Apparently some time this month or very late last month, Salem Police released a new Strategic Plan, and it could use another round of revision.
The very first topic - the very first! - is homelessness under the heading of "safety."
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| Homelessness as #1 safety problem |
Seeing homelessness as a problem of criminality is not very helpful. In tone and in substance that is misguided.
The underlying problem is that we don't have enough housing and affordable housing. Problems with mental health and petty crime are greatly intensified in this context. The primary problem is not crime. The crime will be much easier to police when we handle the housing adequately. The Plan should lead with a clear statement that we lack housing, and "homelessness" should not probably be the leading item in the Plan's structure.
Then the next heading is traffic safety.
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| Crash yesterday, in the paper today |
Cars and their drivers kill and seriously injure more people than homeless people kill and seriously injure. But in part because we scurry and clean up the mess and carnage of a crash, and it doesn't linger the way the mess of a camp does, we quickly forget the magnitude of the violence, even when unintended. We remember the persistence of nuisance, not the more transient and catastrophic violence of crashes.
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| How about support for traffic cameras? |
Though there are downsides to the surveillance system in traffic cameras, they operate more objectively than traffic stops, and do not escalate to police shootings.
Camera tickets could also be reviewed by non-sworn staff (currently Police oppose this and want to clog up the works by having them reviewed by sworn officers).
And Police could recommend to planners and public works that they build better roads. If a key part of any solution to homelessness and housing is to build more homes of all kinds, a key part of the solution to traffic safety is to build slower roads.
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| US DOT, via Twitter |
The plan does not point outwards to connect enough with larger systems and solutions. It says "a comprehensive traffic safety approach," but it's not quite there. It would be helpful to connect the police Plan with the new National Roadway Safety Strategy, for example, which is a much closer approximation to a "comprehensive traffic safety approach."
There are very likely other disconnects in the plan, and others will have more to say. It would have been more helpful to publish the document as a draft for public comment and then to write one more final revision.
2 comments:
The Strategic Police Plan was released quietly on Feb 9 with an email to a limited number of people. That in itself tells me a lot.
But the whole document is weak, disappointing and lacks substance. Lots of flowery words that signify almost nothing.
It took over a year to create this disappointing document. It is so out of step with the majority of Salem citizens. It need serious discussion and I hope revisions. But so far most people have no idea that it even exists.
Recent killing of a homeless person by police and the lack of openness about it, belies the lack of seriousness of the Plan.
With another day or two of thought, it's striking that every other policy document has a draft published for review and a hearing at Council. Exempting this from normal review processes is bad.
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