember once there were priests at the Newman Center at Arizona State University who were preaching quasi heretical pro-LGBT homilies, and Bishop Olmsted came in and he got rid of all of them. I thoroughly enjoy when people clean house and get rid of corruption. Nothing wrong with that. Reform is great. Abolishment, what in the world are you talking about?
People will say about police abolishment and defunding the police, “Your straw-manning us. Nobody’s really talking about abolishing the police,” but yet a few days ago in the New York Times, Mariame Kaba published an article that said, “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.” She writes, “Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct. Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century. Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.”
She doesn’t want to just reform bad police departments. She wants to get rid of all police departments together. This follows a similar line of argument you can see in Alex Vitale’s book The End of Policing, which talks about police corruption in various States but never offers a comprehensive reform, never offers a comprehensive plan or alternative in place of the police. Instead, what you get are arguments trying to say that police are unnecessary anyways. This borrows a bit from Vitale, but Kaba summarizes it pretty well.
She writes, “The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other non-criminal issues. We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.” Well, I’m glad that police deal with these minor crimes and minor offenses, because if you didn’t have them deal with minor offenses, the minor offenses would boil over into major offenses and you would eventually start to have anarchy.
Take for example noise complaints. A lot of these people who are in favor of police abolition say, “We should just have community members be involved in this, like community mediation.” What do you do if somebody is playing their music really loudly in their apartment and it’s 11:30 at night and people are trying to get sleep? We used to live in an apartment in a bad part of El Cajon, California. We lived in an apartment where across the street we listened to people who lived on the ground floor and this lady said, I kid you not ladies and gentlemen, we heard through her window, she said this, “I don’t know why people got so mad at me. She was on my property when I stabbed her.” We were pregnant with little Matthew, and I thought to myself, “Yeah, it’s probably time to go.”
I remember once, we had to call for a noise complaint. It was 11:30 at night. There were people throwing a huge party. I had to go to work the next day. My wife had an appointment, and we were being driven batty. We called the police non-emergency number, and they came and they spoke to the people, and they turned the music off and they left, and everything was great.
I remember the next morning I was walking through my apartment complex and the guy who lived there, he knew me. He said, “Hey, do you know who might have called the police on us last night?” I’m like, “Oh, man. What happened?” “Yeah. Somebody called the police because we were being too noisy. Man, if I ever find that guy, I’m going to smash his head in.” I’m like, “Yeah, I bet he’s a pretty annoying person. Have a good day.” Notice I haven’t told a lie. I’ve just told a mental reservation, because I can be quite annoying and wanted to get the heck out of there.
That’s why we have people who have the ability to enforce law behind them. What would you do if just the community mediators showed up at the guy’s door, “Turn the music off.” “No, get the heck out of here.” “All right. Well, you have a nice day then.”
This argument that we don’t need police because they spend 99% of their time not chasing down violent criminals but filling out forms or helping people with more minor problems, that’s like saying we don’t need firefighters because firefighters spend a very small fraction of their time saving people in burning buildings. But the fact of the matter is we have them because for those minority of cases, there’s no one else who is qualified to save people from burning buildings. Much the same way, the reason we have police officers is because there is no one else who is qualified and duly selected by the state and given the authority to apprehend violent criminals or to use violence in order to protect us.
This idea of proper authority, you can find it in scripture itself. Go to Romans 13. Challenge anyone you know who is Catholic who says we ought to get rid of the police, challenge them to read Romans 13 verses 1 through 7 where Saint Paul is telling the Christians in Rome, who want to rebel against authority because they believe their authority is only God, they don’t have to listen to anything Caesar says, they only listen to what the apostles say. What Paul tells them is no. He says, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed. And those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good and you will receive his approval.”
What Paul is saying here, now Paul is not saying that you have to tolerate any kind of government that exists. It’s not like Catholics in Nazi Germany had to do what the Nazi said and take people to concentration camps. But if the civil authorities are exercising their lawful, God given authority to secure the peace and punish wrongdoers like murderers, like rapists and other individuals like that, then we should respect the authority that they have and not break laws, because if we go out and break the law, we’re going to incur due punishment.
Paul goes on to say, “For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. He is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” What Paul was referring to here is to the sword that the Romans would carry with them. They didn’t have guns obviously, but they had these daggers. If you got out of line with a Roman centurion, he could cut you to pieces with that sword pretty quickly. If Paul were writing to us today, it would sound something like this. “Look, a cop doesn’t carry a gun for show, all right. He’s here to exercise the lawful authority that he has sworn to uphold and protect.”
You have to always balance Romans 13 with Acts 5:29. Acts 5:29, Peter tells the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than men.” The Jewish authorities at that time told Peter and the apostles, “You can’t go out and preach Jesus Christ.” They arrested them and then arrested them a second time, and they said, “We told you not to do that,” and Peter said, speaking on behalf of the apostles, “We must obey God rather than men.”
If the state tells you to disobey God, you disobey the state. That’s how it works. But if the state gives you a rational law to follow, then you should obey the law. Now, there might be cases where the law is unjust or irrational, and then you may practice civil disobedience, and maybe we’ll cover that here in a future episode.
We need law enforcement. That’s a very basic principle that’s set down by our faith. Besides, what would we do without law enforcement? What would we do without police? That is the number one question police abolitionists get asked, and they never have a good answer.
It’s actually instructive to read articles on police abolition that were written before all of this debate surrounding it and the George Floyd killings and everything related to that. This is an article in The Nation by Mychal Denzel Smith in 2015, or Smith. It’s spelled with a Y. Written in 2015.
He writes, “When I say abolish the police, I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality.” I’ve seen other articles say this, that look, if you just took the money you gave police officers and you spent it on education programs, unemployment programs, free healthcare, you wouldn’t need the police. Those people wouldn’t go out committing crimes. This goes all the way back to Rousseau and the Enlightenment view of the human being versus the Christian view of the human person.
The Christian view of the human person is that we are born naturally tending towards evil. We’re not totally depraved like John Calvin thought, but our moral compass is skewed, and so we naturally want to do evil and we need society to be able to help us to be formed to become the proper human beings we ought to be. We can be instilled with natural virtues from other people in society or supernatural virtues through the life of grace. But human beings are born not totally bad, but you could say they’re born bad.And society helps to make them good, whether it’s civil society or religious society.
The Enlightenment view that Rousseau argued and others like him argued is reversed. They say not that human beings are bad and society, civil or religious, makes them good. Rather, the Enlightenment view is that human beings are born good and that there was just this wonderful human society that lived with perfect altruism before industrialization, before civilizations arose, and so it’s society that makes people bad.
Here’s another one from Maya Dukmasova. It’s called Abolish the Police? Organizers Say It’s Less Crazy Than It Sounds, and she proposes peace circles. Like do we need police to resolve conflicts that we have in the community? Instead, what if we just got everybody together in a literal peace circle?
She writes, “For nearly three hours, the people assembled to share stories of times they’ve been hurt and those of times they’ve heard others. A thin black teen recalls being made fun of by a neighbor for appearing weak. An aging white woman talks about feeling excluded from her daughter’s life now that she has moved out. This is a peace circle, a style of community meeting practiced by indigenous peoples around the world for centuries. The practice draws on the abolitionist notion that pre-modern methods of conflict resolution provide valuable alternatives to today’s over-reliance on police and prisons.”
Okay, so this is a total myth that Native Americans, or indigenous people, or pre-modern societies just sat around in peace circles to be able to resolve disputes or enforce law. William MacLeod wrote an article back in 1937 on firsthand witnessing of how crime was prosecuted in Native American territories. The article was published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology all the way back in 1937, and this is what he observed when he looked at native American tribes and how they administered enforcement of their laws. “Severe flogging, even to the point of death, and the destruction of the offender’s horses, dogs, tent, robes, and other property, even to the point where he is left destitute were the usual punishments noted as meted out by the police.”
You can also go the other side of the world to the Aborigines in Australia, who they do … I’ll tell you this. They do not sit around in peace circles just to resolve conflicts and crimes that are committed in the community. To show you that, here is a news clip that at first you would probably just brush off if you heard it over in Australia, so this is about an issue in Alice Springs. Let me play it for you.
Speaker 9:
Police are sending extra officers to Alice Springs to quell an outbreak of knife violence, including the stabbing death of a man last night. Officers found the 36-year-old dead at the Larapinta Valley Camp late last night. Detectives are investigating the death. No one has been arrested and police are appealing for information from-
Trent Horn:
Okay, so you might be thinking well, Trent, that’s just a stabbing. What’s that unusual? Well, Alice Springs is a very unusual place because of the number of stabbings that take place there. Here’s an article on Atlas Obscura. “In the last years of the 20th century, Doctor Abraham Jacob, a newly arrived surgeon at the Alice Springs Hospital in Australia, noticed a recurring feature amongst his patients. They had all been stabbed. Almost every day, someone would limp, crawl, or be carried into the emergency room with a stab wound. Doctor Jacob began keeping track of the admissions and found that over seven years, Alice Springs Hospital admitted 1,550 stabbing victims, an astonishing number considering the population of Alice Springs is just 25,000. This works out at 390 stabbings per 100,000 population, the highest reported incidents of stab injuries in the world.” London by contrast, which has a lot of stabbings because they don’t have guns, is not 390 out of 100,000. It’s 47, and London is a huge city.
“When Doctor Jacob announced his findings, Alice Springs was quickly dubbed the Stabbing Capital of the World. Being a surgeon, Doctor Jacobs knew plenty about cutting, yet the type of spiked and skewered patient he was treating surprised him. There was a 50/50 male-female split, even though most stabbings occur in young men. Only 1% of the wounds were found in the abdomen, the traditional place to stick someone, whereas fully 40% of the victims had been stabbed in the thigh. What on earth was going on?”
Well, here’s the answer. “In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of governmental attempts to integrate indigenous Australians with whitefellas saw many Aboriginal people migrate to the town from surrounding rural communities. They settled on its outskirts in rough and ready town camps and brought with them many of their cultural traditions. Most pertinent of these, at least to Doctor Jacob, was the concept of payback. For of the 1,550 stab victims Doctor Jacob counted during his seven years, 99.99% were Aboriginal.”
“Payback is a form of corporal and sometimes capital punishment administered by tribal elders to recalcitrant members of their tribe. This traditional punishment consists of the wrongdoer being stabbed in the thigh with a spear. The exact positioning of the wound depends on the crime. A stab in the lateral thigh punishes but does not cripple. A blow to the posterior thigh can permanently disable, while a spear applied to the medial thigh often punctures the femoral artery and kills. It is a violent yet delicate affair, and the elders wield their spears like scalpels.”
I hate to disappoint these liberal Enlightenment fans, but pre-modern societies when they engaged in law enforcement were far more violent and arbitrary and capricious than law enforcement is today. We have made great strides. It doesn’t mean that law enforcement is perfect. You’re going to have cases, including individual police officers and even whole police departments, that are in need of radical reform. There’s lots of ways to do that.
I’m not going to get into all that today, but I will say that when I read abolition material, people are calling for the abolition of the police, I do sympathize with some of their concerns, like the idea that we face crime only by taking criminals, throwing them into jail, locking them up, throwing away the key and forgetting about them. Because look, unless they’re in prison for the rest of their life and they don’t get out on parole, they’re going to be back on the streets again. If prison or jail is just a place for you to grow in criminality and to become worse, then we’ve got a serious problem. We have to look at the prison system as a way to rehabilitate people, and that may involve having a different understanding of what punishment is for or how punishment should be administered.
If you think about the natural law view of punishment, the state has the right to punish individuals, rightfully so, who are guilty of crimes, because what they’re trying to do is balance out the scales of justice. Think about Lady Justice standing there in front of the courthouse, blindfolded, because justice is supposed to be blind, impartial, with scales, and the scales are never even because when someone commits a crime, the scales of justice have been put out of balance. Something is out of balance in the good of the community, and so the state or proper authorities have to enter into it to intervene and then restore the scales of justice, to make right to the community what’s been wronged. That’s where restorative justice comes into play, and that’s something I do agree with.
The USCCB in that document Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice, it talks about restorative justice, and here’s what it says. “An increasingly widespread and positive development in many communities is often referred to as restorative justice. Restorative justice focuses first on the victim and the community harmed by the crime, rather than on the dominant state against the perpetrator model. This shift in focus affirms the hurt and loss of the victim, as well as the harm and fear of the community, and insists that offenders come to grips with the consequences of their actions. These approaches are not soft on crime because they specifically call the offender to face victims and the communities. This experience offers victims a much greater sense of peace and accountability. Offenders who are willing to face the human consequences of their actions are more ready to accept responsibility, make reparations, and rebuild their lives.”
I’ll give you an example. Suppose we arrest someone for vandalism. There was a lot of vandalism that happened in my community after the protests at the La Mesa City Police Department a week ago that I talked to you about. There are people who vandalized. They would write just curse words and things like that on private property, and then other members of the community the next day … and I actually went down there to do a little bit of the cleanup. They went and they painted over the vandalism that had taken place.
Well, imagine though, let’s say we’re able to apprehend the vandals. Instead of just sentencing them to a jail sentence or non-related community service or paying a fine, what if the vandal was held to restoring the community to its proper equilibrium? The vandal first has to clean up all the graffiti under the supervision of the person he or she has harmed, and maybe in that interaction they’ll get to see that the person, they haven’t just tagged a building, but they have harmed a store owner, they’ve harmed a fellow human being, and get to see the personal elements of their consequences. Number one, they are the ones who are tasked with having to clean up everything.
Now, they can’t just paint over the graffiti and call it a day, right? You would think to yourself, well, there has to be more punishment than that. They can’t just clean it up. More has to be done. The intuition behind restorative justice can explain that. You have a punishment so to speak, but it serves a restorative purpose.
What I might say in this case is that you still haven’t balanced the scales out yet, because even though you cleaned up the graffiti, the store owner, other owners in the shopping mall, they’re going to be scared about other vandals coming around doing the same thing. Maybe what you have to do is you have to work in a controlled setting to generate enough money to be able to pay for installing security cameras in this shopping mall to make sure this kind of vandalism doesn’t happen again, or something that is related so that by your actions you can make the community feel safe again that you have learned your lesson, you have improved the community as a result.
Restorative justice, something interesting to think about. Definitely a lot to think about here on the podcast today. I hope it was helpful for you all. Be sure to stay tuned for a lot of great episodes that we have coming up this week. I hope you all enjoyed this episode. Be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com to become a subscriber to help us put out more episodes, more rebuttal videos. You guys are great and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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